Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic 9781350231825, 9781350231856, 9781350231849, 9781350242074

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Theater of Lockdown

Methuen Drama Agitations: Text, Politics and Performances Theater has always offered immediate responses to political, social, economic and cultural crisis events that are local, national, and global in dimension, establishing itself as a prime medium of engagement. Methuen Drama Agitations interrogates these manifold intersections between theater and the contemporary: What is the relationship between theater and reality? Which functions does the theater perform in public life? Where does the radical potential of the theater reside and how is it untapped? Methuen Drama Agitations addresses issues from across a number of spectrums, including contemporary politics, environmental concerns, issues of gender and race, and the challenges of globalization. The series focuses on text as much as performance, on theory as much as practice. It investigates the lively dialogues between theater and contemporary lived experience. Series Editors William C. Boles (Rollins College, USA) Anja Hartl (University of Konstanz, Germany) Advisory Board Lynnette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) Anton Krueger (Rhodes University, South Africa) Marcus Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) Sarah J. Townsend (Penn State University, USA) Denise Varney (University of Melbourne, Australia) Theater in a Post-Truth World: Texts, Politics, and Performance Edited by William C. Boles Forthcoming Titles Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity Edited by Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Khalid Y. Long, and DeRon S. Williams Performing Statecraft: The Postdiplomatic Theatre of Sovereigns, Citizens, and States Edited by James R. Ball III

Theater of Lockdown Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic Barbara Fuchs

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in hardback in Great Britain 2022 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Barbara Fuchs, 2022, 2023 Barbara Fuchs has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Ben Anslow Cover images: Red and Black Lit Match Poster (© serazetdinov / Shutterstock), Painted Red Color Background (© fotograzia / Getty Images), Joshua William Gelb in Theater in Quarantine’s The Neighbor, adapted from Franz Kafka (© Theater In Quarantine) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3182-5 PB: 978-1-3502-3185-6 ePDF: 978-1-3502-4207-4 eBook: 978-1-3502-3183-2 Series: Methuen Drama Agitations: Text, Politics and Performances Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

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To the theater-makers everywhere, and to Rhonda, who saw it coming.

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Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgmentsx Introduction1 1 Straight to Zoom: Theater Moves Online 27 2 Bending the Rules: Experimenting with Zoom 43 3 Thinking outside the Box: Multiplatform 65 4 Thinking outside the Box: Simulation 87 5 Solo: Small-Scale Theater 115 6 Audio Theater, from Telephones to Podcasts 143 7 Distanced Theater: Reinhabiting the City and Beyond 161 Postscript183 Appendix: List of Works 187 Notes191 Index227

Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5



6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Time zone map from Zoo Motel website, 2020 15 Bill Irwin and Christopher Fitzgerald in In-Zoom, 2020 40 Screenshot of End Meeting for All, 2020 46 Screenshot of Traces of Antigone, 2020 50 Annelise Lawson and James Cowan in In These Uncertain Times, 2020 57 Screenshot of Game Over, 2020 68 Screenshot of Twitch chat channel in Roundabout, 2020 83 Bottom and fairies 91 The witches, (left to right); Aonghus Og McAnally, Dharmesh Patel, and Lucia McAnespie in Macbeth, 2020 94 Spike marks for playing Regan in King Lear, 2020 99 Haskell King and Ian Lassiter in Russian Troll Farm, 2020 103 Jack Gleeson in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), 2020 109 Joshua William Gelb in The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, presented by Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions, 2020 122 Joshua William Gelb in Footnote for the End of Time, presented by Theater in Quarantine, 2020 123 The digital waiting room in Here We Are, 2020 125 Box from The Institute for Counterfeit Memory, 2020 139 Audience, preshow in True Love Will Find You in the End, 2020158 Fernando Villa in El merolico, 2020 164 Monica Miklas broadcasting from her tent in Fire Season, 2020175 Delphine Bienvenu and Amir Sám Nakhjavani in En Pointe, 2020 180

Illustrations

21 Left to right: Tituss Burgess, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Ashley Park in Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, 2020 22 Joshua William Gelb in I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, music/lyrics by Heather Christian, presented by Theater in Quarantine and Theater Mitu’s Expansion Works, 2020

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, I want to thank Rhonda Sharrah, research assistant extraordinaire, who was sure there was a book here even before I had fully realized it myself. Indefatigable researcher, keen observer, essential interlocutor—I owe her an enormous debt. One of the great pleasures of this book, for someone who spends most of her time working on artists of an earlier era, was to engage the writers, directors, actors, and designers who persevered in the face of Covid-19 and found ways to keep making art. Perhaps because we were all cut off from our normal interactions, it was especially rewarding to find myself interviewing artists I had never met before, over Zoom, in a series of conversations that proved absolutely essential. I thank the following artists and theater professionals for their insight and assistance: Saheem Ali, Jesse Berger, Sophie Blumberg, Jim Bredeson, Edmund Campos, Sarah Cronk, Bryan Doerries, Kristy Edmunds, Rebecca Ennals, Eileen Evans, Camila Fitzgibbon, Allan Flores, Olga Garay-English, Carlota Gaviño, Joshua William Gelb, Marjolaine Goldsmith, Kathryn Hamilton/Sister Sylvester, Bill Irwin, Christine Jones, J. J. Kandel, Onur Karaoglu, Jenny Koons, Jessica Kubzansky, Gemma Lawrence, Álvaro Luna, Kay Matschullat, Charles McNulty, Aaron Meier, Jared Mezzocchi, Monica Miklas, Edgar Miramontes, Bush Moukarzel, Jonathan Muñoz-Proulx, Mark O’Connell, Crissy O’Donovan, Melissa Ortiz, Elli Papakonstantinou, Lorenzo Pappagallo, Francisco Reyes, Jon Lawrence Rivera, Luis Sorolla Rodríguez, Iñigo Rodríguez-Claro, Samantha Shay, Madhuri Shekar, Eli Simon, Sean Stewart, Jamie Tuohy, Fernando Villa Proal, and the Wingspace Design Collective. At Bloomsbury, Mark Dudgeon and Agitations series editors Bill Boles and Anja Hartl enthusiastically supported the project. Elena Araoz and her Innovations in Socially Distanced Performance project helped confirm that we were indeed witnessing a new form, and that

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it deserved our attention. As I sought to present as full a picture as possible, Jessica Bauman and Elizabeth Mak went out of their way to help me connect to artists. Colleagues in Theater Studies—many of them practitioners in their own right—pointed me to exciting work, read my pages, and offered thoughtful feedback. My warmest thanks to Erith Jaffe-Berg, Anston Bosman, Carla Della Gatta, Esther Fernández, Julia Lupton, Brandon Woolf, and Zoey Zimmerman. Last but certainly not least, my family countenanced my endless enthusiasm for virtual theater as we experienced lockdown together, watching a great deal more experimental work than they ever expected to encounter and making room for my project in a full house. I am endlessly grateful for their support. Preliminary versions of my discussions of Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All, Grumelot’s Game Over, and Jared Mezzocchi’s work with Isadora appeared on HowlRound Theatre Commons (https:// howlround.com/commons/barbara-fuchs, June 25, 2020; July 30, 2020; and January 4, 2021, respectively).

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Introduction

Missing the theater is emphatically not like missing someone who has died from Covid-19, or the apartment you’ve been evicted from, or the business you built, or the job you loved—at least not unless that job was in theater. Yet missing theater became during the pandemic a shared condition for theater-makers, audiences, scholars, and critics alike. Artists, whose livelihoods were most seriously imperiled, led the way beyond nostalgia and despair with their commitment to making theater, however dire the circumstances. I spent the lockdown at home in Los Angeles, sustained by theater and gradually coming to the realization that I was witnessing an important new development in the form. In my own household, a spring middleschool production of The Lorax, under the direction of the inestimable Zoey Zimmerman, quickly moved to Zoom, complete with matching green screens.1 Yet none of us considered it anything but a remedial response, making the best of an awful situation in an attempt to honor the work already sunk into the production. Gradually, what had at first seemed like a quick fix became instead hugely enabling—not just a life raft but a flotilla of rapidly proliferating possibilities. As productions multiplied and it became clear that digital theater meant watching anything, anywhere, anytime, those possibilities became both inspiring and overwhelming—I am surely not the only one to have “attended” more productions than ever in 2020. This is my chronicle of an intense period of trial and transformation for theater-makers and audiences alike. Theater of Lockdown traces the modes of theater-making that emerged during the unprecedented closures of the theaters across much of the world in 2020. Though born of necessity, recent productions offer a new world of practice, from plays on Zoom, WhatsApp, Instagram,

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and Twitch, to enhancement via lenses and augmented reality, to urban distanced theater that enlivens streetscapes and building courtyards. Based largely outside the commercial theater, these productions transcend geographic and financial barriers to engage new audiences, while offering much needed, though limited, support for artists. My study charts how the theater of lockdown puts pressure on existing assumptions and definitions: How do new forms born of exigency alter the conditions of both theater-making and viewership? In a pandemic, how can theater be live? How is participatory, site-specific, or devised theater transformed under physical distancing requirements? How do digital forms blur the line between theater and film? While the longing of both practitioners and audiences for in-person and communal performance experiences is undeniable, the affordances of the pandemic have radically transformed and expanded the possibilities. In addition to these formal questions, this book considers the material conditions of theater-making during the pandemic: Who gets to produce virtual theater, on the one hand, and to experience it, on the other? Where and how has the current crisis lowered the barriers to entry and widespread viewership? What are the possibilities of expanded or, in some cases, reduced access? Whom is digital theater for, and how does this answer vary in light of companies’ preexisting commitments, or the particular ways in which various communities have managed the pandemic? Although Theater of Lockdown offers a record of a particular moment, it reads it in light of larger debates about what theater can or should be, and the possibilities that responses to the pandemic offer for the futures of theater. Digital theater, especially, has grown enormously since I first imagined this book in July 2020, as more and more practitioners have turned to virtual forms. Despite brief respites from the pandemic in certain locations, and the development of vaccines in record time, the overall trend suggests that there will be few indoor performances before audiences in the 2020–1 season. Thus my corpus will only continue to expand—a prospect I greet with some ambivalence. Certainly I, too, wish we could be safely back in theaters, yet I am heartened by

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3

the multiplication of alternatives—a crucial lifeline for artists and art institutions—and their gradual embrace by audiences. The growth of new work beyond what any one book might chronicle is certainly a positive development. Given the sheer number of virtual performances, however, my criteria have become more specific: I focus, first, on pieces that reflect on the pandemic itself and the particular conditions of distancing and lockdown, creating an emotional record of what the world is experiencing during these devastating times. Second, I concentrate on work that treats the closures of the theaters as an opportunity for formal experimentation, whether in digital or distanced modes. Most work considered here was created for the conditions dictated by the pandemic, with some preexisting pieces transformed in significant ways and newly resonant in the current context. Though obviously not exhaustive, my book offers both a record of 2020 and a framework for thinking through theater’s transformation. Six chapters focus on digital productions from Europe, Australia, and the Americas, including audio, while the seventh considers distanced performances, primarily in urban settings. Not all are contextualized to the same degree—though theater online offers the illusion of universal access, my knowledge necessarily remains partial and situated, and I am limited by my own language abilities and greater familiarity with some traditions than with others. At the same time, it seems important to trace phenomena that extend far beyond the United States and the UK, to convey how much was shared globally by the theater of lockdown. Though mine cannot presume to be a definitive account, I hope to offer a conceptual scheme within which practitioners and theater scholars alike might think through what occurred in this period. Each chapter offers a mix of scholarly analysis, interviews with practitioners, and an account of reception. Chapter 1, “Straight to Zoom: Theater Moves Online,” charts the first highly visible productions to move online and the important consolation they offered to both habitual theatergoers and a broader population traumatized by the first wave of illness and lockdown. Chapter 2, “Bending the Rules: Experimenting with Zoom,” explores how theater-makers

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across the world quickly identified artistic possibilities in what remains essentially a platform for business communication, often working against the grain of its rigid, frontal boxes. Chapter 3, “Thinking outside the Box: Multiplatform,” focuses on work that combined various modes of delivery, often on different gadgets—Zoom and Instagram and WhatsApp, or Twitch and phone calls, for example—creating new modes of intimacy and play online. Chapter 4, “Thinking outside the Box: Simulation,” explores how online theater attempted to reproduce various aspects of the in-person experience, from actors in a shared space to a proximate audience. Chapter 5, “Solo: Small-Scale Theater,” analyzes how theater-makers sought to address the constraints of lockdown by individualizing experience, whether via single performers, intimate digital exchanges, or productions for viewers to try at home. Chapter 6, “Audio Theater, from Telephones to Podcasts,” focuses on a subset of those individual experiences, as it examines the turn to audio as an important outlet during the pandemic. Chapter 7, “Distanced Theater: Reinhabiting the City and Beyond,” shows how theater-makers moved beyond theaters to a variety of urban and exurban spaces in their efforts to continue producing live, in-person experiences. Rather than presenting a taxonomy, my goal is to chart the increasingly varied theatrical production during this period, with particular attention to how artists connected with audiences under the constraints of lockdown. My approach is both inductive and historical, as I trace the gradual progression from first experiments to more elaborate forms. Some of my categories overlap—much audio theater, though not all, is de facto a solo experience, for example. Some pieces occurred in both digital and in-person form—the Signal Fires “national act of storytelling” in the UK, for example, included both actual and online “fires” around which audiences could gather.2 Others morphed as they evolved, whether because they could eventually move to a theater or because they deliberately tracked the progress of the pandemic: from digital to distanced, for example, or from a purely audio exchange to an in-person encounter, as with 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s three-part A Thousand Ways. New work—as of yet unimagined—will

Introduction

5

doubtless require a rethinking of the categories; my goal is to collect the tremendous creativity and resilience that has enlivened this period in an interrogative and open-ended frame. While theater during the pandemic is clearly informed by artistic and theoretical developments of the early twenty-first century, such as the significant expansion of participatory and immersive theater, it also operates in virtually unprecedented conditions, and thus necessitates its own categories and questions. As an almost simultaneous chronicle of what has occurred, this book is by no means the last word—historical distance will undoubtedly provide its own perspective, and the forms that I analyze will continue to evolve from what are in many cases first experiments or prototypes. Given the enormity of the pandemic and the resulting lockdown, theatrical production is engaged in profound realignments that cut across many different sites of production and reception. My own necessarily partial understanding has evolved in conversation with the many practitioners—writers, actors, directors, designers—who were gracious enough to discuss their work with me.

Going Online It may be that we are now at a point in history at which liveness can no longer be defined in terms of either the presence of living human beings before each other or physical and temporal relationships. —Philip Auslander3

While digital or virtual performance existed before the 2020 pandemic, it remained largely in the realm of the experimental and avant-garde.4 Productions were often hybrid, multimodal assemblages, with online elements complementing in-person performance.5 At the same time, as Seda Ilter has demonstrated, in-person plays had come to reflect the broad impact of a “technologised and mediatised” age,6 while the use of projections onstage rendered intermedial work increasingly familiar to audiences. Importantly, some practitioners had begun turning to the

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digital as an unavoidable alternative to presence in the years before the pandemic, as national borders hardened and it became more difficult for artists to travel.7 These are all key antecedents for what occurred in 2020 and laid the groundwork for the fundamental transformation of theater during the pandemic. Yet the intensity and range of the crisis produced a remediation—a reconception of theater online—on an entirely unforeseen scale.8 Steve Dixon and Barry Smith define digital performance as “all performance works where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms.”9 Overwhelmingly, the theater of lockdown involved a shift to digital modes of creation and delivery, whether or not the digital played any role in the content of the work. Virtually overnight, as it became impossible for performers or audiences to congregate safely, both the production and the presentation of theatrical work were seemingly rendered impossible, with an entire industry stopped in its tracks around the globe in early March 2020. With theaters closed on Broadway, the West End, and across the world, artists began to explore alternative modes for creating work and safely reaching audiences while largely isolated at home.10 The wholesale move of theater production online over the months that followed was thus the solution to the fundamental impossibility of congregating in person during the pandemic. If Andy Lavender could once note that “the Internet apes the theatre in a kind of nostalgia for fleshy communion,”11 suddenly that simulation was all there was. As it became clearer that Covid-19 transmission was primarily airborne, it became harder to imagine audiences returning to theaters before a vaccine became available, although artists might be able to create together with due precautions. The generalized transfer of theater to digital modes of production and delivery brings up the key questions of liveness and copresence. If those conditions were traditionally conceived as essential to theater, how might digital theater approximate them? Given Auslander’s contention that liveness itself is a historical and contingent category,12 what would count as theater or live performance in the strange new

