‘Life Goes On, And Art Goes On’ For Alameda’s Youth Repertory

Alameda, CA — The Tomorrow Youth Repertory began 10 years ago as little more than an after-school club. Targeted to elementary schoolers, the program initially involved meetings once a week that culminated in a small-scale production — the mission was to simply provide a theatre program to schools in the area that didn’t have one.

But since those early days of calling in favors to rent out out stages, lights and costumes, the Tomorrow Youth Repertory has expanded into a sizeable program, providing access to a theatre experience to multiple schools.

“We grew into a much larger thing than we ever thought we were going to,” Tyler Null, the Executive Director of the Tomorrow Youth Repertory said. “Within a year we had close to 200 students. It kind of became all of our full-time job pretty quickly. By the time the pandemic hit, we had somewhere around 320 to 350 students, we had about 10 teachers working with us and we were at six to seven schools.”

More recently, the Repertory had begun branching out of its focus on elementary school kids, offering an audition program that allowed kids to work with more challenging productions that focused more so on middle and high schoolers.

In the summers, the Repertory offered a variety of theatre-related classes, from film production to improv.

“We had teachers who wanted to teach and students who wanted to learn,” Null said.

When the pandemic first began in earnest in March of 2020, the Repertory went through several weeks of chaos trying to settle into this new reality. Because the model of the program involved holding classes at several different schools, the early question of cross-contamination between different groups of people began complicating operations.

“One of the things we’ve always prided ourselves on was we were never exclusive to a school,” Null said. “We would host classes at a variety of schools and also a dance studio here and there, but it was always open to anybody who wanted to participate so long as there was room. You’d meet kids that you don’t normally hang out with; you’d meet kids from other schools. That became very complicated very fast.”

Between figuring out possible long-term plans — not knowing at the time how long the pandemic could potentially close schools for — the Repertory was dealing with sudden revocations of its licenses to hold classes in schools, leaving some time of turmoil leading up to the closure of the schools.

“They did cancel the schools, and that was actually kind of a relief,” Null said. “‘I know what’s happening and I know the battle I’m fighting now.’ And around that time, we quickly started hosting our classes on Zoom.”

The intention was to “tread” water for two weeks while they waited for schools to reopen. By the end of the first week, it became clear that not only would the end-of-semester show have to be canceled, but the schools themselves would likely not open for some time.

“We decided that we couldn’t do the show we were planning on doing, but we also felt like we couldn’t cancel,” Null said.

One of the shows that had been in rehearsal before the closures — Hamlet — was turned into a Zoom “radio play,” which included the soundscape for the production. The other show — Alice in Wonderland — was turned into a video production.

“We had all of the students who sang in the show record themselves singing, and all the kids who danced in the show record themselves dancing,” Null said. “We edited together all of the songs and all of the dances, and we ended up making what we called ‘Alice in Zoomland.’ It was nice, but it wasn’t quite live.”

After taking a break for the duration of the summer, the Repertory kicked off the Fall semester by starting online sessions of Dungeons and Dragons, something that is still ongoing.

“It kept kids engaged, it kept us creatively connected to them, and it also kept some staff working, which is good,” Null said. “We felt like we wanted to keep trying to give kids stuff to do if they wanted it.”

Seeking to maintain that level of connectivity and creativity with his students, Null began writing plays that were specifically designed for the Zoom environment.

“We decided to write plays that were intended to be performed on Zoom,” Null said. “The goal was to give kids shows that would be worse on stage. The goal was to give kids shows that were better for being on Zoom; it didn’t feel like a consolation prize. The goal was to make kids feel like ‘hey, I’m getting to do something that I would never have gotten to do, otherwise.’ Our whole mantra became, ‘this sucks, but the world is still spinning. Your life is not on hold, your life is not waiting to resume, your life is happening and there are special things that are happening.’”

Seeking to give kids “material that would speak to how they were feeling, and also speak to the weird, weird world they were in,” the Repertory performed Zoom-productions of a play that Null wrote that was a twist of The Wizard of Oz, with the main character trying to escape quarantine rather than Oz. Now, the program is in the middle of a production that is based on the Among Us game, with each square on Zoom acting as its own partition of the spaceship.

“While of course our number of students that we serve has gone down since the pandemic time, it’s less than I would have expected,” Null said. “We’ve still got about 200 students, and when you consider we are an after-school theatre program at a time when schools are closed and so are theatres, by all rights we shouldn’t exist,” Null added with a laugh. “So, the staff is kept working, those who wanted to. I’m happy with what we’ve been able to do.”

And through smart saving over the past 10 years, coupled with its creative online-programming, the Repertory has been able to map out a runway of how much longer they can last in this format, a runway that, back in March, extended to December, and as of now, extends to Augst.

“Our goal with everything we offered right now was just to break even,” Null said. “If we make money, make sure that it’s enough to pay the teachers and to keep paying our insurance. Beyond that, there’s no intention of making money right now. Ultimately, I am of the mindset that our job isn’t really to do theatre anymore. Our job is to keep kids creatively engaged.”

Null is hopeful that, in a year from now, things will look different. In the meantime, the focus of the Repertory is to provide a creative outlet for their students who are sorely in need of one.

“The goal is to make them not feel like these were lost years,” Null said. “They were weird years and they could’ve been rough years, that’s fine. But the goal is to not have it feel like lost years.”