Ridgefield Museum Makes History With Bleeding-Edge Podcast Series

RIDGEFIELD, CT — The Piti Theatre Company travels New England searching for fascinating little towns whose history they can mine to create original performances for their "Your Town" series. It was only a matter of time before they discovered Ridgefield.

But then COVID hit, and it changed everything, as COVID has a tendency to do.

"The greatest thing about theater — and the hardest thing about theater — is that it happens once for an audience," Jonathan Mirin told Patch. He's the artistic director and co-founder of Piti, and had been collaborating on a new production with The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield.

Come March 2020, that production was in danger of never happening for any audience at all.

The COVID disruption was particularly devastating to Namulen Bayarsaihan, director of education at The Aldrich. One of her goals for the museum is to grow its exhibitions beyond the traditional sculptures and paintings, towards more performances. She had been cultivating the relationship with Piti since the fall of 2019, planning on folding original live performances from the company into "Twenty Twenty," an exhibition of the work of seven, primarily photographic, artists.

The two organizations were collaborating to illuminate the current issues and cultural change that have been the hallmark of 2020 through the prism of Ridgefield's own history, and live performance. Piti planned on involving local performers, including the Aldrich Teen Fellows. The production would be multifaceted, cerebral, ambitious ... and now off the table.

Mirin concluded there was "really no safe opportunity that we can anticipate having live performances and large audiences that are experiencing this program, but we really wanted to continue with it because we thought the idea was really strong."

Ultimately, the project was too important to get left for dead in the COVID wasteland.

"We had to get really creative," Bayarsaihan said.

The modern art museum found that creative solution in the form of an early 20th century entertainment staple: the radio play.

Radios themselves may be on the way out, but podcasts are white-hot. Mirin stopped fretting about lekos and Fresnels and refocused on microphones and mixers.

"It became clear that we could make these podcasts remotely and all the actors could work remotely, and we could work with the local performers remotely," Mirin said.

Working in the auditorium-less new medium held some other new benefits for the veteran creator and performer as well.

"I wouldn't have guessed it when I started out making theater 20 years ago, but I am having fun doing it."

The result was "Hindsight Is," a 3-episode podcast series. Actors portray regional historical figures in Connecticut including women's suffragist Alice Paul and former NAACP Connecticut Chapter President William Webb. Vignettes dramatize some of the social and political issues which bubbled to the surface this year, such as voting rights, racism, and fascism.

The podcast series is available on The Aldrich's website.

"The idea of sitting in your living room, listening to a radio program, the family gathered ... So many themes this year have reflected that idea," Bayarsaihan said. "I feel like we're all way more connected with our homes and our deeper relationships with our family members."

Unlike the previous entries in the Piti Theatre Company's "Your Town" series, the Ridgefield performances will have legs — into the classroom. The producers are creating supplemental multimedia materials and putting together a curriculum guide for educators who want to incorporate the podcasts into their lesson plans.

The museum's new series may have taken a serendipitous detour, but ultimately dovetailed perfectly into Bayarsaihan's master plan: "The Aldrich is a contemporary art museum, so we want to be at the forefront of really innovative ideas, and a part of that is creating innovate programming, programming that no one else is doing, programming that is really fresh and current, and a reflection of our times."