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world in which theater-makers and audiences now found themselves? Initially, many critics began their reviews with demurrals, hesitating before characterizing what they were seeing as theater. In the United States, Helen Shaw of New York Magazine and Jesse Green of the New York Times emerged as early champions of digital productions, with the latter noting his default answer to questions of genre: “if it’s made by theater people and I like it, it’s a play.”13 As I argue in Chapter 1, The Public Theater’s production of Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About in late April was an important milestone in these early months of lockdown, swiftly normalizing the idea of theater on Zoom. As Bryan Doerries, whose Oedipus the King was another trailblazer, observed: “It’s neither theater nor cinema nor television nor web communication but inextricably all those things wrapped up in some kind of new broadcast medium.”14 Previous debates about liveness had long considered the supposed ontological distinction between live and recorded material, and how the latter might threaten the very essence of theater.15 Yet the evolution of streaming technology so that digital no longer necessarily meant recorded had already changed the terms of the debate. In recent years, critics have noted how, in simulcasts such as the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD or National Theatre Live, temporal copresence has replaced physical copresence as the criterion for liveness.16 Moreover, what these scholarly conversations could hardly conceive was the wholesale recourse to the digital as the only feasible mode for theater, as it confronted an existential threat not from recorded performance but from a global pandemic. As theater moved online in 2020, many practitioners continued to adhere to liveness as their standard for what constituted theater. Others matter-of-factly presented recorded work, acknowledging the inevitable limitations of bandwidth for streaming even within rich nations. Yet others instituted for themselves alternate standards of liveness, such as recording material in a single take, as in Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All, which I discuss in Chapter 2. As productions multiplied, there were more attempts to define the

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new forms on offer. Director Peter J. Kuo, fresh from a production of Madhuri Shekar’s In Love and Warcraft for San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, argued: Live video theatre, though, focuses on visuals, the liveness of both audiences and performing artists in shared time, virtual convergence in digital space, and the subconscious awareness of limitation, which activates the imagination. This is regardless of if the actors, technicians, or audiences are sharing physical space or not. The performance can be broadcast from a shared space where a set is built to accommodate cameras or streamed from each individual performers’ home. This fulfils my definition of theatre: a coming together of artists and audiences to share an experience of unique live moments in time.17

Many concurred that the sense of limitation—the need for the audience’s imagination to complete the picture—fundamentally distinguished online theater, whether or not it was recorded, from film. Designer and director Jared Mezzocchi (Russian Troll Farm) foregrounded the ingenuity of digital theater, insisting that the new form could take from both film and theater while being very deliberate about which conventions it invoked.18 The self-consciousness that Mezzocchi underscores arguably becomes intrinsic, given the complexities of the new form. In terms of one of performance theory’s most important touchstones, one might argue that online theater becomes postdramatic—reflexive, self-aware, hypermediated—by its very nature.19 In their introduction to a recent collection, Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf note how the different modalities operated before the pandemic: Dramatic theatre strives for a kind of hermetic “absoluteness” in which, as soon as the lights dim, we are asked to overlook the fact that we are actually in a theatre: watching people work. Postdramatic theatre, by contrast, is formally distinguished by the insistent appearance of its own theatreness. One could also say this of Brechtian theatre, which highlights its material conditions in order to generate critical reflection

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on how the situation on stage came to be and thus might be changed. But postdramatic artists use theatrical production and reception as formal material for performance itself.20

In moving online, the theater of lockdown redoubles the “insistent appearance of its own theatreness.” While the most naturalistic pieces might deemphasize their own formal qualities, these remain unavoidable, precisely given the newness of the form and the sometimes strained use of platforms designed for other, very different purposes. There is no perceptual immersion when watching a play on one’s laptop at home, with the sound of sirens periodically punctuating the evening. However much we may want to see the computer screen as proscenium, we are operating with a new, and hardly naturalized, set of conventions. The walls between Zoom boxes, and the interactions between different platforms, multiply the fourth wall and the opportunities to break it, adding new dimensions of reflexiveness. As I argue in Chapter 4, the simulation of the many elements that online theater cannot easily deliver—costumes, copresence for actors or audiences—only underscores the self-consciousness of the form. Some viewers may find this off-putting—just as they might not gravitate to postdramatic work in theaters—while others zero in on these qualities as digital theater’s most appealing aspect. One of the key distinctions that Hans-Thies Lehmann offers in his influential account of dramatic versus postdramatic theater is the movement away from text in the latter.21 While digital theater often foregrounds language, preexisting dramatic texts are necessarily reconceived as they move onto a digital stage and encounter a new set of conventions. That remediation renders even text-based work postdramatic by virtue of being digital. The choice by many practitioners to foreground audience response—whether by activating the chat function or otherwise inviting the audience to enter a community discussion, as in the powerful conversations that followed Oedipus the King—further decenters the text, even in the absence of bodies onstage.

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The theater of lockdown reflects on the multiple overlapping crises of 2020—the pandemic and its attendant social and economic costs, threats to democracy, police violence, and the vigorous anti-racist protests that ensued—even as it foregrounds its new, awkward form and the impossibility of losing oneself in the online experience. It thereby offers new possibilities for political engagement, while also complicating the various dichotomies the field has internalized, between a postdramatic theater, primarily concerned with form, on the one hand, and political theater on the other.22 The enormity of the pandemic and its toll on the theater make these distinctions inoperative. While much of this work might be described as undertaking the humanistic work of consolation, it is also, perhaps of necessity, deeply engaged with its circumstances. To put it another way, the immediacy of the pandemic and its attendant crises has underscored how even the most formally inventive work is also a response to its context—not a surprising argument, to be sure, but one that still needs to be made explicitly.23 As To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Chapter 4), Last Audience (Chapter 5), and a number of other pieces make clear, simply following a script or taking direction takes on vexed political connotations amid overlapping public health emergencies and political crises. By thematizing the imbrication of viewership (especially digital viewership), agency, and political subjectivity, the theater of lockdown explores the most urgent questions of the moment and reminds us of how form can address social and political matters.

Access and Engagement Under lockdown, theater became both more difficult and much simpler—the closing of the theaters immediately lowered the barriers to entry simply by brutally clearing everyone’s calendars, and at least temporarily disabling many of the standard gatekeeping mechanisms. At least in theory, anyone could make theater at home—assuming they had an up-to-date computer or cellphone, with a camera and

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a microphone, and a reliable internet connection for sharing the resulting work; assuming also enough space and light, and no children or roommates running into that space; assuming no consuming care responsibilities and no direct impact from Covid-19 itself. Practically speaking, smaller and more nimble companies, particularly those used to making site-specific or experimental work, moved more quickly to producing online. For them, Zoom was inherently no more or less challenging an environment than a castle or a swimming pool or an empty warehouse—it was simply a question of figuring out its possibilities.24 While artists were suddenly able to collaborate across the globe, they could not share actual space on Zoom. A production could hope for worldwide viewership, yet no longer rely on the standard word-ofmouth among audiences now isolated at home and consumed with the pandemic. The very scale of production shifted, as pieces became shorter to account for Zoom fatigue while taking on ambitious virtual collaborations across continents. While many reveled in the mediatic possibilities, others, such as Virginia Grise and Elena Araoz’s A Farm for Meme or Francisco Reyes’ Yorick, deliberately explored the tactile, the intimate, the miniaturized in their appeal to audiences. Meanwhile, the modalities for audience access to virtual theater gradually multiplied and became formalized. Initially, few seemed to imagine or expect that audiences would pay to watch a production online, and a general spirit of solidarity prevailed, with theater imagined as a palliative to the devastation of the pandemic and the challenges of lockdown. Performances were free, with encouraging reminders to support companies and actors via donations (in Chile, this was referred to as “a la ciber gorra,” or “passing the cyber-hat”). An important early intervention was the UK’s National Theatre at Home initiative, which made available versions of the theater’s greatest hits, streaming free for a week each. From One Man, Two Guvnors (April 2–9) to Amadeus (July 16–23), thousands tuned in from around the globe for the crowd-pleasing productions.25 The project was made possible by the preexisting National Theatre Live initiative, which broadcasts in

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movie theaters in over sixty countries (despite the name, the bulk of the broadcasts are “repeat encore screenings”).26 With both stage and film theaters closed, the National moved quickly to streaming on its YouTube channel, where the lack of paywalls garnered an enormous audience and significant goodwill. Gradually, some productions erected paywalls, or limited the number of “seats” available, to mimic a limited run in an actual theater. This was the case for the Old Vic’s In Camera series, which presented Lungs in June, and Three Kings and Faith Healer in September. All were streamed live, with the limited casts socially distancing in the empty theater;27 with filmic effects such as close-ups and nimble live editing to enhance the story.28 Presumably, the manufactured condition of scarcity helped create demand and give the audience a sense that they were partaking of a limited good, so that tickets sold out. The very limited runs (I was only able to see Faith Healer) accommodated an audience artificially capped at the theater’s in-person capacity. In his review of Three Kings, Jesse Green commiserated, “It’s a ridiculous result of the restrictions of livestreamed theater that one of the best performances to emerge from the new medium is also one you might never get to see.”29 Yet these decisions are in no way inherent in the medium—other online performances were viewed by thousands of people simultaneously.30 The decision seems especially peculiar when the series title foregrounds the analogy with film. As Green perceptively concludes, “Let’s stop quibbling about or finessing the genre. Let plays be plays. But can we not take just one great thing from the movies: the chance to see them again? We are missing enough these days as it is.”31 Meanwhile, at least in the United States, unions struggled to keep up with the new modalities, as definitions and genre classifications took on serious real-life consequences. Actors’ Equity, the theater actors’ union, was more focused on protecting actors from being forced back to work before the pandemic was contained than on enabling the new modes of dissemination that might allow them to work safely. As theater companies desperately attempted to figure out how to connect with their audiences, they found that Equity contracts did not cover what they

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wished to do. In a much-noted early case, Red Bull Theater, a small offBroadway company specializing in Jacobean plays, was forced to cancel a livestreamed reading on Zoom, for which they had reassembled the cast of a 2015 production (Tis Pity She’s A Whore, planned for March 30, 2020). As artistic director Jesse Berger wryly noted, Red Bull became “the canary in the coal mine” for these jurisdictional labor issues.32 The company did not consider a livestreamed Zoom reading to fall under the purview of an Equity contract that covered performances at their off-Broadway theater.33 Should livestreamed work instead be covered by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), given that it occurs on screens? What of performances recorded and subsequently streamed? As Shaw noted in New York Magazine, “This is certainly a new, nebulous world. … Is cyberspace a stage?”34 For off-Broadway houses, at least, the initial solution was a workaround: an ancillary organization created by the performers’ unions granted permission for livestreamed performances with limited rehearsal time, recorded versions of which could also be presented for no more than four days, under a special benefit-performance clause.35 While this allowed the show to go on, it did not resolve the underlying issues or allow actors to work under contract, thereby threatening their ability to claim health insurance through their union.36 What might remain for critics fairly abstract issues of genre became pressing questions of labor representation and jurisdiction, on which actors’ livelihoods and health depended. Increasingly, theaters signed contracts with SAG rather than with Actors’ Equity for work that was recorded and streamed, which left stage managers—who are not covered by SAG—out in the cold.37 With its focus on protecting from Covid-19 even actors who did not want to be protected, Equity seemed to be losing the public relations battle, especially when actor Jessika D. Williams chose to leave the union rather than forgo the title role in Othello at the American Shakespeare Center, in Virginia’s bucolic Shenandoah Valley.38 By November, and under significant pressure from their members, many of whom belong to both unions, SAG and Equity came to an agreement, with its own

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Theater of Lockdown

definition of what would count as theater online.39 Michael Paulson, who covers the industry for the New York Times, noted the multiple restrictions: “the Equity-covered work is supposed to be distributed to ticketholders or subscribers, and not broadcast to the general public. The audience, over the course of the streaming run, must not exceed twice the theater’s seating capacity over that time period, or three times the capacity for theaters with fewer than 350 seats.”40 The focus on ticketholders or subscribers seems particularly vexed, given many theaters’ increased commitment to access for new and broadly conceived audiences, including pay-what-you-will and donation models. A further set of restrictions attempts to draw the line between theater and film, bringing the theoretical discussion I outline above to its most pragmatic instantiation: “The program may not include work that is more in the nature of a television show or movie, including work that is shot out of chronological order, that is substantially edited prior to exhibition, or that includes visual effects or other elements that could not be replicated in a live manner.”41 This “you know it when you see it” definition characterizes theater by negation, suggesting that these questions are far from settled. As the months wore on, more companies turned to Zoom to recreate online what had worked for audiences in theaters, whether by rescuing recently canceled productions or reprising successful in-person runs. The most effective of these productions, including Olney Theatre’s The Humans and Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Zero Cost House, found in the digital versions opportunities to enhance the original plays’ dramaturgy, emphasizing, for example, the family’s dysfunctionality in Humans and the surreal juxtapositions of House.42 Larger theater companies, particularly in Los Angeles, attempted to move their subscription models online and woo back paying audiences with a combination of previously recorded and live digital performances. Center Theatre Group’s “Digital Stage,” launched in early October, reintroduced hierarchies of access in the virtual realm, with “Friends Memberships” and “Insiders Memberships” providing carefully calibrated opportunities.43 At the same time, sixty-four smaller theater

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companies in the city were prompted by the pandemic to come together as never before, founding ATLA (Alternative Theatre Los Angeles), an association to pool knowledge and address common challenges as the companies sought to survive.44 By December, the UK’s National Theatre, whose early free broadcasts had consoled so many, had launched its own subscription streaming service.45 While some companies understandably sought to monetize viewer­ ship, others continued to emphasize access, with pay-what-you-can options that endured beyond the first few months of lockdown. Others discovered that barriers to a global audience, and even to international productions, had been greatly reduced: Thaddeus Phillips’s Zoo Motel, performed live from Cajicá, Colombia, included a time zone map so that audiences anywhere in the world could figure out when to watch46 (Figure 1). Although the piece was poorly reviewed in the New York Times,47 a broader audience sustained it, and it now boasts of an UK production in association with Theatre Nation. (Given the entirely digital presentation, it is unclear in what sense the piece “opened in September in the USA” or how a UK premiere is different for a piece “broadcast live from a village in South America.”48) Onur Karaoglu’s Read Subtitles Aloud, which I discuss in Chapter 5, quickly

Figure 1  Time zone map from Zoo Motel website, 2020. Courtesy of Thaddeus Phillips.

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Theater of Lockdown

added an English-language version to its original Turkish production, with actors largely recording themselves at home in each case. The ambitious Flash Acts festival commissioned twenty microplays about isolation from Russian and US writers, and produced each twice over, in Russian and in English, with the corresponding translation.49 Questions of theater’s relevance and accessibility became newly urgent in the United States with the protests for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in May and the looming presidential election in November. Theater found itself grappling with its own practices, as artists issued an urgent challenge to rethink how the industry operates in the United States. The We See You White American Theater (WSYWAT) manifesto, issued first by a prominent collective of BIPOC artists and soon signed by hundreds more, called for a decisive response to longterm inequities, demanding a “new social contract” with respect to cultural competencies, working conditions and hiring practices, artistic and curatorial practices, compensation and funding, accountability and transparency, training programs, and more.50 In tandem with the urgent demands of WSYWAT on the production side, theater’s move online provided the opportunity to rethink much of the received wisdom about access for audiences. As Kuo noted: The belief that live in-person theatre is the only valid form of theatre is incredibly elitist. And the fact that many theatre institutions are dependent heavily on donors is proof of that. The structure is built to cater to those who pay great amounts of money to keep their classist notions of theatre alive. So it’s been a real struggle for our field to welcome those who don’t live near large regional theatres; young audiences; people of color; and individuals with disabilities, who have often been shamed by common theatregoers. But the potential for inclusion is there. Live video theatre provides safe access to those who may not have felt welcome in historically inaccessible spaces.51

Theater-makers intent on attracting newer, younger, more diverse audiences have echoed Kuo’s insights, noting how simply presenting work outside of a forbidding institutional space can make theater more

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welcoming. With digital theater, there are no segregated lobbies, no VIP rooms for donors, no front-row seats: everyone has the best seat in the house. As Dead Centre humorously observes in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), which I discuss in Chapter 4, our nostalgia for being in theaters can make us forget how hierarchical and unwelcoming those spaces have become. In addition to reaching new audiences, digital theater can play a key role in bypassing censorship. Elli Papakonstantinou, whose Traces of Antigone I discuss in Chapter 2, noted that a digital production can reach women in situations of domestic violence, who might never be able to attend an in-person production.52 Doerries stressed how much richer postshow discussions were after Theater of War’s digital performances, as they surfaced different experiences of repression from around the world: “Someone can be talking about racialized violence in their community in the United States and then someone can jump on the screen and say, ‘This is my experience in Hungary,’ or ‘I’m calling in from Poland,’ or ‘Here it’s about homophobia.’ ”53 Perhaps as importantly, digital theater also allowed productions to skirt censorship. Thus Belarus Free Theatre, which operates underground in Minsk and from exile in London, was able to present School for Fools—an exploration of how to reconcile internal and external selves, and how to exist under repression—on Zoom. The production was “performed and broadcast live from Minsk in the bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms of our incredible ensemble, most of whom are selfisolating in a country where doctors and journalists face arrest and intimidation for trying to support public awareness of COVID-19.”54 In addition to the metadramatic reflection on social and political scripts that I discussed earlier, digital access itself marks the impact of the theater of lockdown. Digital theater also offers new opportunities for audience engagement. Many companies quickly recognized the power of the chat on YouTube or Zoom, which replaces physical proximity with online schmoozing (and a great quantity of emojis). While audiences delighted simply in finding themselves together in a virtual space, theater companies used

