ARTS

HOW DOES THE SHOW GO ON?

American theatre in stasis and crisis

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

justice for past harm inflicted on BIPOC theatre companies.

With theaters shuttered, all the frantic urgency that had justified pushing anti-racism work to a back burner came screeching to a halt. No longer were limited time and too many priorities valid excuses for avoiding confronting racism among theater establishments, and many have truly engaged with this work for the first time over the past year. These demands make it clear that American theatre needs more than reform to rid itself of the structural racism at its core—it requires a complete restructure from the top down. The pandemic provided a unique opportunity for a true reckoning of the industry and the destructive norms that have been upheld for as long as theatre has existed in the United States.

“I was talking to a director yesterday who was like, ‘Damn, if this pandemic hadn’t hit, I just would have died,’” said Watring. “At the rate of work, the expectation of work, the hours, the no pay, the no health care, the suck it up, the whisper campaign that controlled theatre for so long.”

The pandemic has presented a two-pronged question for the industry: what will theatre look like, in terms of the art that is created, after this? And who will create it and thrive in its creation? Whiteness has long been the default in theatre, with a Western aesthetic and tradition revered as the foundation from which to draw practice and convention. A more expansive understanding of the form, catalyzed in part by the limitations of the pandemic, may expand too, the breadth of theatrical and cultural traditions enriching mainstream theatre.

Resident Piehole creative Tara Ahmadinejad and her team had expected an in-person production of her play, Disclaimer, at the Public Theater in New York. The initial work, conceived by Ahmadinejad in the aftermath of the 2017 Muslim Ban, had imagined an intimate gathering that confronted the fraught relationship between the US and Iran. When it became clear the play would run online, they set upon the text, tearing it apart to adapt it for the new medium. A core experience of the play was the possibility that the audience would be inserted into the narrative as a member of Ahmadinejad’s family in an attempt to humanize the Iranian experience and create a tangible urgency to prevent war with Iran. “How do you find that vulnerability, when looking at a screen automatically makes a wall come up?” asked Piehole creator Alexandra Panzer. The answer: transforming the setting into an online Persian cooking class and highlighting random audience members on Zoom throughout the virtual production.

By both refusing to pre-record and putting the audience on the spot, Disclaimer constructed a sense of potential that is so key to liveness. “Someone could drop a prop, the gun could actually go off. The potential in the air that you don’t have when you watch a film is recreated through all the different ways that you’re on the edge of your seat a little. Your in-moment-ness is on the line too,” said performer Alice Winslow.

Through the tension created by the threat of participation, Disclaimer reaches for a sense of liveness—a pursuit at the core of most work being done in theatre throughout the pandemic. If liveness is that thing––that intangible feeling that makes artists and audiences come back time and again to theatre––the more fruitful question, then, is how to foster liveness in virtual theatre. It’s a question that theatermakers beyond the pandemic would be well served to continue asking themselves.

“I think that question of liveness has to do with presence and a sense of event, like something is really happening right now, and I’m a part of it in some way. Even when you go see a live play in a theater, sometimes…you just feel like, this thing is not alive. If we all just quietly snuck out, they would just keep going. It feels like they don’t even know we’re here. And other times you can see a play, a play play, that has the fourth wall up, no audience interaction, but it feels alive,” said Ahmadinejad. “It’s hard to say exactly what the difference is between those two things, because it’s sort of esoteric. It’s something about the energy. But that distinction is something that drives the work that we’ve been doing.”

The pandemic, in forcing mainstream theatre to expand beyond conventions, opened up possibilities for transformation. The effect is a double act of status quo deconstruction: compelling the entire industry to think outside traditional performance—thus drawing the experimental into the spotlight—and drawing back the curtain on its pervasive racism and issues of accessibility. Indeed, the unique ability of online theatre to transcend spatial boundaries (your home is the theater) and, in many cases, temporal ones, expanded the reach of the form to unprecedented audiences previously restricted by their disability, income level, or location.

At this moment, the art that endures is that which digs deep into the question of what made pre-pandemic theatre worthwhile, drawing inspiration to create theatre that defies boundary. It is the art that leans into, rather than away from, the moment.

Liveness carries an urgency, a pulling forward, that keeps a viewer riveted. It is a collective energy, the act of realizing a shared experience in a group of strangers. It is the potential for something to go wrong, for human error. It’s the question of how much of what you’re seeing—in Zoom theatre, including the chat—is intentional. “I think why I crave liveness is sort of the violent act of it. It doesn’t exist anywhere else except in the room,” described Watring. A sense of liveness is easiest to acquire in person, but it is not impossible to achieve virtually. We must do so, as this sort of true connection is fundamentally human, especially in the face of profound isolation and quarantine.

Without the usual, physical box of ‘theatre,’ artists are free to sink their teeth into the idea of liveness and medium—to reacquaint themselves with the form. In some ways, if considered properly, the pandemic is an opportunity for a creative, though not financial, revival in a stagnant industry. It has forced the injection of currents of innovation and digital creativity, something at which leading theater voices have long balked.

The pandemic has created the space for something new and greater—a reimagining of what theatre can be into the future—as the physical reconfiguring of the space forces a conceptual overhauling of the discipline. Theatre’s racist, exclusionary forces and the stiffness of its aesthetic borders are bound up in one another; both must be surpassed if theatre is to maintain its relevance into the future.

ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5 wants to touch your shoulder in a Brown University theatre space.