'This is B.S.' is a loving lampoon of summer stock theater

MEREDITH — If you’ve ever paused to look around and say, “this would make a great sitcom series,” then you’ve got something in common with Ella Smith and Lindsey Bristol, who had that thought in 2018 while part of a summer theater cast. And, if your next thought was, “... and that series would be a bunch of B.S.,” then that makes two things you’d have in common.

Smith and Bristol’s series “This is B.S.,” which is now available for viewing on YouTube, pulls back the curtain on the life of non-union summer stock theater professionals. The “B.S.,” in this case, stands for “Bristle Shores,” the name of a fictional playhouse somewhere in small town New Hampshire.

Smith and Bristol met when they were both hired as cast members for the Winnipesaukee Playhouse’s 2018 summer season. They started the script for the series in their dressing rooms in between performances, returned for a week to shoot the seven episodes, and were recently making the film festival rounds — and collecting many accolades in the process.

A comedic series shot in a mockumentary style, “This is B.S.” deals in the parts of summer theater that typically stay behind the scenes: auditions in New York, decamping to rural New England, negotiating living arrangements with new housemates, and handling all of the surprises that come with producing theater on a limited budget and with a skeleton staff.

Lesley Pankhurst, one of the founders of the Winnipesaukee Playhouse, said she wasn’t sure what to expect when Smith and Bristol asked to film their series on the Meredith campus. But, they had a week in 2019 when there weren’t any shows planned, so she and her husband Neil invited the “B.S.” crew to come.

“We didn't ask to review the scripts before filming which was a little nerve wracking because we knew it was going to be a spoof/satire and didn't know what to expect and whether it would feel like it was lampooning us specifically or the industry as a whole,” Pankhurst said in an emailed response to questions. Yet, though the foibles of summer stock theater are center stage throughout the series, Pankhurst said the result is neither spoof nor satire.

“It’s a love letter to summer stock and all the craziness that makes it what it is,” Pankhurst said. She found “This is B.S.” to be an honest look at the bad — long hours, stress, pay inequity — as well as the good — friendships formed and dedication to the art — that define the summer stock theater tradition.

Summer stock is about escape, said Bristol. The actors escape the city for a few months to work intensely with like-minded artists, all to create moments of escape for the local audience. While creating that escape, the cast and crew create a “bubble of drama,” she said, that they coexist within, until the summer ends and the bubble bursts.

“That’s really what it was about, trying to create that bubble of magic,” Bristol said about “This is B.S.”

As the series portrays, that bubble contains plenty of laughter and tears, epiphanies and heartbreaks. Underlining it all is a shared love of live theater — a love that spurs the cast to put on a show despite some startling and surprising challenges. Bristol and Smith said that while they haven’t personally experienced all of the plot twists they wrote into “This is B.S.,” there were several of them that they knew all too well.

“Something we really wanted to make sure we were capturing in the series, besides all of the constraints, at the root of it all is this profound love of making it happen,” said Bristol, adding that the love “is really at the soul of regional theater. I think of Neil and Lesley (Pankhurst), they do it because they love it. It’s not about the money, or big-time fame or fortune, they do it because they want to serve something up for the community.”

“This is B.S.” was shot while the theater community, like the world at large, was blissfully unaware of the disruption that was soon to come in the form of the coronavirus pandemic. The footage sat for months while the future remained uncertain, and when, or even if, those who love live theater would be able to return to work.

“We were being told, theater isn’t essential, we were told we weren’t essential workers,” said Smith. Once it became clear that theater would survive COVID, the undertones throughout “This is B.S.” because all the more poignant.

“Watching it on the other side of things made it really impactful,” Smith said.

It was a side project for most of the people working on the post-production team, and so editing of the episodes took about a year. Then it was off to festivals to try and build a buzz. At the NYC WebFest, the series earned “Best Ensemble Cast,” it won “Audience Choice Award” at the MN WebFest, and “2022 Official Selection” at both the NJ WebFest and at the NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival, among other honors.

The series is now released to the public, through YouTube or thisisbs.org. Lesley Pankhurst said she didn’t request the right to preview the script, or to see any of the pre-edited footage, so the first she saw of the finished product was binge-watching all seven episodes once they were officially released. She did get to see a sneak preview, though, thanks to a clip that Bristol sent her in the fall of 2020.

At that moment, Winnipesaukee Playhouse was about to welcome its first audience all year, to an amphitheater it had renovated for the sole purpose of putting on a show during a pandemic.

“To say it was stressful to open any show during that time is an understatement,” Pankhurst said. Adding to the stress was the fact that they were using a new performance space, and operating under totally new safety measures. “On the day we were to open I received an email from Lindsey wishing us luck on the opening and sending along a clip of the unfinished series that she thought would be appropriate for us to see under the circumstances.”

The preview contained part of an episode in which a performance is interrupted mid-show — though by something far less dire than a deadly virus outbreak — and the cast improvises by finishing the play outside. The “This is B.S.” crew could have had no idea how this one clip, written and shot pre-pandemic, would have such meaning for those fighting to keep community theater alive.

“It’s a beautiful sequence of these artists making lemonade out of lemons and the beautiful, authentic performance that resulted from it. It was exactly what I needed to get me through those difficult first days of reopening,” Pankhurst said.

Smith and Bristol said they are hoping that the series will continue to draw fans from the general public, as it has from festival audiences. If it does, “This is B.S.” might come to signify “Breakout Success” for Smith and Bristol.