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the chat to welcome and introduce viewers (“where is everyone watching from?”) and even offer notes on the performance as it occurred. As I discuss in Chapter 3, productions that used the livestreaming platform Twitch, which prioritizes performers’ access to audience comments, made that audience a cocreator, exploring participatory modes they might not have attempted in a physical theater. More broadly, the lockdown, which many experienced as an existential threat, may actually help theater recognize its strengths. As proof-of-concept, digital theater demonstrates how much more influential theater might become as it simultaneously scales up through streaming and engages an audience in participatory modes. Many of the productions I discuss here show how theater might explore the affordances of the virtual, all while privileging liveness. Bold experiments such as Roundabout and The Seagull on The Sims 4, which I discuss in Chapter 3, pointedly make the case for new dimensions of audience engagement, bringing theater closer to other forms of pluralistic storytelling, including alternate reality games and transmedia forms. While in-person immersive theater had experimented with engaging audiences in shared storytelling long before the pandemic, the move online has made it much easier to do so, bridging the gap between theater and other forms in which those modes of storytelling more typically occur and normalizing for theater-makers the idea that liveness is compatible with a digital platform. The shared agency of the resulting forms may be unfamiliar to traditional theater-makers, yet clearly offers an alternative to the marginalization of theater in relation to participatory forms of popular culture. The lively conversation about alternatives to traditional theatermaking on sites such as No Proscenium55 may now seem more relevant to the broader theater industry. Once theater has successfully moved online—albeit in response to a dire crisis—might it not choose to linger, in order to engage new and potentially enormous audiences? As Alexis Soloski noted in the New York Times, “Too often, pre-pandemic, I would see plays that didn’t seem to acknowledge the audience at all. Now I find that a lot of experimental work takes particular care of us—I’m thinking

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of ‘Cairns’ and ‘Tempest’ in VR—valuing audience experience and trusting us to do a lot of the imaginative work ourselves.”56 Although Soloski references a promenade piece and VR (virtual reality) theater— neither of which are my focus here—the general sentiment seems apposite: can the lockdown provide an opportunity for theater to reset its relationship with audiences? Beyond even the great range of material that I have tried to address in this book, there exist several original, generous initiatives designed to see theater-makers and audiences through, from plays to produce at home (Chapter 5); to a space for imagining what is yet to come, in the Guardian’s “Future Plays” series; to grants for rethinking theatermaking for the near term, in the Dublin Theatre Festival’s “Futures” initiative.57 As theater-makers ponder what changes may endure beyond this period, greater access is front and center. From Shakespeare in the Park in San Francisco (Chapter 4) to the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico in Madrid (Chapter 2), practitioners agree that preserving expanded access, even once performances can again take place in person, will be essential.58

Artists in a Digital Space Even though digital theater offered a lifeline in perilous times, actors and directors expressed tremendous ambivalence about working online. Rarely has a form been simultaneously so appreciated and so reviled, with artists everywhere desperately turning to and also trying to break out of Zoom. While grateful for a mode of theater-making that could operate despite the pandemic, many found it difficult to adapt to what felt so unnatural and disembodied, as Bill Irwin’s In-Zoom (Chapter 1) never ceased to point out. As director Melia Bensussen put it during a Zoom talk-back after a Red Bull performance, exchanging breath—a prime epidemiological threat during the pandemic—is what actors do.59 Joshua Gelb, whose Theater in Quarantine I discuss in Chapter 5, acknowledged the enormity of the challenge: “for theater artists, whose

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entire industry relies on communal gathering, professional grief is compounded by an existential uncertainty. How long will this last, we wonder. When can we return to normal?”60 The demands digital theater places on actors are considerable. On Zoom, the most frequently used platform, their stage is reduced to a box, while their home becomes their place of work. As directors and designers have noted, “We also are asking actors to become their own set, costume, and lighting designers. It’s like we have two options: either give a list of requirements to the actors, which they will need in order to participate, or ask everyone what they have and then create work depending on the resources available.”61 Makeup and hair, too, are now up to actors. Technical design becomes a more collaborative process, involving the entire company from the first day. While designers may celebrate the integrated nature of this process, they also recognize its limitations: the expanded partnership with actors is inspiring, but limited by the actors’ available space and comfort with technology. A spotty internet connection, a tiny space, a loud upstairs neighbor—all unfortunately correlating to income—can themselves affect an actor’s ability to find work. As digital productions became more elaborate, companies began shipping actors tech materials, props, and costumes, which actors were then required to install and manipulate. For Broadway veteran Melissa Errico, an online version of Meet Me in St. Louis involved a surprising number of analog deliveries: Speaking of boxes—they immediately started to arrive at my Bronxville home, separately and in clusters. Soft lights, umbrella lights, scaffolding, green cloth, large clips, face reflectors, inner ear monitors. Then there were the props that showed up like familiar friends— bowler hats, briefcases, tennis rackets. A potato, a piece of cake, a folding table. This life raft of remote performing had become a larger vessel—an intricate art form, an ocean liner of its own.62

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Despite actors’ flexibility, home-based arrangements often prove fragile. No matter how carefully designers plan for each performer’s space, a last-minute change in a living situation, or simply a faulty connection, can undo weeks of work. Part of what drew theater-makers—as so many others—to Zoom was the reliability of its cloud-based model: the platform connects each additional user on a call to the nearest available server, optimizing each connection and making them independent of each other, so that each user’s connectivity issues affect only that user. This makes the platform very stable, though it does not solve the problem of what to do when a particular cast member’s connection fails. As the pandemic dragged on, with Zoom ever more widely used, its low cost, global infrastructure, relative familiarity, and hardware agnosticism—the ability for users to choose what cameras or microphones to use in combination with the platform—became additional advantages. Yet as a business communication platform in no way designed for theater, Zoom always required an imaginative leap. By late spring, practitioners and educators had begun attempting to chart what it meant to make theater on Zoom, chronicling their early experiences with the platform. Director Katie Pearl used her students’ experience with an unexpectedly virtual “Advanced Directing” class at Wesleyan to put together a webpage on which they offered guidance for others and reflected on their use of the platform.63 Nathan Silvern wrote a wry “thank you note to Zoom,” for how it bracingly defamiliarized their experience: Thank you for reminding me [of] the power of composition. For reminding me the way a single image can stay with you forever. Thank you for reminding me how much story can be told in each little moment. Thank you for teaching me the power of metaphor. Thank you for showing me that sometimes intention is more important than execution. Simultaneity is impossible over Zoom, watching actors fight against that and try to move in sync, to speak

22

Theater of Lockdown in sync and fail and fail and fail was beautiful and heartbreaking and inspiring. Thank you for making me work from a point of trust with the audience instead of distrust. Thank you for being so flat and so impersonal. Thank you for throwing beauty, intimacy and community into relief by your artificiality. Thank you for your little boxes. … Thank you for new types of risk. Thank you for actors who don’t realize they are muted. Thank you for freezing. Thank you for moms and dads who can’t figure out how to click out and are freaking out because they don’t want to mess up the show. That is real. Thank you for reminding us how fragile everything is. Thank you for never allowing us to forget what is happening in the world around us.64

In June, director Elena Araoz launched “Innovations in Socially Distant Performance.”65 The project “studies the aesthetics, philosophies, tools, and artists who are transforming the fields of virtual live performance and socially distant productions,” with an emphasis on sharing practical information, “the tools and techniques of a reimagined trade,” via its website.66 How to use microphones when performers are masked? How to create immersive sound design for a “cyber-stage”? An extensive list of hardware and software recommendations offers guidance for practitioners as they move productions online.67 In July, as I first conceived of this book, I partnered with Araoz and her Princeton students to try to crowdsource descriptions of new work, but by the time we had constructed a survey and gathered the first few dozen entries, the number of productions had exploded.68 Despite these various attempts to share information, most practitioners were left to experiment on their own. Eli Simon (UC Irvine/New Swan Shakespeare Festival), whose A Midsummer Night’s Zoom I discuss in Chapter 4, found some distinct advantages: the ability to announce the names of the characters under their Zoom boxes, rendering a play with a large company and double-casting more accessible; the “instantaneous” theater design that virtual backgrounds afforded once he provided green screens to actors, at a fraction of the cost

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and complication of an actual set; the reach to an audience far beyond his immediate geographical area; and the digital effects that served to convey the magic of the play he had chosen.69 Conversely, the main challenge was finding that the entire production depended on the casts’ Wi-Fi connections at home. If a play is generally only as strong as its weakest actor, Simon quipped, the Zoom version is only as strong as its weakest bandwidth. (More elaborate productions, such as A School for Fools, recorded individual actors so they could substitute the recording if an actor dropped off,70 while others offered understudies a larger role as backup for actors with technical difficulties.) Although Simon and his cast were committed to live performance, the connectivity issues forced them to record their show at the last minute. Simon, whose own expertise includes clowning, was also acutely aware of the difficulty of including the body in the Zoom windows. Given the angles required, the limited spaces from which actors connected were not sufficient to capture their bodies. In speaker view, actors had to avoid all audible reactions to others’ lines, lest the camera unpredictably jump to them. More tractable was the challenge of the actors’ focal points: Simon made a distinction between the more straightforward, business-like “Zoomland,” where characters stared straight ahead from their respective boxes, and the green space of the forest, where they gazed at each other’s boxes and even simulated eye contact. Before Zoom added the ability to place boxes in particular locations, this required careful planning: the four young lovers had to enter in a specific order, so that they would appear in the correct relationship to each other, allowing the actors to appear to lock eyes, or at least gaze longingly at the appropriate object of affection.71 In the talk-back that followed A Midsummer Night’s Zoom, as in many others during the lockdown, actors tried to make the best of the constraints, yet acknowledged just how complicated it was to work on Zoom. Any work is good work during this period, when many have not worked for months. The Zoom box that some find so limiting is to others just another stage to explore and inhabit. A preexisting company, used to working with each other, helps with the awkwardness of rehearsing

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Theater of Lockdown

online. (As I discuss in Chapter 5, solo performances are one way to address the complexities of communication among performers online, by simply reducing the cast to a single actor.) The real challenge comes from the loss of communication among a cast, both off- and onstage. As Errico observes: In the room of a normal production, half the work is done via a byzantine choreography of whispers between colleagues. The author whispers to the director about firing the pianist, while the leading lady flirts with the leading man (both because it builds texture and because, why not?). The young dancers test the authority of the choreographer and wonder what the writer even does. All taking place through implication and intrigue, in corridors and crannies, on a lunch break at the deli or a good laugh in the ladies’ room. In the Zoom musical, the corridors and crannies are gone; everything is shared.72

Yet while the Zoom chat may be the only remaining venue for whispering, digital theater increasingly managed to restore at least the onstage connections between actors. As productions became more elaborate, designers took on the challenge of allowing performers to see each other in a composite space and react to what was occurring in real time. Media, video, and lighting designers familiar with the capabilities of existing software began applying it to Zoom, creating chains of digital information that replicated the complex feedback loops of an in-person production. A first step, as Mezzocchi noted, involved “reverse-engineering” Zoom to understand its dramaturgical capabilities: What does each button in the preferences mean? Not what it does, but what it signifies. Take hiding non-video participants: that’s not a just a switch—it’s a potential tactic that we could use in storytelling to turn things on and off, and to be able to see that people are hiding in the space. That’s interesting, dramaturgically, even if I don’t have the script for it yet.73

Beyond identifying the possibilities of Zoom, media designers adapted the tools of their analog work to the platform. Software used

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for editing video and sound in theaters (OBS, Isadora, QLab, etc.) was repurposed to work with Zoom, treating it as one more source of digital information. This allowed a designer like Mezzocchi to function almost like a TV editor during performances, capturing the feed from various Zoom boxes on Isadora and combining them into a separate window, layering them to simulate the actors’ copresence: I could see everyone like a television studio. I could pull from everybody’s feeds and put it into my software to compose the designed video in real time. So the actors were seeing a monitor of the final product while I was seeing everybody all at once, in real-time.74

Crucially, this restored actors’ ability to see each other, in real time, and to respond to the variations in live performance as though they were actually sharing a space. As proof-of-concept, Mezzocchi’s work, which I discuss in Chapter 4, suggests how much more sophisticated online productions may become as they continue to evolve, perhaps even beyond the end of the pandemic. At its most elaborate, digital theater does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audiences, and theater itself. Every aspect of live performance during the pandemic poses its own challenges and invites new solutions. Digital alternatives continue to emerge: while Zoom does not easily offer actors feedback from the audience, for example, Twitch foregrounds that circuit, not only replicating but also expanding upon in-person productions. New platforms may offer yet more possibilities. Audio theater, which I turn to in Chapter 6, forgoes the visual dimension entirely, opting instead for aural immersion and theater as podcast. As I discuss in Chapter 7, distanced theater—most vulnerable to the changing demands of public health—flowers valiantly where the pandemic recedes, only to wither in the face of new waves of infection. Along the way, all these modes of theater of lockdown add to a growing repertoire and confirm the resilience of its makers.

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1

Straight to Zoom: Theater Moves Online

This chapter analyzes digital productions in a realist, verisimilar mode, which offered some of the first experiments with Zoom theater. Their accessibility, visibility, and subsequent success quickly normalized the idea of theater on Zoom, opening the door for far more experimental work. As the pandemic raged, particularly in New York, thousands of theatergoers around the world were reduced to watching archival material, generously streamed by institutions such as the UK’s National Theatre. No one imagined that theater could somehow transcend the pandemic to produce new work; instead, audiences and practitioners alike believed that the lockdown would have the desired effects and enable a swift return to the theaters. Companies across the United States were still postponing productions for a few weeks and announcing their Fall 2020 seasons. Although the education sector and many businesses had moved their operations to Zoom virtually overnight, few would have imagined the platform as a means to replicate the copresence and community of in-person theater. These earliest productions were remarkable for how matter-of-factly they presented theater on Zoom, even as critics struggled to name and define what they were seeing. Their pioneering work was rapturously received: beyond the merits of the individual productions, they offered solace amid isolation, and confirmation of theater’s resilience. Huge audiences tuned in, underscoring the accessibility of the new mode. All of a sudden, geography became irrelevant, as audiences across the globe tuned in to New York productions during the worst of the pandemic there, both for their traditional prestige in the United States

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and international theatrical landscape, and also in solidarity with the brutal scourge the city was experiencing. Temporal copresence stood in for actually sharing space, which had become impossible under the conditions of lockdown. Digital theater, once purely avant-garde, suddenly made new and unexpected forms of community possible for unprecedentedly large audiences. As Andy Lavender presciently noted years before the pandemic: It may appear that Internet technologies put people in the same virtual space. What they also do is put them in the same time, in appearance and interconnection. … [B]‌eing in the same time as others, adjacent to performance, guarantees a transmedial togetherness that is oddly familiar. It provides the sort of experiential affirmation that underwrites our engagement with the theatre.1

Amid the ravages of the pandemic and the isolation of lockdown, that experiential affirmation would prove crucial.

Familiarity A milestone in those early days was Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About?, swiftly written for Zoom in the early weeks of the lockdown. Produced by the New York Public Theater, it first aired live on April 29, 2020, and subsequently streamed through June 28, 2020. Nelson’s hour-long play reintroduced characters that had been fully established before the pandemic, in his tetralogy of “Apple Family” plays. Presented by the Public since 2010, each had premiered on the day in which it was set—a politically significant day for the United States. The plays are part of an even larger project by Nelson, the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” that follows several families in that small town in the Hudson River Valley, eighty miles from New York. As Nelson puts it, “these are plays about the need to talk, the need to listen, and the need for theater.”2



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Nelson’s reputation as a chronicler of the contemporary encouraged the Public to agree to the project. He produced a draft in a remarkable five or six days, having established that the actors who habitually played the Apples were all available, due to the closure of the theaters.3 The piece was rehearsed on a restricted schedule, given the difficulty of working on Zoom.4 The actors’ familiarity with each other and previous experience playing the characters likely eased the transition into the virtual mode, with its attendant challenges for players accustomed to making eye contact across a stage, receiving their cues in person without delay, and so forth. In the first virtual installment of what was for many viewers a comfortingly well-established family dynamic, the Apple siblings experience the trauma of Covid-19 from their homes in Rhinebeck.5 Barbara, a high school teacher, is recovering from a bout of illness serious enough to have required hospitalization, and still visibly shaken from the experience. Her brother Richard, who works as a lawyer for the state government in Albany, has moved in to take care of her, so that they both appear in the same Zoom box. (The two actors playing these roles, Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders, are married and share a laptop; their cohabitation necessitated the fiction.) The other Zoom boxes are occupied by Marian (Laila Robins), a schoolteacher; Jane (Sally Murphy), a writer; and Jane’s partner Tim (Stephen Kunken), an actor and restaurant manager who is quarantining in a separate room in the same house, thereby providing a rationale for his separate Zoom box. From beginning to end, the gallery-view screen looks exactly as it might for any family having a chat over Zoom—realism is very much the point here. Not much happens: the Apples discuss the state of the world and how each of them is coping. From the relative safety of quarantine, they worry about grocery shopping and whether they can do their jobs virtually. Tim reflects that though things are bad for restaurants, the theater has it even worse. In a nod to the enormous losses the pandemic has brought, he mentions the death of a colleague with whom he had worked early in his career, whom viewers in the New York theater

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Theater of Lockdown

world immediately identified as Mark Blum, a beloved actor who died of coronavirus complications in late March. The topicality, as various reviewers noted, was almost unbearable at such a short distance from the events. As the play proceeds, the siblings agree to tell stories to distract themselves, in their own reduced version of The Decameron. Despite the storytelling, the play is relentlessly naturalistic: this is, after all, a family gathering on Zoom to offer support and see each other’s faces, as so many families did in those months. Much of the play’s impact lay in seeing those exchanges, which had so quickly become normalized, rendered as theater. The Apples’ familiar and topical discussion of the pandemic, while prosaic, also reinforced the sense of theater as a necessary mode for processing the immense loss and anxiety that attended the unprecedented lockdown and concomitant closing of the theaters that spring, and one that audiences had sorely missed. Nelson’s play was presented as a benefit for the Public Theater, establishing another key tenet of Zoom theater, at least initially: while it might not be practicable or desirable to sell tickets, encouraging audiences to support theater as they watched online quickly became common practice.

