In a Confused Moment, Theater Struggles to Find A Foothold
As theater (and society) stumbles back, works focused on mutual comfort have the most success
Everyone seems a bit apprehensive right now.
Performing at The Brick on June 8, performance artist Hannah Kallenbach had barely walked onstage before informing the audience of her recent panic attack. “I can’t stop telling people about it,” she confessed.
At a backyard show in Williamsburg on June 13, singer/songwriter Brittain Ashford kept starting and stopping the same song, admitting she was nervous about performing. The crowd gently cheered her on, filling the awkward silences with warm applause.
Ahead of reviving her hit show Get On Your Knees, now at the Cherry Lane through July 3, comedian Jacqueline Novak wrote in Vulture of a “return to stage fright” and of a new kind of worry: “Am I as good as myself?”
Finally in Theater in Quarantine’s The Nine O’Clock Problem by Dan O’Neil, the doubt is baked into the show itself. Director/performer Joshua William Gelb tells a faceless voice that he’s not ready to free himself from “the break that just keeps on going,” fretting: “I haven’t finished what I was working on.”
As re-opening continues apace, joy and relief is mixing plentifully with anxiety and uncertainty. Most institutional theaters were literally not prepared for the suddenness of it all, and remain dark. What theater has emerged, scattered and chaotic as it is, reflects the uncertainty as much as it does the rejoicing.
Two of the larger in-person productions, Blindness and A Dozen Dreams, felt directly built from the pandemic’s most traumatic heights, to their detriments. Blindness is a dystopian journey that frequently plunges its audience into total darkness, effectively—if a bit cheaply—simulating the horror of a sudden blindness epidemic. A Dozen Dreams placed audiences into the dreams of playwrights who were, at the time they conceived the pieces, still trapped in lockdown, making for a broadly (though not entirely) grim and despairing journey through the mindset of early quarantine.
In fairness, both works end on a note of hope and release. At the close of Blindness, the doors open and the bright lights of a New York street (eerily silent, thanks to our headphones) pour into the dark space, a powerful coup de théâtre. The last two “rooms” of A Dozen Dreams are much more cheerful, particularly Lucy Thurber’s bright and breezy Back to the Country, which concludes with the simple hope: “Maybe we can be better.”
Yet ultimately, both shows feel a few months too late. We are too far removed from isolation for their immersion to really hit home, yet not removed enough to feel like looking back. Maybe this is unfair—it’s hard for art to keep up with a world as rapidly changing as ours is right now, and theater in particular has basically never been a rapid-response art form. But following a year and a half of work programmed a few months rather than years ahead, it’s where I’m at. Blindness at least resonated as more timely when it first began performances this April. But the world is already moving on. The show just announced that it will close early, on July 25.
The point is not that theater shouldn’t tackle grim, challenging topics; nor does the play necessarily need to have been written yesterday. Oddly enough, one of the most moving works I’ve watched recently was a livestream of Lucinda Coxon’s Herding Cats, a 2011 play revived by Soho Theatre in a transatlantic production that beamed-in actor Greg Germann live from Los Angeles for one of three roles.
Performing in person were Sophie Melville and Jassa Ahluwalia, both excellent as flatmates Justine and Michael, close friends responding very differently to trauma. Justine is moving a mile a minute, working intensely, always out; while Michael is agoraphobic and lives entirely in online worlds. Revived right now, the play becomes the story of two polar opposite reactions to the stress of reopening. Some throw themselves back into the world with reckless abandon, while others are still daunted by a subway trip. As Justine and Michael comfort each other at the play’s devastating close, confessing they both hold the same fear and uncertainty, I saw many a moment I’ve shared with friends in recent weeks.
Indeed, the simple solace of mutual comfort is where I’ve found theater most successful in the last few weeks. At that backyard show, once we’d held her up through the nerves, Brittain Ashford led the small crowd in song.
In early May there was Working Theater’s Missing Them, one of the few works I’ve seen that attempted to directly grapple with the now over 600,000 lost to Covid-19. Developed by Reza Salazar and Anjali Tsui, the show featured moving testimonies from relatives of those lost, performed by five alternating actors. At the show’s end, viewers who had lost loved ones placed a picture up to their camera, forming a Zoom collage of loss. It was, of course, a devastating image, but the shared moment of acknowledgment felt like a ritual desperately needed.
Over at the Public Theater, 600 Highwaymen’s A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An Encounter puts two audience members in a room together and guides them, by index cards, to form a temporary bond. You ask each other questions, form shapes together on the plexiglass that divides you, and even share a song (more singing!). My stranger suggested “You Are My Sunshine,” not knowing it was once my mother’s go-to when I’d wake up in the night and needed, well, comfort.
At Target Margin Theater’s space in Sunset Park, a piece by Kaaron Briscoe titled A Feeling of Great Happiness (part of Target Margin’s Magic In Plain Sight series) began with Briscoe announcing: “The next 30 minutes have no agenda. Nothing is required of you.” The piece moved joyfully between stories, singalongs and community announcements (“It has been brought to my attention that turtles breathe through their butts”). Near the end, Briscoe doused her co-performer Kate Weber with a super-soaker, while I watched with jealousy. It was a hot day.
What joined these pieces was a feeling of shared rituals where strangers gave each other comfort without asking too much. Grief is recognized, and the despair we’re still emerging from is ackowledged—we’re not pretending nothing happened. But we’re not mired in that despair, or forcing anyone to re-live it in theatrical form.
Pre-pandemic, I might have rolled my eyes at the close of Briscoe’s show, a benediction where she led us in breathing as one, then softly reminded us: “Every day that you exist is proof that there is joy in the world.” For right now, it just works for me. Please do talk to me about turtle butts; or admit you’ve forgotten how to sing in front of people; or force me to draw circles with a stranger.
Not every show I’ve mentioned really falls neatly into this argument. Herding Cats gave me comfort too, though it was depressing as hell. Missing Them was a direct reliving of our horrible loss, but the ritual of it brought solace.
Theater in Quarantine’s The Nine O’Clock Problem directly unpacked this strangeness and confusion, and didn’t reach any clear conclusions. “You’re looking for a way back in,” a voice says to Gelb, as he struggles to complete his show. Your “break” became just another loop, it goes on, and now the break must be discarded to help you get back to living.
Gelb is uncertain—should we really be discarding right now? “I’d always been under the impression that theater is about remembering,” he says.
“Going forward, I think it’s about forgetting,” the voice replies. “At least for a while.”