Progress on the AC
The whole issue started in 2020 with COVID-19.
That year, Ringplay Productions was looking forward to a great season. Both theatres were open and working, and we were on a high following the success of Der Real Ting Musical!! in 2018 and 2019. We had a full season planned. It opened in January with Doubt directed in the PAB Black Box by Philip A. Burrows, and continued in February with Ian Strachan’s Diary of Souls in the WVS Main Stage Theatre directed by Nicolette Bethel and renee caesar. We were one day away from opening our third production, The Foreigner, when the COVID-19 lockdown occurred, shutting the theatre for the next 18 months. When the prohibition on live performances was finally lifted, the air conditioning units in the WVS theatre had seized up through age and disuse, and we have been working in our ≤80 seat theatre, the Black Box, ever since.
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt with Dion Johnson and Jovanna Hepburn, January 2020. Directed by Philip A. Burrows
T-Day the Actor, Esther Louis and Sony Jean-Jacques in Ian Strachan’s Diary of Souls, February 2020. Directed by Nicolette Bethel and renee caesar
In the fall of 2021, when the country was slowly re-opening and the prohibition on live performances was gradually lifting, we opened up the WVS and turned on the air conditioning only to find that the compressors had died. The cost of replacing them, we were told (to our dismay) began at $150,000. We did not have that money! So we launched an appeal in 2022 to start to raise the funds. We got some corporate and other support, but nowhere near enough; but we didn’t stop! We went on with our Shakespeare in Paradise festival that fall, housing it in the Black Box (a truncated in-person season had been held in 2021 featuring 2 in-person productions and one virtual production—Love’s Labour’s Lost in October at Fiona’s Theatre at the NAGB, a collection of videos made of that 2020’s Short Tales in November, and Competent Authority in December). And in that festival, we launched our Year of Bahamian Theatre in honour of the 50th anniversary of independence—again in the Black Box.
This month we finally pulled the trigger on the air-conditioning system!
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This month we finally pulled the trigger on the air-conditioning system! 〰️
But by the end of last year it was clear that if we did not have an immediate ejection of capital to fix the WVS air-conditioning, the theatre was going to have to close for good. And (as this blog traces) that’s when the public and the government stepped up!
All that to say: this month (May 2025), we finally pulled the trigger on the air-conditioning system. As a cultural non-profit company, we got out customs duties waived, and we put our order in!! Work has AT LAST begun! A couple of photos of what has happened in that regard below.
There are two sides to it. One requires the creation of a new box office, as we don’t yet know how much demolition and installation of our 6 new air conditioning units is going to impact the existing one. I’ll drop a couple of photos of that here, but there’s going to be a whole separate post for that. The other is a whole set of images of the people from Coastal Air Conditioning taking out the antique units.