“Call It the First Zoom Play”6 The strong positive response from critics to What Do We Need to Talk About? offered important encouragement and served to anoint the new form. In New York Magazine, Helen Shaw noted that the play “was made for and with screens, yet it still tastes totally of theater.”7 Shaw searched for a justification to explain her visceral reaction: “Maybe it’s the top notes of language, or the length of engagement among the cast, or the way that the audience’s own imagination is a crucial player? I’m trying to place it.” Stuart Emmrich, in his review for Vogue, was more definitive: “Wednesday night represented something of a milestone: the world premiere of a play written specifically about this strange time we are now living in and staged to take advantage of the fact that almost



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none of the actors could be in the same room together.” Emmrich underscored the remarkable intimacy of the experience, despite the fact that more than 5,000 people were watching at the same time—more than ten times the number that could have watched together at the Public. “It’s almost like you are watching a new art form being born,” he marveled. His review also charted the gratitude expressed on Twitter, particularly by theater practitioners.8 In her New York Times (NYT) piece announcing the production, Alexis Soloski was positive overall, yet decided that this early work “isn’t quite theater.” She nonetheless emphasized the importance of its live performance for “restoring some of theater’s ephemerality.”9 The headline for the actual review, by cochief theater critic Ben Brantley, was more direct: “Same Apple Family, New Kind of Theater.” Brantley emphasized the consolation the piece offered, yet expressed some reservation about the nature of the event: “Since theater occurs in a shared physical space, ‘What Do We Need to Talk About?’ doesn’t exactly qualify, I suppose,” he demurred. Ultimately, however, the hope offered proved more important: But the theatrical impulse—to celebrate and capture a moment in real time as it passes—is so strong here that, I actually felt I was attending a play. It felt good. Nelson and his team have given me hope that the real thing is still there, nurturing its singular strength and agility, eager to come out of quarantine and meet us face to face.10

Thus although What Do We Need to Talk About? is arguably one of the most conventional pieces produced during the pandemic, its agile, virtually real-time response to the enormity of the crisis, enabled by a set of preexisting relations between playwright, cast, and producing theater, proved extraordinarily important. Voiced by a set of beloved, familiar characters, the play offered comfort to the enormous audience that sought it out—over 80,000 views across thirty countries during its streaming run.11 It became simultaneously a proof-of-concept and an enormous hit with both critics and audiences. The demonstrated feasibility of the form, interest in the

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piece, and huge emotional response gave permission for theatermakers to move to Zoom. The immense success of What Do We Need to Talk About? quickly led to further installments in the Apples’ Zoom story, which now constitutes a new trilogy. And So We Come Forth, presented by Apple Family Productions, premiered on July 1, 2020,12 although it was not nearly as well received as the original—“slightly indulgent” was Jesse Green’s verdict in the New York Times.13 The political landscape in the United States had changed radically in the interim, with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests across the country, so that the solipsism of a white family in its white town became more salient. The third play, Incidental Moments of the Day, which premiered on September 10, 2020,14 seemed to have incorporated these critiques, albeit in a complicated fashion. As the pandemic recedes in New York, some of the siblings gradually seek new connections: Marian goes out to dinner and sees her date’s face for the first time, as his mask comes off to eat. Richard finds a girlfriend and begins his move to Rhinebeck, his physical closeness to his sisters now countered by his absorption in a new relationship. Things are less sanguine for Barbara, who clearly feels somewhat abandoned, and Jane, whose attempt to move beyond her own depression involves deciding to train as a phone counselor to help others. The brightest moment in the play is a short dance performance by one of Barbara’s former students (Charlotte Bydwell) on a fellowship in France, which the others view enraptured—an inset reminder of the importance of art, even when consumed via Zoom. Nelson’s digressive mode, in which topics are introduced via stories told by friends or secondhand encounters, now took on white reactions to the intensity of the anti-racism movement. Yet the political stakes rendered the distancing a kind of alibi for the characters’ or even the playwright’s discomfort: they repeatedly resort to “this happened to a friend of mine,” rather than exploring the complex issues via the characters themselves. What might have earlier seemed a slightly clunky mode of deepening the Apple family’s



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everyday conversations now felt like evasion. Even Brantley’s glowing review in the NYT was headlined “A Family Gropes for Words in ‘Incidental Moments.’ ” He observed, “A crippling self-consciousness informs every syllable they utter. The Apples—whom I’ve known and loved for a decade now—have never seemed more awkward, or more unsettlingly sad.”15 In the Guardian, Mark Lawson noted the trilogy’s potential as a “feast” for future historians, “for its reporting of extraordinary times,” and gave Nelson the benefit of the doubt: “With three characters who are sisters, Nelson explicitly calls in defense Chekhov (five of whose plays he has adapted), who wrote about a blithe elite surprised by history.”16 Theater blogger Jonathan Mandell, writing for DC Theatre Scene, was more critical, calling Incidents “the least engaging and the most problematic” of Nelson’s Zoom plays, for its “clear perspective of white grievance and hostility toward the antiracist protest movement of the last few months.”17 Although Mandell recognized the existence of such feelings in the world, and the fact that they might be worth dramatizing, he found them less “useful” (his italics) than other theatrical interventions as the pandemic wore on, compounded by tremendous social upheaval. If What Do We Need to Talk About? could unite its viewers in a comforting sense that “we are in this together,” as the early pandemic slogan had it, by Incidents that easy platitude had given way to more painful reflections on what divides us, yet desperately needs discussing.

Tragedy as Balm While Nelson’s trilogy swiftly depicted personal and familial responses to the pandemic, it was not the only work to register its urgency. Theater of War’s Oedipus Project offered an immediate response that focused on the communal, shared experience of the crisis in New York and gave voice to many of those on the front lines. As director Bryan Doerries notes, “Ours is really not a cultural mission. It’s really about public health and social discourse.”18 Given this conception of theater,

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the company’s rapid response is hardly unexpected. What surprised even its director was what he terms the “greatest gift” of Zoom.19 Founded in 2009 by Doerries and Phyllis Kaufman, the company began by offering readings at military bases, using Greek classics as catalysts for important “town-hall” conversations on everything from the psychological effects of combat to substance abuse to domestic violence. Doerries, who serves as the company’s artistic director and also translates the ancient Greek tragedies that constitute most of the readings, conceives of theater as a healing intervention beyond the usual confines of the cultural sphere.20 As the company has moved beyond its initial mode, it has gradually served larger audiences in a wider cross section of society, focusing on access for those not usually present in theaters and insisting on theater as a tool of public health rather than a cultural artifact.21 Having used tragic drama as a way to address many different forms of suffering, Doerries was primed to mobilize in the service of community, despite the challenges of the lockdown. As he observed in his 2016 book, “Ancient tragedies, in particular, hold the power to dissolve and transcend all the artificial walls that we humans work so hard to build around ourselves.”22 This preexisting conviction enabled the company to pivot quickly to address an enormous new societal challenge, as they responded to Covid-19 with a virtual version of their work. Their starstudded Zoom webinar readings of Oedipus the King (and other works in the months after) demonstrated how online theater could provide a communal response to the worst moments of the pandemic and to the isolation that aggravated them. Doerries had earlier observed how “audience members are, in a way, healed by the realization that they are not alone in their communities, not alone in the world.”23 The hope that the tragedies offer, beyond their inherent darkness, therefore lies in “the people who come together to bear witness to their truth.”24 The idea of theater as a tool for public health may seem less surprising than Doerries’s gamble that it would translate seamlessly to a virtual format. While there are certainly many televised events that presume community—think of sports matches, for example—theater



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has mostly imagined its own effectiveness in terms of a shared, in-person, in situ experience. As Doerries explained to me, “I had all kinds of preconceived notions of what was at the center of our work and what elements were required, and I was wrong.”25 Like so many theater practitioners, and perhaps more than most, Doerries avers, “I’m a big believer in the ephemerality of theater and the power of inviting everyone to be present in the now, in the unfolding moment. That’s an element without which I don’t think we could do the work that we do.”26 Hence his own surprise at how effective Zoom proved: So it turns out that while Zoom may not be a performance medium— it was certainly designed as a corporate communications tool, that’s clear—it is a miraculous technology from my perspective when imbued with spirit and humanity for bringing people together and achieving a kind of intimacy that I actually didn’t think was possible through technology, and now I stand corrected. … It felt like stumbling upon a new form that I just personally could never have conceived possible, because I was so hung up on the idea of being present and breathing, being together in space.27

Doerries’s gamble that the digital version of Oedipus would offer community and consolation as an audience bore witness over Zoom, in a space shared only in a virtual fashion, paid off magnificently, with over 15,000 people from forty countries joining the May 7, 2020, reading.28 As the director notes, this was more viewers for a single performance than the company had reached over a ten-week run of Antigone in Ferguson in Brooklyn.29 The international audience on Zoom also allowed for reflection on conditions shared beyond the United States, whether the Covid-19 pandemic or institutionalized racism. Even as it offered an international reach, the Zoom version also afforded opportunities for intimacy. As one might expect, “just the close-cropped framing on Zoom creates this intimacy in this relationship to the human face that we don’t have this year.”30 More surprisingly, audiences also appreciated inadvertent glimpses of

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domesticity, such as the panelist whose wife could be seen knitting on their bed in the background while he spoke. A moment that Doerries scarcely noted during the event was mentioned by countless viewers in their subsequent comments.31 Crucially, Theater of War reclaimed Sophocles’ classic text as a pandemic play: the plague decimating Thebes necessitates Oedipus’s quest to understand its cause.32 The mysterious pronouncements of the oracle are no longer Oedipus’s individual problem; they affect the entire city. The issue thus becomes one of leadership: how long will Oedipus ignore the problem? How will he react when he recognizes his own responsibility?33 From their various locations, Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, Frances McDormand as Jocasta, John Turturro as Creon, Frankie Faison as the shepherd, and the rest of a notable cast voiced a text that seemed almost unbearably relevant to the moment. Jocasta’s scathing response to Oedipus served as a more generalized indictment: “There are people suffering out there from this dreadful plague, dying from it. And this is what you choose to do with your time?”34 The reflection on leadership resonated across various national contexts. As Elif Batuman notes, she found herself longing for compassionate leadership as she viewed the play: “Something about the way Isaac voiced Oedipus’ response—‘Children. I am sorry. I know’—made me feel a kind of longing. It was a degree of compassion conspicuous by its absence in the current Administration. I never think of myself as someone who wants or needs ‘leadership,’ yet I found myself thinking, We would be better off with Oedipus.”35 As Doerries muses to Batuman, the play would take on its own meaning in the UK, where it was read on September 3: “ ‘The narrative of a leader who discovers that he’s the contagion will probably have a different resonance there,’ ” in the wake of Boris Johnson’s experience of Covid-19.36 As the Theater of War website notes, the conditions in which Sophocles’ play was originally staged also underscore its relevance: At the time the play was first performed, the audience would have been reeling in the wake of a pestilence and its economic, political, and social



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aftermath. Seen through this lens Oedipus the King appears to have been a powerful public health tool for helping Athenians communalize the trauma of the plague, through a story that is as relevant now as it was in its own time.37

In 2020, Covid-19 challenged Theater of War to go beyond its targeted audiences to respond to a universally shared condition: The big difference, obviously, with the pandemic is that it’s taken us one step beyond, which is to say now everyone has been impacted by something. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live, everyone has been impacted. Now, some people have borne the brunt of it, and we see the intersection of social and health justice writ large in front of us. We’ll continue, obviously, in our performances to foreground that, but everyone has something at stake. So the beauty of it is the gift of the technology of Zoom met with Athenian drama.38

Theater of War’s production explicitly appealed to community: while the webinar format in no way reflected the thousands of people in attendance, the performance was followed by a moving discussion with various New Yorkers on the front lines of the pandemic and attended by roughly half of the audience. Panelists included New York City lieutenant paramedic Anthony Almojera, the eloquent vice president of the Uniformed EMS Officers Union (Emergency Medical Services, Local 3621FDNY), who joined directly from his sixteen-hour shift responding to calls in New York City’s own plague. Almojera described how the play’s references to moaning and wailing invoked for him not just the final cries of the patients but the endless wails of ambulance sirens on city streets. He related for an audience isolated in lockdown the particular pain of entering other people’s homes and lives in such dire circumstances: “I am going into their homes and seeing … all the characters that make up their lives. You see a life full, and then you see them as life is leaving them.” Almojera discussed the tremendous toll of endless fruitless attempts to revive Covid-19 victims and of trying vainly to offer comfort while covered head to toe in PPE (personal protective

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equipment—another of the terms that became all too familiar in those dire weeks). Before the pandemic, he noted, bearing witness at the end of someone’s life was a kind of “blessing,” but the need to protect against the virus dehumanized the paramedics, rendering them into “an apparition” in a mask, all in white, “almost like a ghost.” Bereaved family members, whom paramedics would ordinarily comfort, had to be kept at a distance as potential patients, forgoing the empathy of shared touch. Even in its virtual format, Almojera’s account was indelible and made clear from afar just how much trauma the people of New York were processing. The wrenching discussions after the Oedipus reading provided a broader audience with a glimpse of Theater of War’s important work on the front lines of the pandemic. Their Frontline Medical Providers project, developed with the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Johns Hopkins Program in Arts, Humanities & Health, presents readings specifically geared to those audiences, yet open to the general public. As the Theater of War website notes, “The goal of these performances is to create free, easily-accessible opportunities for medical providers, who may be struggling in isolation with trauma, loss, illness, grief, and distress, to name and communalize their experiences, connect with colleagues, and access available resources.”39 The emphasis on the communal is striking here: faute de mieux, Theater of War assumes that a webinar experience of theater will transcend the isolation of those most actively fighting the pandemic and ease the psychic toll upon them. Theater is explicitly contrasted to medical debriefings, as “a healthy alternative” allowing medical providers “to step back from their professional roles, bear witness to their own experiences, and come together as a community—without having to narrate their trauma—by discussing and interpreting empowering online performances of ancient plays.”40 By making these performances available to the wider community, Doerries asks them to do more than simply—or facilely—salute frontline medical providers as heroes and instead invites them to sit with the stories the providers tell, one tragedy pried loose by another as the collective affords an unburdening.



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Blessed Zoom As the long spring weeks wore on, theater-makers turned to marqueeworthy names to make the case for the enduring importance of the form and to encourage viewers’ financial support during the closures. Some even moved their canceled yearly galas online, while the starstudded online celebration of Stephen Sondheim’s ninetieth birthday, Take Me to the World, itself a benefit, was widely admired.41 In Bill Irwin’s In-Zoom, a ten-minute piece produced by the Old Globe (San Diego, CA), the comedian paired with actor Christopher Fitzgerald to explore the abundant limitations, and eventual affordances, of the platform.42 The title inverts the idea of the camera’s ability to “zoom in,” as Irwin notes in a New York Times interview: That’s the wonderful thing when you work in television—the immensely gifted and technically savvy bunch of people around you going, “You hold still, and we’re going to do this, and the camera will do this.” Well, now it’s all up to us. If you want a close-up, you bend your waist and get your head close. If you want a medium shot, you have to sort of sit back in your chair. It’s like the old cliché: We’re making the airplane while it’s flying.43

In the world-upside-down of Zoom, the actor, alone at home, must supplement the technical know-how that Irwin fondly remembers. In-Zoom featured the slightest of plots: two unnamed characters have a Zoom call to record some inspirational passages. This becomes the excuse for exploring what it might mean to perform and—even more challenging—make physical comedy together in a digital mode. Although the self-consciousness of the piece anticipates the knowing, self-aware uses of Zoom that I discuss in Chapter 2, Irwin’s gee-whiz approach and deliberate naiveté emphasize the newness and intractability of the form over the actors’ capacity to transform it. Much of the comedy comes from the hapless actors’ discovery of those limitations, as they realize what is and is not possible on Zoom. Even the technical issues that bedevil digital theater become

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comic bits: when the actors freeze in their squares, we suspect a dropped connection, yet it turns out to be “gas pains.” To magnify the undeniable challenges of sound on Zoom, the two deliberately speak gibberish to each other. Landing a punch into the next square becomes a triumph of coordination, abundantly celebrated, at least until the absurdity of the moment sinks in. One particularly hard realization comes when the actors notice that eye contact, which actors take for granted, is not possible between Zoom boxes: “In the theatre we look at each other!” Yet this crucial lack leads to one of the most transformative moments in the piece, as they realize that it can instead be simulated by facing in the direction of the next square over: “What if we just pretend that we can see each other?” Fitzgerald’s character eventually asks (Figure 2). Irwin thus has the actors rediscover the essential place of artifice in even the most unforgivingly transparent of platforms. This feels significant: naturalism may be the first reaction to Zoom, perhaps born of the medium’s unfamiliarity, but theater need not stop there. The two characters play up their generational divide: Irwin’s character is more bawdy, joking about “foreplay” and the “whole thing,” while Fitzgerald’s voices a more contemporary reticence about the body: “I

Figure 2  Bill Irwin and Christopher Fitzgerald in In-Zoom, 2020. Courtesy of Bill Irwin.



