ARTS
HOW DOES THE SHOW GO ON?
TEXT ELLA SPUNGEN
DESIGN MICHELLE SONG
ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK
American theatre in stasis and crisis
15
There is a moment, always, before the lights go down, when it occurs to everyone in the audience that something is happening, something worth paying attention to. Anticipation charges the air, filling the gaps between knees and bringing pre-show conversations to a close. In that moment, the audience reaches a collective agreement to hush, listen, and wait. Behind the curtains, scrambling settles. Then, as if on cue (and it is): the lights dim, the curtain rises, the performers slip on stage, and that agreement is held for the duration. Sometimes, in the middle of watching a performance, I turn away from the stage to examine the faces in the audience around me. I watch laughter ripple through the crowd, search for my own expressions reflected back at me, see shock, joy, and grief play across the faces of neighboring attendees, and feel the warmth of shoulders pressed up against mine. For 90 minutes, or two hours, that dark room is its own miniature world, sequestered from the outside, hovering beyond time and space. Then, last March, everything stopped. Theaters went dark, the miniature worlds became two-dimensional, and neighbors were relegated to strangers. For an industry that had required in-person interaction, relying on both artist and audience, the pandemic presented not just a challenge but an existential threat. That crisis arrived at the perfect moment—theater was and is stuck, wedded to a traditional form and marked by systemic racism. Given the time to step back, creatives have used the COVID crisis to break through theatre’s stasis as a white, inaccessible physical space, pushing instead into new digital forms and pursuing anti-racist work to reimagine what theater can be. In the weeks after it became clear that in-person theatre was not going to be an option, something else began to trickle out. Zoom was jerry-rigged to serve as a makeshift stage as the hybrid and the digital crept in. Artists began creating made-for-online works, audio plays, drive-in performances, and XR (extended reality) experiences—Chekov’s The Seagull was staged on The Sims 4 by director Celine Song. Just as the pandemic provided an opportunity for creatives to expand theatre beyond the physical, the freeze in productions and nationwide outrage over police brutality last summer also sparked a long-overdue confrontation over the racism and exclusion embedded in American theatre. Storytelling has been a feature of the human experience for as long as we have had language; the pandemic, perhaps, presents the next frontier of this fundamental artform. +++
The phrase ‘virtual theatre’ always felt vaguely oxymoronic to me, for its fundamental clash between the flat digital realm and the viscerally inhabited, spatial theater. I talked to Brown/Trinity Repertory Masters of Fine Arts students, and to “Piehole,” a group of alumni who have been creating theatre together for over 10 years. I asked each of them: “If we take away the factors that traditionally define theatre, what distinguishes the form?” Alexa Derman, a playwright pursuing her MFA at Brown, burst out laughing in response. Slowly I realized my line of inquiry was flawed. The founding members of the theatre collective helped me realize my mistake. “Part of [Piehole’s] mission is pushing the edges of what theatre can be. I don’t know if the question of what makes something theatre is really part of that…‘Theatre is perpetually dying,’ right? So let’s just go and make a bunch of stuff and call it theatre; let’s give theatre more possibilities than what a traditional way of thinking about it might lead you to believe,” said Tara Ahmadinejad, director, co-creator, and founding member of the collective. Piehole explores ideas of collective authorship and the use of form to shift audience perception, often employing digital media and unconventional spaces to stage live art. The theater collective worked with video game developer Tender Claws before the pandemic to create a mixed VR and live, immersive theatre experience called The Under Presents. The contrast between pre-pandemic live theatre and post-pandemic virtual theatre might be, anyway, a false dichotomy. I had been asking what theatre is, but these theatremakers aren’t wasting their time with that question, especially not now. They are simply moving toward what theatre can be. The best art emerges not from defining borders but rather pushing them, thinking around them, imagining a world without them. In striving to create a binary—is this theatre or isn’t it?—I was restricting imaginative thinking and even duplicating the exclusionary practices of the industry. For so long, the industry has boxed out those who challenged the status quo, setting definitive boundaries of what theatre is in order to dictate who it could be made by and for—specifically, for most of theatre’s history, white bodies and stories. Besides, no one knows the answer to my question, and Alexa Derman’s audio play Possession, unroots it entirely. The play, made exclusively for audio, never to be staged live, was featured in the recent new play festival ‘writing is live’ (the strikeout of the usual title a nod at the not-liveness of the productions in this year’s festival). It mimics a true crime podcast, digging into the constructed archive, false history, and cultural ripples of a lesbian cult murder that never was. Possession embodies the way the pandemic has deemed traditional parameters of the genre irrelevant. “I’m not as interested in, you
know, what is theatre?” Derman told the College Hill Independent. “And more interested in, how can the material conditions under which something is made influence and excite new possibilities? … My ideal way of consuming Possession would be like, put it in your pocket and go grocery shopping,” she said. In audio, with the usual physical aspects of theatre flattened into sound and inference, the language of the play takes center stage. +++ Theatre is an old, static form. It is also one that has, for as long as it has existed, only been available to a shamefully slim group: the white, the wealthy, the able bodied, the metropolitan. Racism and exclusion run to the very foundation of American theatre, to its early roots in minstrelsy and blackface. While performance art and theatre can be traced back thousands of years, the first truly American musical was the minstrel show in the late 1800s, wherein white actors donned blackface and degraded Black people through racist stereotypes. The phrase ‘Jim Crow’ comes from Thomas Rice’s virulently racist song-and-dance caricature of Black people. The old standards of musical theatre—The Sound of Music, South Pacific, The King and I—invariably have allwhite casts and/or trade in racist stereotypes. Today, such overt racism may not boil at the surface, but blackface is barely a memory. Theater companies continue to tokenize BIPOC artists and use them for their emotional and physical labor. Theaters perpetually center whiteness, filling their creative teams, boards, casts, and seasons with white stories and faces. Plays by Black writers, or directed by Black directors, are relegated often to second-stage or smaller productions. Unsustainable and long-held labor practices push theatremakers, especially BIPOC and disabled theatremakers, to the point of breaking because ‘the show must go on.’ The list does go on. In July 2020, as a response to the nationwide reckoning about police brutality and race in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a coalition of theatre artists of color released a document entitled We See You White American Theatre, detailing the white supremacy and patriarchy ubiquitous in the sphere and enumerating demands for long-overdue institutional change. The 29 page document lays out, in meticulous detail, how to fundamentally overhaul white American theatre in the service of true equity and representation—spanning from culturally competent practices to fair working conditions. Specific demands include Indigenous land acknowledgement practice, anti-racism training, eliminating the six-day rehearsal week and day-long technical rehearsals, the hiring of majority BIPOC writers, designers, and directors for the foreseeable future, and restorative