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think you’re operating under old assumptions here. The body—that’s a minor point. We’re heads now—we talk in windows.” Irwin bawls his distress, as the question hangs in the air—what is theater, much less physical comedy, without a body? As I note in subsequent chapters, digital theater became far less reticent about presenting the body, and bending the rules of Zoom in order to do so. Yet in Irwin’s piece the thematization of the body and its vulnerabilities—largely absent on Zoom, yet the very reason theater has moved online—is no less powerful for being allusive. Direct references to the pandemic are rare, although a brief mention of “Zoom shiva” adds a particularly somber note. The piece builds toward a final benediction, as the two take turns reciting verses from the New Testament, largely stripped of their religious language yet resonant with meaning amid the suffering and isolation of the pandemic. Fitzgerald’s character goes first: “For I am sure, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from love” (Rom. 8:38-39). Irwin concludes with: “May love dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may find the strength to comprehend what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to find that love which surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17-19). By eliding most mentions of God, Irwin returns us to questions of human scale: what are the breadths—or breaths—that separate us, the heights and the depths that we must traverse? Yet the lay humanism is stretched to a breaking point in the face of enormous losses: “You didn’t mind that it mentioned the word ‘God’?” his character asks at the end, only to be reassured by his counterpart. By foregrounding comity, Irwin returns us to the human and to the importance of the connection between the two characters even as one of them appeals to the divine. Beyond the Beckettian delays and the slapstick impediments along the way, theater—and the connection it affords—proves to be the benediction.

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Bending the Rules: Experimenting with Zoom

No sooner was Zoom theater established, via the naturalistic and straightforward presentation I charted in Chapter 1, than artists began to experiment more audaciously with the new form and challenge its assumptions. This chapter moves to more self-conscious explorations of digital platforms and their limitations, by companies with a long history of formal experimentation as well as emerging artists willing to investigate the new affordances. While many of these works engage in a solipsistic mode of reflection on the pandemic and lockdown, reminiscent of that discussed in Chapter 1, they do so in a far more self-conscious fashion. In their use of Zoom, they slyly challenge the unspoken rules of the platform, so quickly and tacitly established in thousands of work meetings and family reunions, by playfully gumming up the works: offering body parts instead of faces to the camera, treating the Zoom squares as color fields, deliberately impeding viewer access, and so forth. At times, they become surprisingly moving and poetic, stretching the possibilities of a platform devised for corporate communications. These pieces thus launch a process of transcending formal constraints that I explore more fully in Chapters 3 and 4. In work produced during some of the most terrifying early months of the pandemic in Europe and the Americas, formal experimentation accompanies an almost Beckettian sense of the absurd, in dogged explorations of our imperfect resilience under lockdown.

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A Meeting to End All Meetings If Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About, instantly canonized as the birth of Zoom-native drama, inaugurated the form in a realist mode, Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All, I, II, and III provides the absurdist alternative. At the hands of a company noted for its aesthetic of “theatrical deconstruction, comical failure, narrative fragmentation, collage, and provocation,”1 in pieces devised by a core of performers working together since 1984, Zoom theater becomes something else entirely. Recorded in single live takes, the three twenty-five-minute segments of End Meeting for All bring together six actors improvising at a distance, from Sheffield, London, and Berlin.2 From its witty Zoom-specific title on, End Meeting, first broadcast in April and May 2020, depends on the audience’s previous rapid assimilation, over long weeks of lockdown, of the unwritten Rules of Zoom, which the piece then blithely proceeds to dismantle. (Although it seems hard in 2020 to imagine a time when Zoom will be unfamiliar, it is perhaps appropriate to explain here that to end participation in a digital Zoom call, the user must hit “End,” while for the host to end the entire exchange requires hitting the “End Meeting for All” button.) As director Tim Etchells, who has written extensively about performance, notes, “I realised we were slowly starting to understand the Zoom grid as a kind of stage—a space we shared but in which we were nonetheless both connected and disconnected.”3 Collage and collation have long been part of Forced Entertainment’s practice; End Meeting extends these practices to the digital sphere, exploring “different partially connected realities in different cities, the screen a kind of membrane or imperfect portal between worlds.”4 In examining those loosely connected realities, End Meeting reflects on new habits of viewership and communication, confronting audiences with how passively and quickly we have adapted to the dictates of digital platforms as we present ourselves on our endless Zoom galleries. Why



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do we face the camera—and remain at a manageable distance from it—in suitable lighting? Why not cover it up with our hands or use it to put on makeup? Why do we only present ourselves in our naked individuality (though decently clad, at least from the waist up) and not in funny wigs or masks? However sad we are, how much privilege is there in simply being able to remain inside, communicating virtually? At the same time, End Meeting explores the imperfect theatricality of Zoom by foregrounding its forced nature. As Nicholas Ridout has pointed out, Forced Entertainment has long relied on mise-en-scènes that suggest “a theatrical system in the form of a remnant,”5 in which performers, however reluctant, must put on a show: Everyone seems to be here, somehow against their will, but for some reason determined, nonetheless, to go through with it, to act out whatever needs to be acted out, to go through the motions thoroughly enough to make sure that the wheels and cogs of the machine at least rotate, even if the machine doesn’t produce anything, or anything which, by normal standards, might be considered enough, acceptable, appropriate or satisfying.6

Ridout’s 2006 description long predates the pandemic or Forced Entertainment’s response to it. Yet it’s almost as though the absurdity of the current context has caught up to the company’s long-term concerns, as we are all forced into new modes of communication, entertainment, and broader civic participation. In fits and starts, End Meeting stages the tentative creation of a theatrical work, occasionally set aside for other desultory projects that its characters haphazardly attempt. As a play-within-a-play, it chronicles the challenges of its own new form, mobilizing them to consider the larger difficulties of existing in a time of pandemic. The six performers, each occupying their individual Zoom window in an unchanging gallery view, are more or less engaged in the process. In the first installment, the erstwhile protagonist, Claire (Claire Marshall), in an outsize gray wig, announces, “The reason that I am wearing this

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wig is because I am pretending that I have been in quarantine for a really, really long time.” As director, Tim occasionally feeds Claire her lines. Their back-and-forth about the piece they are trying to make constitutes most of the action, such as it is; its impossibility makes the achieved Zoom drama a little like the Godot who never arrives. Meanwhile, the others process their sadness and alienation in various ways, from intense exchanges with their fellow actors to complete isolation. One tries to communicate via handwritten signs held up to the camera (“Can anyone see me?”) and eventually retreats into a pantomime skeleton costume, complete with mask. Others block the camera with various props and body parts, simultaneously avoiding our gaze and deliberately framing it. As they experiment with various colors and patterns across the windows, End Meeting suddenly becomes as much video art as theater (Figure 3). With Zoom increasingly penetrating our pandemic existence, the disappearance of the actors’ faces from their respective windows suggests both a plea for privacy and a sobering reminder of death. The real does not so much irrupt into

Figure 3  Screenshot of End Meeting for All, 2020. Courtesy of Forced Entertainment.



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the piece as silently frame it, in the unspoken condition of pandemic from which the six recede. End Meeting’s metatheatricality is arguably its most inventive and witty register: the piece is as concerned with what does not work as with what does, paradoxically making art on Zoom while charting the mode’s limitations. Beyond its Beckettian hopelessness, End Meeting foregrounds the “poetics of failure” that critic Sara Jane Bailes attributed to the company long before the current moment. In addition to the interrogation of performance itself, noted by Ridout, Bailes explains how, from its very name, the Sheffield-based company set out to challenge “the contrived nature of contractual exchange between performer and spectator.” Bailes reminds us that theater has always been haunted by “a condition of compromise, a requisite yielding that lets go of the external world and its conditions.”7 Yet the contrived rules and the discomfort they induce move front and center during a time of pandemic. The metatheatricality is enhanced by Zoom, as the fourth wall is multiplied several times over. In their windows, each performer becomes a separate audience for the others, with varying degrees of engagement. In addition to thematizing the technological failures of communication across the “membrane” that is the screen, the imperfect iteration of the grid reminds us that some participants are just not interested or frankly unable to engage with the shared project. The others are not simply Claire’s audience; they instead engage in their own lonely routines, as the piece insists on the performativity of emotion. Cathy (Cathy Naden) announces she feels sad, then sprinkles water below her eyes “to show you how sad I am.” After deadpanning that “acting needs to come from inside,” Claire suggests an onion instead, which Cathy promptly rubs over her eyes in the (vain) hope of a more convincing representation. Misheard words chart the easy segue in isolation from melancholic to alcoholic, as malapropisms adapt to the age of Zoom and its technical distortions. Both minimalist and poetic, End Meeting reflects constantly on our isolation and how readily we have adapted in order to keep making

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things. While Claire doggedly pursues her meditation on illness, quarantine, and aging, the others process their sadness in various ways. In the second installment, Cathy appears in her Zoom window under a duvet because she has heard that this makes for a good voice recording. This leads to an exploration of what confidences might look like over Zoom: Tim asks Cathy to answer as though “nobody else is listening,” while the others strain to hear, their ears up against the camera. Meanwhile, Richard (Richard Lowdon) quixotically attempts to fix a lawnmower from his basement and to learn Spanish online, invoking the larger horizons denied to us in lockdown. For her part, Terry (Terry O’Connor) hides behind a mask and insists she is not there. Given the strangeness of the circumstances, the lines between reality and performance break down. “Are you acting?” Cathy asks Claire, “or are you just having a really weird day?” The constant emphasis on everything going wrong foregrounds the “predicaments” of unpredictability and uncertainty that, as Ridout has argued, lie at the very heart of theatrical experience.8 “Is it live?” the actors ask, zeroing in on one paradoxical dimension of their production. The aural pun— is it life?—gives the question a particular poignancy. By the end of Part III, when Tim reflects, “I thought it’d be more uplifting … I thought it’d be longer, or shorter. I thought it’d say more. It’s just not quite what I thought it was going to be,” End Meeting voices a rich reflection on both the pandemic itself and the necessarily imperfect responses to it, whether artistic or quotidian. As the United States erupted into protests over racism and police brutality after the killing of George Floyd in late May, the claustrophobia of End Meeting’s Zoom world became ever more apparent. Much as in Beckett’s Endgame, the characters’ remove from the world around them, the stripping of context, becomes their defining characteristic. Yet the piece’s sustained metatheatricality, as each character toggles between audience and performer, isolation and connection, encourages us to interrogate the unwritten rules that define self-expression, artistic production, and access to culture alike.



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Theatre of Seclusion Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou’s Traces of Antigone, based on a text by Swedish playwright Christina Ouzounidis, offers another example of how cutting-edge theater artists quickly moved to explore the possibilities of Zoom in response to the limitations of lockdown.9 Papakonstantinou’s “rules and restrictions” for the project clarify the process of developing this “theatre of seclusion”: 1. We rehearse, develop, and execute the whole piece in quarantine with the help of digital platforms. 2. We are allowed to make use only of the props, musical instruments, set environment, costumes, and technical means that were made available to us when quarantined; no add-ons later on! Our home is the set. 3. Public space and home space merge into one. The tagged names on our windows name us and reconfigure anonymity and objectification, always already “singular-plural,” in the elsewhere and otherwise. 4. We work in seclusion from our homes like women before us. Are we trapped, safe, or emancipated? It is up to our viewers to tell, as we grant them permission to invade our most intimate world. Zoom in to details, zoom out to the galaxies. 5. We all use the same basic technology to weave in synchronicity this new age audiovisual embroidering. 6. We invite viewers to interact with the performance, thus propelled to the public agora.10 As Papakonstantinou astutely observes, the pandemic offered an unusual condition, in that the seclusion that women traditionally experienced in the oikos now extended to all. In this context, Traces offered an opportunity to reflect on what the costs of that seclusion have traditionally been for women: “We make art in seclusion, just like women before us. Only this time we go public.”11 The piece also

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harnessed the new medium of Zoom to simultaneously exhibit and contest the complex rules governing access to women’s bodies: “framed in digital boxes, we remain transparent for the whole world to peep on us, yet, safe in the refuge of our innermost private space (unlike other women—victims of domestic violence).”12 Beyond using Zoom to reflect on seclusion, Papakonstantinou treats the platform as a new kind of space and reflects on what it means for our existence to be displaced to a virtual locus.13 In her “overpainting”14 of the ancient myth, the various Zoom windows become partial openings, withholding as much as they reveal. Despite the “flat, obvious, transparent”15 nature of the platform, the six women in the company rarely occupy their boxes in a straightforward fashion. Instead, they disappear behind scrims, wear masks, or offer only part of their body (Figure 4). They often hide behind photos displayed on cellphones; one covers half her face with an image of Frida Kahlo’s iconic brows. At times, entire windows are given over to color; at other points, a small corner reveals that something lies behind. Small vaginal openings in a field of color frame the actors’ mouths, inviting a constant reflection on

Figure 4  Screenshot of Traces of Antigone, 2020. Photo by Mariza Kapsabeli, courtesy of Elli Papakonstantinou.



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the constraints surrounding female speech as well as the objectification of female bodies. Language is similarly offered and withheld—the piece includes Greek, Swedish, and English, with smatterings of other languages, but there is no systematic translation of every moment, so that the audience must constantly piece together a multiplicity of languages and images. Traces reflects constantly on gender construction and fluidity, portraying several actors in the process of transforming or supplementing their physical selves: beards and moustaches drawn on the face, fruits displayed as testicles and then consumed, cloth stuffed inside a crotch, and so forth. The piece insists on embodiment, foregrounding the body in parts while also underscoring sensory perception and introducing elements from the longed-for natural world outside (leaves, branches). The tactility of bodies and materials is constantly invoked, even at a digital remove. As Papakonstantinou notes, The work aims to stitch together the physical with the digital, the material with the immaterial and to mix the two audiences (the digital and the physical one) in the ether of a meta-space. This is a weird animal of the internet, where women from their homes or (in a replica of their home on stage) weave together languages, images and sounds.16

Music is pervasive, with both recorded music and live performances on vocals, keyboard, and bass by two of the actors (Nalyssa Green and Katerina Papachristou). Traces also hones in on the iterative cultural reflex of voyeurism, returning often to the refrain “Show me your faces,” yet simultaneously obscuring those faces in a paradoxical display of concealment, almost as though exploring the many ways they might be withheld. At times, the actors play with the Zoom green screens, partially dissolving into the background. When one abruptly asks, “Can you show me the girls?” we expect a display of objectified bodies but are instead presented with a demure child on a carousel in a family photo. As Papakonstantinou explains, the frequent use of photographs in the piece reflects the

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company’s work before the performance to conjure absent women, especially those who had been influential in their own lives, and include them in the story being told.17 If voyeurism is the troubling double to viewership in any performance, it is perhaps all the more so on Zoom, which is so unsparing in affording not only a frontal view of the performers but also access to domestic spaces ordinarily unavailable to the public eye. What some viewers might experience as charmingly intimate— as with the knitting wife in the background during the Oedipus panel described in Chapter 1—may be unbearably intrusive for those viewed. As Papakonstantinou observes, We invite viewers to interact with the performance; in fact, we push them to the public agora, to an experience of going beyond digital and physical dimensions in a genderless space of technology where the public and the private merge into one. And of course, they peep on us. Are we trapped, safe or emancipated? It is up to our viewers to tell, as we grant them permission to invade our most intimate world. Zoom in to details, zoom out to our galaxies. The tagged names on our windows name us and reconfigure anonymity and objectification as our viewers turn into voyeurs.18

Yet by asking viewers to turn on their own video, the actors reverse the dynamic: But we also get to peep on them! This came as a great surprise when we opened the show. The fact that when they turned on their cameras, we saw our audience in their own seclusion. Their private space was exposed as well.19

Beyond breaking a virtual fourth wall, the actors’ moment of peering into the private spaces of the audience and even commenting on what they see there temporarily alters the power dynamic of the gaze. The copresence of performers and spectators on the Zoom screen is fundamentally different than simply addressing the audience in a theater, or even bringing an embarrassed volunteer up to the stage.



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At the same time, in the context of the pandemic, this moment of reversed “peeping” also constitutes a new shared public space—hence Papakonstantinou’s focus on the agora.20 Contradictions such as those exposed by this reversal of the gaze are central to Traces, which presents women as “Transparent yet mysterious; Empowered yet objectified; Private yet public; Present yet absent; Connected yet isolated; Certain yet uncertain.”21 Yet, even in the midst of an equalizing pandemic, the piece reflects on the particular burdens that women must bear, from Antigone on. Ouzounidis’s modern-day Antigone is “just a girl,” a schoolgirl of thirteen. Yet her affective and physical world is already marked by the traces of gendered and domestic violence—the disappearance of women, as well as the objectification that the piece constantly and paradoxically foregrounds. Papakonstantinou’s piece ably works with and against Zoom, using a “banal, low-tech” mode to create an experience at once “hand-made”— with whatever the performers had within their reach at home—and transcendental. If the pandemic caused a fundamental displacement, disconnecting us “from nature, from the body, from physicality,”22 Traces offers an almost ritualistic record and response, reinscribing female bodies and their stories in a most unexpected medium. A pioneer in exploring the possibilities of Zoom theater, Papakonstantinou was also able to move quickly between different versions of the same piece, with an in-person performance of Traces at the Romaeuropa festival in Italy on October 13 and 14, 2020, during a relative respite from the pandemic. In promoting the piece, the director now wisely offers multiple formats—digital, “physical,” and “gallery/museum”—so that presenters can be assured of a performance, whatever the public health conditions.23

Uncertainty, Fear, Brief Moments of Joy One distinct genre of Zoom theater—if a form so new could be said to have genres—was the generational response to the pandemic by

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millennial actors, students, and others whose lives had been turned upside down. These artists were quick to adopt virtual platforms and push at their limits, in an effort to address Covid-19’s impact on their work. While the disappearance of in-person school, sociability, and employment hit hard across the globe, in the United States the anguish of the pandemic was exacerbated by police brutality against people of color and the resulting protests over the summer and fall. Some productions took this double-whammy on directly, while others tried to find a way to address the pandemic without seeming to disregard the importance of the anti-racist reckoning. Like End Meeting for All, Source Material Collective’s In These Uncertain Times plays with an aesthetic of failure but leavens it with poetic moments of unguarded emotion.24 Originally planned for late May, the piece was postponed for a few weeks due to the protests. As writer and director Samantha Shay explained in a statement circulated online, although the piece spoke to “the uncertainty of now,” it was not directly related to Black Lives Matter, and to pretend otherwise would have been “a gentrification of an important movement.” Given a cast of both white and BIPOC artists, moreover, Shay was acutely conscious that making art at that moment did not “make the same ask of everyone.”25 Importantly, the cancellation was offered as an opportunity and a challenge for the audience, whom Shay urged to help dismantle white supremacy and to support Black artists. Postponed by just two months, In These Uncertain Times had the strange quality of an artifact slightly out of time, born of an earlier and direr moment. At least in California, from where I watched it, July seemed to offer some respite from the virus, although the next few weeks would bring home the consequences of a hasty reopening. Watching it again as I write these pages, however, I am struck by how much more urgent the pain of the piece seems, given that we are ever further from a return to normality across the United States. Shay’s piece is atmospheric and conceptual, exploring the emotional states of her characters and the longue durée of theater-making from the purview of the pandemic. Largely filmed on Zoom, In These



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Uncertain Times stretches the capabilities of the platform to make room for not just the company’s six actors but a plethora of other art forms. Shay explores various Zoom modes and the effects they create, treating the “share screen” function as a canvas and layering it with texts and surfaces. These include a range of still images, often superimposed with insets of a cellphone or of the Zoom chat. On the phone’s screen, a progression of Instagram posts highlight comical reactions to the pandemic, and both the challenges and consolations of art—dance, choral music, Eugenio Ampudia’s Concierto para el Bioceno in Barcelona, with a quartet playing to plants in the empty Liceu, but also the WSYWAT manifesto. By archiving, recording, and editing these clips on her phone, then sharing them on the screen, Shay offers a varied texture of intermediality within Zoom itself. In These Uncertain Times launches with a shared screen, featuring an inset text of critic Todd London’s account of theater, now rendered ironic by the pandemic: “The theater is the antithesis of the virtual, and it’s the antidote. The theater demands our physical presence and our communal proximity. It forces us to breathe the same air, face the same action, process the same emotional information in a public space at the same time.”26 The first of three Instagram clips then rolls, inset in the same shared screen. When we first encounter the cast, they are ensconced in their Zoom boxes, desultorily comparing notes. They all appear somewhat fragile as they express their longing and dislocation: “Am I Stephanie? Am I just one part of Stephanie? Am I the part of Stephanie who felt she was nothing without theater as she knew it? Was theater up until now just one big fucking lie?” One coughs unstoppably, while the others prick up their ears. They are apparently gearing up for a performance, though by the time one of them is urged to give the curtain speech, the cast seems most uncertain. “This performance may incorporate loud noises,” the hapless announcer intones, as Annelise (Annelise Lawson) screams in the background. As he carries on with his no-longer-routine announcements, the question hangs in the air: what exactly are we all to do “in the event of an emergency”? “There’s no way out!” Annelise

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shouts—directives are no longer a simple matter of pointing audiences to the nearest exit. The actors then shift into various modes that qualify the straightforwardness of Zoom, recalling both End Meeting and Traces of Antigone. Performance becomes the occasion for examining the impossibility of performing. There is wild partying, in separate boxes; Stephanie (Stephanie Regina) films herself fully clothed in the shower, Annelise on a trampoline in the garage. The announcer falls and then shows us his prodigious nosebleed. Conversations are futilely attempted over loud background music. One section explores, in ever more extreme terms, the invisibility of women in theater history: “I went to couple’s therapy by myself, but you didn’t notice … I died in your house with unfinished business so I could haunt you forever, but you didn’t notice.” By placing her female actors over images of Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Stanislavsky, Shay reflects on women’s limited say in a history of Western theater dominated by men, however remarkable the female characters those men have written. Their “unrequited proclamations of love to the masters of the Western canon,”27 as Shay put it to me, thus have a bitter edge. These intense interludes give way to more meditative moments. Annelise and James (James Cowan) appear in gallery view on the side, while the shared screen shows video of trees in full flower, swaying in the breeze. The intense conversation between the two friends appears entirely in written form, scrolling on the chat, which is superimposed over the spring blooms (Figure 5). Annelise sounds almost suicidal, and James attempts to calm her down. They reflect on what love might look like in this new world, in an intimate exchange paradoxically shared with “All panelists” and punctuated by Zoom’s prefixes: From James Cowan to All panelists: do you think love will be able to exist in the new world? From Annelise Lawson to All panelists: I think it’s going to have to



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Figure 5  Annelise Lawson and James Cowan in In These Uncertain Times, 2020. Courtesy of Samantha Shay. From James Cowan to All panelists: how? … From Annelise Lawson to All panelists: It’ll be more exposed. From Annelise Lawson to All panelists: You’ll talk to a person for a long time. Until you realize they’re worth taking off your mask for. So then you will. And you hope they will too. The first step into the six feet is gonna be freaky and then when it ends, you’ll sit all alone for two weeks.

They end on a wistful note, but not before demonstrating just how affecting dialogue can be even when exchanged via Zoom chat, in stark contrast with the corporate platform that frames it. Shay’s playfulness is again at work here: although the exchange feels heartfelt and unmediated, the constant reminders from Zoom about who is speaking produce an almost Brechtian distancing. The piece also reprises Irina’s drawn-out crisis in Acts 3 and 4 of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, suggesting

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how, even when a situation appears spontaneous, female despair often proceeds along prescripted lines. Nature gradually takes up more and more space on the screen, from the spring trees in the background to an entire scene filmed outside, by the ocean, offering an imperfect consolation for the loss of sociability. The piece ends with a borrowed image of an actual curtain call, from an earlier time, on the shared screen. The cast then dance their goodbyes in gallery view, in what feels like slightly forced gaiety. Young actors across the globe shared much of the angst portrayed in Shay’s piece. In Spain, the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico— the National Classical Theater Company (CNTC)—actively sought to engage both actors and audiences during the pandemic, after Spanish theaters shut down on March 14, 2020.28 The move to new and experimental formats provided the opportunity to promote younger generations of practitioners, including the Joven Compañía (JCNTC), the training wing of the company. One of the most striking projects produced was En otro reino extraño (In Another Strange Land), a meditation on love based on texts by Lope de Vega, with dramaturgy and additional texts by Luis Sorolla.29 Director David Boceta reimagines the classical notion of the Arcadia for a piece that reflects on love under the straitened conditions of lockdown: un grupo de jóvenes (que podrían ser los actores y actrices de la JCNTC) hablan sobre qué es para ellos el amor (con palabras de Lope de Vega que también podrían ser las suyas) en una especie de Arcadia aislada de la ciudad, (que podría ser su propia casa durante este confinamiento). [a group of young people (who could be the actors and actresses of the JCNTC) speak of what love means to them (in the words of Lope de Vega, which could also be their own) in a kind of Arcadia isolated from the city (which could be their own home during this lockdown).]30

As Esther Fernández observes, the Arcadia becomes a powerful metaphor for rethinking confinement:



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With Boceta’s digital recreation of the arcadia [sic], the actors took the audience on a self-reflective journey that led us to question and deconstruct traditional narratives of love, gender, and sexuality propagated by early modern theatre; in so doing, the audience sought refuge from reality not in idyllic repose but through confronting reality head-on.31

Although, unlike in Shay’s piece, there is no actual nature here to offer respite, reclusion offers an opportunity for reflection, distanced from normal routines. Boceta and Sorolla thus turn the lockdown to their advantage, using it to enable certain kinds of exchanges even as it precludes others. Dramaturg and director were determined to make of this piece an opportunity to place the Compañía Joven front and center, while opening up the Hispanic classical tradition with respect to gender mores.32 Highlighting lesser known aspects of Lope’s oeuvre, they hoped, would help engage both the company and the audience and pave the way for more audacious work to come. In a “digital montage”33 of brief scenes from Lope, Zoom conversations with the company, and snippets of their daily lives in lockdown, Reino offers a behind-the-scenes look at how actors experience the heteronormative resolutions of so many classical plays, in contradistinction to their own more variegated experience of intimacy. In this interstitial moment, the actors, who by this point had been training and working together for two years, move quickly to conversations of remarkable depth and clarity. If the lockdown provides the opportunity for slowing down and taking stock, the Zoom format on which the actors report their discoveries offers a sense of emotional openness and transparency, with the flat, frontal quality of the boxes in this case presenting nakedly direct responses. As Sorolla explained, many of these conversations were recorded at the start of the rehearsal process, as the actors reflected on their own experience in relation to the materials they are usually assigned.34 By interspersing these reflective, loaded conversations with traditionally heterosexual love scenes, lesser known scenes of

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homosocial/homosexual attachment, and feminist protestation, Reino presents a past full of possibility, waiting in the wings. Scenes of love between men, in La boda entre dos maridos (The Marriage of Two Husbands, 1601) or between women, in La prueba de los ingenios (A Test of Wits, c. 1612–13), may be better known to scholars than to audiences, who tend to overestimate the conservatism of the classics.35 In Reino, these scenes complement the traditional heterosexual pairing of Castelvines y Monteses, Lope’s Romeo and Juliet. Meanwhile, a monologue from Lope’s La defensa de las mujeres (The Avenger of Women, c. 1615–20), powerfully delivered by Inés Serrano, demonstrates just how long sexism has been contested. As Fernández suggests, the “strange land” of the piece’s title may well be classical theater itself, a realm yet to be explored in its full complexity.36 The visual interest of the piece owes much to the creativity of videographer Álvaro Luna, working under the constraints of lockdown. The love scenes between two actors, to take perhaps the most challenging example, were filmed individually by the performers and then assembled into a composite. As Luna explained, the goal was to preserve the commitment to liveness even for this prerecorded material, so as to make it as theatrical as possible: “We didn’t want to toggle between camera views—they both had to appear in the same shot, in one take. We wanted it to be like on stage, when you see all the actors at once.”37 It was agreed that, after rehearsing on Zoom, the actors would each capture a single take, filming themselves on their phone. They used a second phone to communicate with their partner, filming in a separate location. Each actor followed detailed instructions for how to position their camera and identify a neutral background. They then sent the resulting video to Luna, who designed the scenes while also in lockdown. After a brief editing process to synchronize the sound, Luna projected the combined videos onto a background that added dramatic interest and then recorded that projection. Gamely climbing on ladders and positioning cameras on the top of wardrobes, Luna improvised in the absence of all the usual equipment at his disposal. His goal, as he



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explained, was to “create a real physical space with virtual characters.”38 His apartment courtyard became the background for the balcony scene from Castelvines y Monteses, to which he added an abstracted image of a ladder for Roselo. For the scene between Febo and Lauro, from La boda entre dos maridos, Luna used as background a book of erotic drawings by Jean Cocteau, turning the pages to preselected images as the scene progressed—the abstracted space of the drawings on the page, he noted, was designed to highlight the erotic tension of the scene. His own bed became the background for the scene between Laura and Diana, from La prueba de los ingenios, the most realistic of the three. Although the touch between the actresses might be virtual, Luna explained, “it is real because the emotion is there.”39 The slight awkwardness or strangeness of these compelling scenes worked surprisingly well at a thematic level, as a reminder of how we have tended to smooth out the rough edges of the past, in favor of a much less challenging sense of its mores. Despite the technical complications, Luna stressed, the goal was to preserve the emotion of a scene being done live between two people, in what he described as “a mise-en-scène that was real, within the video creation.”40 En otro reino extraño was one of the rare pandemic-born pieces to transfer to an actual stage, with an adapted version opening at the Festival de Teatro Clásico de Almagro on July 14, 2020. As Sorolla notes, the piece could not be the same in that incarnation—it was no longer about a lockdown that had kept people apart but about the complexity of coming back together, of figuring out how the lockdown had transformed us.41 Nonetheless, Boceta chose to preserve and foreground the intimacy and nakedness of the piece in the new format, forgoing any elaborate sets or costumes and instead establishing connections with the audience by having the actors engage them directly while sitting on the stage, dressed in street clothes.42 The set design, which included projections of the Zoom conversations, took its cues from the digital version. The piece was well received; the handful of viewers protesting that “these were not the classics” only served to confirm its achievement.43 The remounting and its positive reception overall, including a brief nod in El País,44 suggest that the defamiliarization of

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the Spanish classical canon on Zoom, reenvisioning its possibilities in a time of lockdown, may have consequences that last well beyond the reopening of the theaters. In August, Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) transformed its annual showcase of student work into a digital theater festival, featuring six pieces created for “the online space.”45 One of the most interesting was Lockdown: Love and Death in the Age of COVID, directed by Nigel Jamieson and devised and rehearsed online with the cast and company.46 The piece was “largely filmed and captured using the Zoom recording function on the actors’ phones and personal devices,”47 mostly in their homes (the program thanks all the patient housemates and roommates). Set in March, Lockdown focuses on the impact of the pandemic on young people, following five acting students as they process the lockdown. Though largely realistic, it features occasional surreal exchanges about the dark web, surveillance, and other less savory aspects of an existence rendered almost entirely virtual. The actors’ deep frustration at the interruption of the in-person training they had worked so hard to secure recalls the broader losses the lockdown wreaked on the world of theater. Perhaps most searing is Lockdown’s exploration of the anti-Asian racism that the pandemic unleashed in Australia, via its effect on Steven (Alan Zhu), the only student of color in the group. Visually, the piece is enlivened by the use of art created by one of the company members, Micaela Ellis, who plays the artist Mila. As the losses suffered become more acute, and the exchanges more intense, Mila’s art takes on an ever greater role onscreen, her angry self-portraits expressing despair and alienation. In addition to the many Zoom exchanges, the piece includes some film of the students alone, at the moments of greatest tension or despair. As the piece winds to its conclusion, they find relief for their immense loneliness, with one pair taking solace in each other and various characters reaching out to care for their mates, even traveling across state borders then closed. More spectacularly, the culmination of the piece has the students literally break through the walls in the various spaces they inhabit to



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come together in a hospital room, in what may be a Covid-19 dream or, more optimistically, the final release from their shared nightmare. The effect is inordinately powerful: so accustomed have we become to the separation required by the lockdown, and its reflection on Zoom, that the very irruption of the actors into a shared space feels transcendent. As the program notes, the first time the actors came together during the production was on the last day, when they rehearsed and filmed this transformative scene on an actual stage and triumphantly took their bows before an empty house, presumably during the relative respite in Covid-19 cases in New South Wales in June. The last two shots offer a bifurcated dedication, “to our beautiful empty theatres … and CHANGE.” The contrast with US-based productions is striking— however briefly, Australians enjoy a moment of optimism unavailable to Americans. Yet another instance of the generational response to the pandemic is Company of Angels’ (Los Angeles) The Art of Facing Fear.48 Although the piece offered little in the way of formal innovation, it demonstrates the globalization of theater during the pandemic, reflecting both a shared condition and virtual collaboration across disparate geographies. Written by Ivam Cabral and Rodolfo García Vázquez, the piece was first developed for Zoom in Saõ Paulo, Brazil, by Os Satyros and subsequently adapted for a production in Europe featuring actors of African descent as well as for the US version.49 Less solipsistic than In These Uncertain Times or Lockdown, The Art of Facing Fear is actually not as concerned with the arts as it is with the general social and political upheavals caused by the pandemic. It charts the despair of a group of young people as they simultaneously experience a lockdown that has extended to 5,555 days (as Claire of End Meeting for All might put it, a really long time) and the concomitant racism of their society. The US performance, presented live on Zoom, featured a largely BIPOC cast from across the country, with actors participating from Alaska, California, Georgia, and everywhere in between. After a lengthy welcome process, the audience was asked to write in the Zoom chat what made them afraid and what losses they had experienced due

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to Covid-19. The actors then incorporated these reflections into their performance, often speaking over each other to convey the enormity of the loss. As a transnational production, The Art of Facing Fear emphasizes the global nature of the pandemic: its various locations share an experience of contagion, racism, and protest, under the watch of inept and often violent regimes that repress those who represent any form of difference from a white, heterosexual, and cisgender norm. If the African diaspora and its attendant scenes of racism link these experiences, so too do the similarities between Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Trump’s United States, remarkably alike in their denialism and obdurate refusal to address the pandemic. As these various examples demonstrate, no sooner was Zoom theater launched that artists began playfully testing its limits and exploring its possibilities. While the next few chapters chart some of the more fruitful directions in which these experiments evolved, it is important to stress how quickly artists found creative solutions to the lockdown and closures of theaters around the globe, even during the darkest moments of the first wave of Covid-19. Working from home and in isolation, with whatever props or backgrounds were at hand, directors, actors, and designers nonetheless managed to signal that they were still in the communal business of creating, however challenging the circumstances.

3

Thinking outside the Box: Multiplatform

Theater has a chance to eclipse film, not by putting The Cherry Orchard on Zoom, but by producing work that understands how to play with people, that understands that the audience wants to dance. Sean Stewart1 This chapter traces how theater expanded across digital platforms and games (Zoom, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitch, The Sims 4, etc.) during the pandemic, including in versions that dispensed with Zoom altogether. While some productions, such as Los Angeles’ Independent Shakespeare Company’s Romeo and Juliet,2 introduced social media primarily to engage younger audiences, others were more deliberate in their attempts to explore their audiences’ digital prowess. By using multiple platforms, immersive theater in a digital mode goes far beyond recreating a feeling of liveness and community: it breaks new ground in audience involvement and gestures toward possible futures for theater.3 With its new avenues for audience engagement, the pandemic has effectively accelerated the development of participatory modes. Theater thereby more closely approximates, and better reflects, a culture that is moving toward ever more interactive forms, from fan fiction to fantasy sports to the constant online commentary that attends and completes any event. While the internet itself is inherently multimedial, “involving its users as readers, writers, and spectators of text, images, movies, and sound files,”4 the pieces I analyze here often include multiple devices or programs at once. An audience member might watch a Zoom performance on a computer screen while receiving WhatsApp

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messages on a phone, call in to a performance occurring live on Twitch, or follow a live Instagram video during a quiet interlude in a Zoom breakout room. The multiplication of platforms brings up important questions: What kind of intimacy and participation does this work afford, and for whom? How does devising—that most collaborative form of creation—operate across platforms, or when practitioners must be physically distanced? How does immersion or site-specificity function when multiple platforms are involved? What does it even mean to be immersed when an audience is virtual? Perhaps most crucially, how does audience engagement and agency in the performance transform a digital theatrical experience? While some of the forms and modes of storytelling described here—and the questions they raise—may be familiar to gamers, the pandemic has increased their importance for theater-makers, bringing different forms of creative work into shared conversation. One of the advantages of theater’s forced migration into the digital space during the pandemic may well be this rapprochement. At the same time, the forays into multiplatform work return us to key questions about how central a strong text or story is to a performance. A constant among the works discussed here, however experimental their form, is the purchase of their core—and in some cases canonical—texts, however playfully treated, altered, or decentered.

Distanced Devotion The devising Spanish company Grumelot, founded in 2005 by Carlota Gaviño, Javier Lara, and Iñigo Rodríguez-Claro, has been at the cutting edge of theatrical performance during the pandemic. In June, their Delicuescente Eva explored simultaneous streaming and filmed performance: live actors performed before a few physically distanced spectators at Madrid’s Teatro de la Abadía as the show was simultaneously filmed by multiple cameras and streamed online for a much broader audience. With Game Over, a devised piece based on love

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letters between Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, Grumelot expanded the limits of digital theater beyond the merely remedial. A profound exploration of storytelling across platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Spotify, Game Over suggests what theater might look like in a multimodal future.5 Game Over combines Zoom with a number of other platforms to explore the constraints of geographic distance in a context of illness. The piece astutely tracks how digital proximity has replaced physical closeness and also marks the limits of that substitution. Its metadramatic reflection extends to the creation of character across multiple platforms, taking its cue from Knipper’s work with Stanislavski and her role as muse to Chekhov. Via breakout rooms, phone conversations, and WhatsApp texts, Game Over guides the viewer in constructing a character for herself, not only breaking the fourth wall but also creating an intimate form of immersion. Based on the correspondence between Chekhov and Knipper, whom he married a few years before his death in 1904, Game Over explores the possibilities of human connection across impossible distances, when one party is facing life-threatening illness—an eerily relevant topic as the Covid-19 pandemic closed down most travel across the world. Knipper lived in Moscow, where she was one of the original company members of Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre and played many of Chekhov’s key female roles, including Masha in the first production of Three Sisters. Meanwhile, Chekhov, suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him, lived in Yalta (Crimea) for its warmer climate. If the 1,147 miles that separated the two would still prove daunting today, in the era of WhatsApp and Zoom, at the turn of the twentieth century they were enormously challenging, especially for Knipper. Her letters are full of playful longing and entreaties for Chekhov to come to her—a grueling journey that would take weeks, if not months.6 Though distance proved endlessly frustrating, it also produced the impassioned letters at the heart of this piece. Knipper continued to write even after she learned of Chekhov’s death, as though she could not bear to say goodbye to the heightened channel of communication between them.

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To devise Game Over, Grumelot held a workshop for young actors, selecting fourteen for a five-week online exploration in June and early July of 2020. As Gaviño notes, “We were interested in how technology, which is so quotidian for us and already part of our lives, could help us create a virtual multi-platform experience.”7 Grumelot’s work often involves superimposed theatrical modes, with the spectators taking an active role by choosing where to focus their attention. For Game Over, Gaviño explains, they wanted to see “how many platforms could be used at once to establish the most intimate of connections with the spectator,”8 for an accumulative effect. The resulting piece is devised theater reimagined for multiple platforms and also a new kind of immersive theater under lockdown, which an audience of sixty to seventy viewers from across the world experienced live on July 4, 2020, while a handful more watched on screens at La Abadía (Figure 6).9 Both formally and thematically, Game Over explored multiple simultaneous connections across time and space, for audience and performers alike. Even as it presented performers in different locations and time zones, it interrogated what their and the various audiences’

Figure 6  Screenshot of Game Over, 2020. Courtesy of Carlota Gaviño, Grumelot.

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presence signified. As Lavender notes for what he calls “telematic theatre,” prepandemic: The event is accessed diversely by spectators in the same room as a specific set of performers; the same spectators watching the virtual space in which other performers (and spectators) appear; and those watching solely online. This ecology of performance entails a sustained flux of presence and perception, object and subject relations and positions, and a pluralism of media. The latter, a kind of medial volatility, becomes dynamic through a meld of aesthetic, technical, and referential systems that are experienced in the moment to be mutually in play. If this makes Internet theatre dramaturgically challenging, it nonetheless means that it is overtly and experientially dimensional. It operates through discrete layerings of time (due to the mapping of time zones, the effects of latency, and in some instances the interface between live and pre-recorded materials) and space.10

Game Over, which was primarily in Spanish, with some fragments of the letters between Anton and Olga read in French, announced itself with instructions on my WhatsApp: I should log into the Zoom at the appointed meeting time and also monitor my phone for information. Links to a webpage, Instagram, YouTube channel, and Spotify made it clear that no one platform would contain the entire story. (At this point, I called in reinforcements, in the form of my theatrical teenager and his gadgets, to keep track of everything that was going on. Only mild eye rolling ensued.) The ironically named programa de mano that I first received on WhatsApp hinted at the complex playfulness of Game Over. It took the form of a screen recording, capturing the toggling of an anxious lover on a phone—from WhatsApp to photos to The Sims. Simply viewing the program thus located me deep in a text exchange, in which I was also vicariously perusing short voice messages full of longing, scrolling through lonely photos on the beach, and checking a lover’s location on a map. While the program was prerecorded, it reproduced the immediacy of typing and correcting oneself, changing one’s mind about

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how best to engage an absent lover, and so forth. Perhaps because so many of us treat the phone as an extension of our psyches, the sense of intimacy and immediacy was striking. Yet the intensity and absorption of the intimacies on display kept it from feeling voyeuristic—this was no mere titillation. Even before the piece began, the WhatsApp narrative mobilized nostalgia for the theater, with brief texts recreating the experience: “You are now entering the theatre,” “You look around as you find your seat and try to recognize some familiar face.” A voice recording from an usher completed the effect. Once on Zoom, viewers were introduced to the company. The multiplication of platforms was now matched by the multiple actors playing Antons and Olgas as they negotiated their various relationships at a distance. Playfully holding acetate slides with impressive Chekhovian beards over their faces, the actors invited a reflection on the very idea of character: how many different versions of Anton and Olga can we conceive of, or recreate? Can gender-neutral casting work for such a heteronormative love story? Live captioning on Zoom, stuttering across the bottom of the screen, suggested writing processes—letters or telegrams—as the actors brought the lovers’ longing, ardor, and doubt to life. Antons and Olgas danced, took showers, ran through Berlin, and strolled on the beach in a richly impressionistic live sequence that emphasized the simultaneity of their experience, however far apart they were geographically. The live performances occasionally gave way to prerecorded fake ads that reflected on how capitalism and religion both take advantage of our need for connection and escape. The moments of shared viewership were interspersed with audience participation and choice. At one point, viewers were briefly invited into individual Zoom breakout rooms. In mine, an actor led me through a process of character construction, with echoes of Stanislavski and a distinctly Chekhovian feel: You’ve always liked cherries. When you were five, you ran away from home and spent four hours in the tree in the garden. You stuffed

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yourself with cherries … When you were thirteen you tried smoking for the first time. You did not like it. At sixteen you fell in love with Ania. At eighteen, with Ivan.

While some were creating characters in breakout rooms, others were witnessing Olga and Anton’s engagement, or dancing along with Olga in her dressing room, or receiving a phone call in which Anton first declared his love to her. Once reconvened on Zoom, viewers were instructed to turn on their own video and led through a Pirandellian meditation on what it might mean to be someone else’s character or creation. Beyond their metadramatic appeal, these moments deepened the piece’s reflection on the relationship between an author and the actor for whom he wrote some of his most famous characters. The audience was also on display, with cameras on, as some of us finally opened letters that Grumelot had previously sent in the mail— an analog dimension of the piece unfortunately unavailable to those watching from across the ocean. There was unguarded wonder on people’s faces as they encountered whimsical missives that echoed the symbolism of the piece and held them up for all to see. There is pleasure, too, we were reminded, in what is not immediately available. The WhatsApp messages continued throughout the performance, occasionally pointing to a parallel Instagram Live, on which one of the Olgas fought over the phone with her Anton. A song list on Spotify added to the nostalgic mood. Narrative structure was effectively multiplied and undone in the service of a deeper dive. To be sure, we knew already that this story would not end well. And despite the misleadingly teleological title, narrative progression was hardly the point of Game Over. Instead, Grumelot and their deft collaborators, designers Itxaso Larrinaga, Iara Solano, and Alex Peña, offered a paradoxical version of immersive theater at a distance: not site-specific, though it was about location; not VR-enabled, though it made ample use of the technology on everyone’s gadgets to get into our heads and under our skin. Self-aware

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yet emotionally engaging, even moving, Game Over reflected on how we both make contact and make up for it, as hyperconnectivity meets a time of pandemic. Grumelot expanded its exploration of multiplatform digital theater with Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte, a devised piece directed by Gaviño and Solano and based on texts by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican essayist, poet, and dramatist who wrote most of her work as a cloistered nun.11 Improbable though it might seem, Sor Juana has in recent years become something of a feminist pop icon, a Frida Kahlo of the seventeenth century. Given a class of drama students that was entirely female, Gaviño explained, Grumelot decided to create a piece that focused on the relationship between gender, reclusion, and creativity and asked the actors to keep diaries of their experiences during lockdown.12 The resulting piece combines texts by Sor Juana with material devised by the twelve women, in a powerful and affecting whole. After first encountering the company’s Game Over in July, I invited Grumelot to present Dolor at LA Escena, Los Angeles’ festival of Hispanic classical theater, which I direct (November 12–16, 2020). Dolor first announced itself via Instagram, with a series of lively posts about Sor Juana’s life in the weeks before the show. The posts, by “sorjuanalapeor,” were all in the first person, introducing from the start a striking intimacy in the telling of Sor Juana’s story: A los tres años ya sabía leer. Aprendí porque engañé a la maestra de mi hermana para que me enseñara el alfabeto [eye and mouth emojis] luego se lo tuve que ocultar a mi Mamá para que no me castigara. Mi abuelo [smile emoji] fue el único que lo supo, él me dejaba leer sus libros y me pasaba horas en su biblioteca. [book, pencil, heart emojis].13 [I was reading by the age of three. I learned because I tricked my sister’s teacher into teaching me the alphabet {eye and mouth emojis} then I had to hide it from my Mamma so that she would not punish me. My grandfather {old man emoji} was the only one to know—he let me read his books and I spent hours in his library. {book, pencil, stars, and heart emojis}]

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Familiar facts of Sor Juana’s life were thus repackaged for a new audience through both the platform and the first-person narration, which invokes shared confidences and personal memories. The design sensibility of the Instagram posts mixes seventeenth-century portraits and rare books with neon and contemporary photography, for an eclectic, approachably hip version of Sor Juana. The posts thereby introduce the aesthetics of Dolor and its simultaneously fragmented yet affecting approach to the figure at its core. The company also communicated with the audience via WhatsApp before the show, priming them for what lay ahead. The most irreverent communication was an online “map to explore the mystical path of self-knowledge”—actually a witty online quiz to determine “Qué tipo de monja eres?” [What kind of nun are you?], designed by Larrinaga. With its references to partying, progressive understanding of gender, and strong feminism, the quiz underscored the sense that this Sor Juana had most definitely been updated for young audiences. Together with the materials shared after the November 14 presentation, these precirculated interventions made Dolor a durational experience, unfolding over time on the audience’s cellphones, to be opened and absorbed at will. While none of these were crucial to the central Zoom performance, they added layers of meaning, humor, and, crucially, emotional connection. Much as in Game Over, during the actual performance of Dolor the WhatsApp messages were presented as “an alternative stage in which some parts of the show will occur and also one more platform for this experience” (emphasis original).14 Several of the actors shared their locations on WhatsApp, so the audience could follow them virtually across Madrid. A WhatsApp conversation occurring in the Zoom performance was mirrored on the audience’s phones—immersion via gadget. The WhatsApp group also served to remind the audience of the Instagram posts and to announce that an actual phone call would be part of the piece. When it came, the caller inquired about a viewer’s earliest memory, which made for an affecting and surprisingly intimate conversation. A digest of audience responses was offered on WhatsApp

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after the show, the first in a series of messages from the various cast members—outtakes designed to further extend the experience and deepen the sense of connection beyond the Zoom performance. On Zoom, Dolor was enlivened by an evocative soundtrack entirely composed and/or performed by female artists—techno, Chavela Vargas, a brand-new setting of Sor Juana’s own lyric poetry to music by Aniana Gutiérrez, one of the students in Gaviño’s class. The actors took turns presenting their impassioned responses to absence, isolation, and the curtailment of their agency under the overlapping conditions of patriarchy and pandemic. They cut their hair in a rage—like Sor Juana when she did not meet her own exacting standards for intellectual advancement, like any one of us, unable to bear any longer the unruly locks that remind us of how long we have been away from the world. They read Sor Juana at home, eschewing parties for intellectual exploration. They recited her in the empty streets of Madrid, racing to beat the curfew. The emotional core of the piece came as the cast reflected on our common condition of seclusion, gazing out their individual windows onto a shared sky. Viewers were then invited to turn on their cameras and add their own windows and views to what the actors were displaying in their Zoom boxes. The glimpse of viewers standing next to their windows in locations across the globe, with different qualities of light and at different times of day, made for a remarkably affecting scene, a powerful metaphor for what online theater can achieve by bringing us together, even as it reminds us of the connection we cannot attain.

Players Much as for Game Over, Chekhov offered the starting point for New York Theater Workshop’s (NYTW)’s The Seagull on The Sims 4, streamed online in two parts on October 27 (Acts 1 and 2) and October 28 (Acts 3 and 4).15 Although presented by a theater company, this piece strains at the boundaries of the form—promotional materials

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describe it as a “durational installation art piece that explores the newly emerging popular form of live—and interactive—performance.”16 Seagull was commissioned as part of NYTW’s Artistic Instigators program, designed to support a group of creators by commissioning them “to imagine work in our present moment that creates community within the given circumstances of social distancing, celebrates the liveness that is inherent in a theatrical experience, and examines the relationship between theatre, distance, and technology.”17 The piece involves New York playwright Celine Song (Endlings) attempting to reenact Chekhov’s play on The Sims, while simultaneously narrating and broadcasting her experience via the livestreaming gaming platform Twitch. This Seagull bears some similarity to Forced Entertainment’s radical dismantling of the classics in their Table Top Shakespeare, which also migrated to a virtual, streaming format during the pandemic.18 But whereas the Shakespeare recreation uses resolutely low-tech, analog elements even in its digital form—a mustard bottle for a king, a jam jar for a heroine—Song’s Chekhov is entirely digital. As Song explains, “The Sims is a very interesting video game, because it attempts to simulate human life as it exists, the mundanity and all. In The Sims, we as players are both gods and voyeurs. That seemed to closely resemble the experience of writing and watching a play as a playwright, but without the living, breathing humans as the actors.”19 For its part, Twitch allows a large audience to participate in the performance without having to appear on camera or even participate in the chat.20 At the same time, it offers those who do wish to engage a means of communicating with each other and also with the players— in this case, Song herself—in real time. By commenting in the chat, viewers can both reflect on the action and affect its course by offering Song their feedback. They also engage in elaborate, highly performative conversations with each other, often straying far from the Sims game at hand, in exchanges that become central to the experience. Although The Seagull on The Sims 4 was more of a happening than a play, as NYTW was the first to recognize, it surfaced fascinating questions about theater itself. The main event was not what occurred

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in the Sims world, but rather the conversation about it. Song kept up a lively chatter, full of understated, self-deprecating wit, and constantly invited suggestions from viewers via the Twitch chat function. The stream moved swiftly, with many of the 300 or so viewers commenting repeatedly, while others were happy to lurk. At various points, other prominent playwrights (also NYTW Artistic Instigators) called in to chat with Song: first Aleshea Harris (Is God Is), then Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play). Several remained active in the chat throughout, forming a kind of inner circle of wits dashing off bon mots, many of which involved theatrical in-jokes. On the first night, which covered Acts 1 and 2, Song was at pains to remind the audience that this was not actually Chekhov’s The Seagull, but her own highly subjective adaptation in real time. She began by setting up her characters on the Sims platform, which led to a discussion about the nature of characterization itself. Was Song creating characters, or just casting them in a particular Sims version? When Song deadpanned, “I like to create people from scratch and have them have dramas,” she begged the question of how far the analogy between the Sims player and the playwright would hold. “Radical transparency in dramaturgy,” came the corresponding quip from the audience.21 As she recreated Chekhov’s characters on The Sims, Song offered her interpretation of them, asking the audience for confirmation as she went. Decisions included not just their ages, appearance, and clothing but also how much money they should be assigned or how the relationships between them should be set in this highly mechanistic world. “I don’t really think they get each other, so I’m going to make them 60% friends,” Song explained. The ironic reduction of character to the formulas available on the Sims platform provoked delighted commentary from the viewers, who traded in-jokes and reflected on their own experience of the theater as invoked by a Chekhovian world of depressed artists. The Seagull’s focus on the world of the theater, including the staging of Konstantin’s play at the start, invited the viewers’ commentary. Song described the frustrated young playwright as “one of the first incels of

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Western drama—I know it’s a bold claim.” The young hopeful Nina, who performs in this play-within-the-play, came in for special scrutiny from the commenters: Nina was the star of her small bfa program Nina nailed that Stop Kiss monologue The goofy walk is when the director says “try it and see”

If Nina was an actor just starting out, the successful writer Trigorin invoked viewers’ most entitled professor in drama school. Beyond riffing on specific characters, the viewers shared their collective wisdom about the world of the play in highly condensed form: “No one has a job in Chekhov.” “DRAMA” “Very sad russian.” “Chekhov could NEVER.” Song’s Seagull led viewers to speculate about what else could be adapted to a videogame format. Throughout both nights, they imagined what major canonical works (and some recent hits) would look like as video games: “August Wilson on Runescape” “slave play on animal crossing” “I will personally adapt Angels in America for Pokemon Go” “Macbeth on COD” “Neopets Glengarry is the only Glengarry for me” “Mother courage on second life” “Waiting for Godot on Club Penguin”22

Perhaps most interesting (at least for this Sims novice) was the ongoing conversation about agency. Beyond the jokes about what room the characters perversely walked into and how they eluded Song’s attempts to herd them lie interesting questions about what would make them interact as the play requires. Is it possible to build motivation on Sims? How fine-grained would a program or algorithm need to be to produce Chekhovian realism? (“Chekhov is the algorithm,” someone argued in the chat.) When Song’s characters would not behave as she needed them to, another viewer observed wryly: “This is naturalism at its finest.” Aleshea Harris, calling in, tried to reassure Song, “This is an improv sketch that hasn’t gone as…” (she trails off).

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The question came down to whether Song should turn off the characters’ “free will” or autonomy function. Mock horror ensued: “A Chekhov play disabling free will?” Another viewer helpfully observed that free will could be turned down to low or medium “if you need them to be a little easier but still want free will.” Harris quipped, in reference to the fiercely uncompromising Belgian director: “Turning off free will is the Ivo van Hove version.” On his call to Song, Jeremy O. Harris noted that as a younger playwright he would often put a character that was giving him trouble on Sims: “I’d put it in a house and see what happened, and write around that.” The conversation obliquely addressed not just writing and character development but also the extent to which a director shapes the interpretation of a text. The Sims characters cannot dialogue or collaborate, but they can mark the limits of directorial control. A brief moment of seriousness ensued as Song played a clip of the eminent Black philosopher and activist Cornel West discussing Chekhov in relation to the present moment: “We certainly live in the age of Chekhov, since he is the great poet of catastrophe, but also the great poet of resilience, of perseverance, of stamina, of keep going on, I can’t go on, I will go on.”23 To the question of how to make disappointment a constant companion and still persevere, West observes: “I don’t think there’s an answer to the question … I think there’s a response … embodied and enacted in our deeds, our practice, our way of life, and it’s very Chekhov-like.”24 West’s meditation on Chekhov in relation to freedom added a deeper layer to the playful events of the evening. Purely by juxtaposition, it invited the participants to consider the broader significance of the performance in the present moment: “The age of Chekhov is one in which through our artistic expression, through our acts of kindness and solidarity we can express a freedom and a love and a democracy that is not realizable at present, given the structures of domination in place.”25 What is the place of the digital in that sublimation, and what is the relation of these Sims characters, their free will and needs carefully calibrated for maximum efficiency, to our own autonomy, subjectivity, and political agency? While these

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questions might not have found a purchase in the chat, they hang in the air, West’s injunction an implicit corrective to the light-hearted banter. Embodiment, even in its highly stylized Sims form, constantly got in the way of Song’s Seagull. The viewers commented on the constant irruption of the characters’ biological needs, with the action repeatedly derailed as one or another needed to eat or use the bathroom. Song was tempted to turn on their “no-needs” setting, which set off its own thread of existential comments: “Where’s the drama in having all your needs fulfilled?” “Unfulfilled needs are the basis of all drama,” and so forth. While the first night featured the complications of even getting the characters in the same room—much less interacting as desired— when they were constantly headed for the toilet, the second night was derailed by sex and childbirth. Orchestrating courtship and sex turned out to be quite complicated (“Who was the intimacy director?” someone inevitably quipped), while childbirth took things to an entirely different level. Song decided to stage Masha’s pregnancy, although in Chekhov’s play we learn only retrospectively in Act 4 that she has married Medvedenko and had a child with him. Like everything else, the pregnancy was played for laughs, as viewers wondered when Masha would finally have the child, and Song loudly announced her ignorance on the matter: “Does anyone know how to have the baby? I am having trouble figuring it out.” Viewers helpfully observed: “You need the Sims Pregnancy and Labor Moodlet and the Bassinet.” In retrospect, the moment becomes more significant, underscoring the extent to which any play chooses to represent some events at the expense of others. Naturalism is as much of a convention as any other form of representation, and the silent suppression of pregnancy and childbirth in the original Seagull genders the play in ways that we cannot fully conceive until we spend half an hour trying to figure out how Masha will actually give birth. The durational, immersive experience of the Sims adaptation—the boredom, the hilarity, the impatience—thus extravagantly counters the omissions that gender the original play. Explaining humor can feel deadly—in writing this, I feel like the occasional viewers who apologize for their seriousness in the chat,

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where it is clearly not the preferred mode. Despite its levity, however, Song’s Seagull surfaces important conversations about our classical canon, the nature of adaptation, and the centrality of agency in so many aspects of theatrical practice. As one viewer put it, at greater length than most: “Playwrights discussing Chekhov while observing and prodding Chekhov characters to follow a certain path is the most Chekhov of all.” Two months before Song’s Seagull, I encountered my first Twitch performance. The Digital Theatre Festival of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA; Sydney, Australia), discussed in Chapter 2, also included Roundabout.26 The lively multiplatform piece was written and directed by science-fiction writer and developer of alternate-reality games Sean Stewart, who imagined it as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Importance of Being Earnest for the 21st century.”27 Like Seagull, Roundabout offered a powerful example of how participatory theater works in a virtual format, but in this case harnessed audience response to a brand-new text, written by Stewart for the occasion. Beyond the generic mash-up of sci-fi and rom-com, Roundabout activates its audience in specific ways, assigning it a major, albeit virtual, role in advancing the plot of virtual couplings and uncouplings. As Stewart notes, “This century … will be defined by the sharing of power between artist and audience. From video games to fan fiction, the audience increasingly delights in becoming part of the action.”28 Given his own background in games and interactive storytelling,29 plus his self-described start as a “theater kid,”30 Stewart set out to foreground audience engagement via an integrated experience—the theater that is created by combining Twitch’s video window with the scrolling audience response on the side: “That theater, not the play, is what really matters.”31 The entertainment value of the performance, he emphasized, would largely be produced by the audience for the audience, much as in Song’s Seagull. Stewart envisions interactivity as theater’s “secret weapon,” which film cannot match.32 What you lose on the swings, you get back on the roundabouts, he muses, adding yet another level of meaning to his

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title: whereas theater could never attain the scalability of film, new platforms now allow theater to erase film’s “reach advantage”33 while involving the audience and responding to its prompts far more readily than film ever could.34 Crucially, it is very difficult and expensive to have the story respond to its audience in a film. As Stewart wryly notes, live actors can handle audience choices for a fraction of the cost: You know what processor can handle audience input well—even completely random stuff you never thought of in advance? A live actor; and to be frank, you can get some pretty good ones who otherwise are getting $12/hour at their barista gig. In other words, although it looked for a hundred years as if the dominance of cinema over theater was a foregone conclusion, I think that horserace is a very different proposition now. Broadcast video is just a collection of bits that can be pirated from dozens of torrent sites on the web. But theater—scalable on streaming platforms and responsive to its audience—can deliver a live, interactive experience that cinema can’t come close to matching.35

In Stewart’s powerful framing, responsiveness to the audience gives theater an “enormous but unexplored advantage” over film. If Song’s interactive experience bypasses actors altogether for a metadramatic romp on The Sims, Roundabout explores what it might mean to have live actors responding to audience feedback during the performance. As he explains, “If you involve the audience, if you bring that to theater, and do it mindfully, in real time, if you say, ‘there is an audience here that is talking, how can I take the funniest things they say and amplify them’—then we’re on to something that has legs.”36 Yet Roundabout was not just improvisation: although there were moments that required responding to audience suggestions, there were also multiple preestablished paths in what became a very long script.37 To play with its audience, Roundabout relies on Twitch, with some assistance from cellphones (not to speak of smart refrigerators and ovens, which take on starring roles). Although I watched a selection of the recorded performances on YouTube, the live experience on Twitch

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involved the actors’ constant response to comments and votes from viewers.38 The audience could also “earn Roundabout Achievements” by activating a dedicated plug-in, for such coups as making the actors laugh. Rather than simply dedicating the sidebar chat to audience schmoozing, as is the case for most digital productions, Roundabout incorporated Twitch fully into the show, announcing: “The chat channel is one of our stages.” The actors read the chat constantly and occasionally contributed to it, even as they reflected on the audience response and addressed it during the performance. The piece thus alternated between the tightly paced, sharp script and more open-ended moments with the feel of improv or stand-up comedy. Repeatedly polled over the course of the performance, viewers influenced its progress by providing starting points for improvisatory riffs or voting for a particular direction in which to advance the action. As Stewart puts it, “here the audience is a character, too, with its own motives and ability to affect the plot.”39 That slight but very clever plot featured a human love triangle—the neutrally named Kit (Anna Clark), Sam (Rebecca Attanasio), and Pat (Leinad Walker)—and the three virtual beings vying to enter their bodies—Phi, Alpha, and Omega (body and voice support by Rudy Hendrikx). The virtual beings scoffed at the audience (in doggerel, no less): “I was one of you once, made out of meat, / sea-water, and skin, a fine leather doll. / You act like you’re digital, but it’s a cheat / a fish with a space-suit and modem is all.” As Stewart observes: “In our play, there is a struggle between virtual beings and those ‘made out of meat’—but aren’t we all amphibious these days, moving between both the physical and digital worlds?”40 Fittingly, the haughty virtual beings informed the virtual audience of its role: “You think you’re an audience—that’s partly true / you’ll find that you’re actors, and stagehands, too.” The audience’s words and choices gradually took on a greater role, as they eventually decided which of the six characters got to inhabit a body and how those bodies would pair up (Figure 7). Would Omega inhabit Sam, and would they prefer Kit to Pat? The screen announced during increasingly lengthy intermissions

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Figure 7  Screenshot of Twitch chat channel in Roundabout, 2020. Photo by author.

the “stats” the audience/players had achieved (“We LOL’d: Achieved if players post funny lines,” “Possession: Awarded if the audience chooses for Omega to inhabit Sam”) and eventually signaled which set of possible outcomes the show would follow (“Tonight’s Denouement will be: BLUE LINE 2”). In addition to thematizing the audience’s own experience as digital beings, the many combinatory possibilities enabled a deeper exploration of gender and desire than the slight framing conceit would suggest. When the embodied humans in the play attempted to resist the virtual occupation, they somehow ended up in each other’s bodies instead. As much Twelfth Night or Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes as Midsummer Night’s Dream, Roundabout thereby interrogates who we are in relation to our bodies. What happens when a female body performs male gender, as occurs when clueless boyfriend Pat inhabits the body of his girlfriend, Sam, whom both Kit and Pat love? Pat wonders to the appalled Kit, “Technically, if we did it, would that be a threesome?” He also speculates about how his sexuality will express itself in this borrowed body: “I wonder if I’m going to be gay?” We assume the desires will be Pat’s, but does that not simply dismiss the body as a “meat-bag”? Even when the genders do not shift, the question of desire in relation to the body is

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paramount: in another performance, Kit shows up in Sam’s body, but feels no attraction to Pat, who is thoroughly confused by this. Yet Kit quite seems to enjoy her new, more stereotypically feminine body as she tries on a new hairdo and a fetching hairband—as she inhabits the body of the person she has loved for years, she has essentially become her own object of desire. Conversely, when Kit shows up in Pat’s body, Sam casually assumes, “You don’t want to be a guy.” Kit ruefully considers her options: “Don’t I? I mean, I could hold a girl’s hand on the street without wondering if some guy might get creepy about it.” As the actors took turns playing various characters, they spoke at least some of the same lines, whatever “body” they happened to be inhabiting. Their genders and the vectors of desire between them, however, gave those lines a different resonance each time. Bodies switched unexpectedly, to great comic effect, and had the unfortunate habit of reasserting themselves over minds. When Kit helpfully points out to Sam that Pat “does not have a lot of romantic imagination,” Sam counters, “outside the bedroom, anyway.” Where does this leave Kit-asPat? Will Sam finally love her/him, this amazing combination of Kit’s mind and Pat’s body? Roundabout is far less interested in conclusions than in exploring possibilities, which it did over the course of its six performances. In reflecting on his experience with Roundabout and its significance for the future in his conversation with me, Stewart stressed audience participation above all. Beyond the initial performance itself, he noted, privileging audience response to the text rather than the text alone can also enliven prerecorded, streamed performances.41 If the chat channel is renewed for each new instance, it enables liveness to reside in the audience rather than the actors. While this version lacks the interactivity of an actual live performance, it nonetheless produces a feeling of engagement. Given the complexities of live performance over the internet and the uneven distribution of technology not only across the globe but even within richer nations, live chats in the wake of multiplatform presentations might extend the live experience to digital audiences distributed over time and space. Beyond the

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model of prepandemic National Theatre Live, which, after an initial live rebroadcast, convened audiences across the world for the joint experience of a prerecorded piece, digital live chats might engage audiences in their homes in a similarly shared experience, long after a piece was recorded. As Stewart makes explicit, and the work discussed in this chapter abundantly demonstrates, participatory and immersive theater flourish in a digital mode, particularly when enabled by multiple platforms. From the heightened intimacy of Grumelot’s texts and calls, to the playfulness of Song’s Seagull and Roundabout, audiences find abundant opportunities for engaged experience. By centering those experiences in audience participation, moreover, digital theater aligns itself with the powerful shift to interactive forms of culture that marks our present moment, offering new possibilities.

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Thinking outside the Box: Simulation

“Theatre deploys artifice while cinema is committed to reality,” Susan Sontag observed.1 As digital theater becomes more sophisticated, it raises key questions of what the commitments of this new form are and how they might be achieved. The use of filters, augmented reality, and other technical solutions increasingly makes it possible to modify actors’ appearance, place remote actors in a shared virtual space, create virtual scenery, or even simulate an audience. Yet those same strategies—born of a longing for verisimilitude—reduce the distinction between theater and film, so that it becomes more urgent for artists to reassert the theatrical qualities of their work. Enduring questions initially bracketed during this period of quarantined creativity—the force of live versus recorded performance, the specific character of theater versus film—reassert themselves as the work evolves. One key question as the archive of digital theater grows is whether simulation can be more than merely compensatory. For many companies, the move online was, at least initially, an attempt to salvage their work during lockdown. Yet no sooner did artists begin exploring the possibilities of digital theater than they encountered its greater affordances. While many of them would no doubt have preferred the familiarity of performing in theaters, before in-person audiences, they found that simulating that analog situation enormously enriched their work, adding layers of selfawareness: How is character fashioned, and how might technology assist that project? What does it mean for actors to share virtual

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space? What makes an audience a collective? What role do bodies play in copresence? This chapter reviews the use of simulation in a range of performances, from the use of filters to enhance character, to multiple strategies for simulating copresence for distant actors, to the simulacrum of an audience via video. These various (and variously successful) experiments differ from the carefully aestheticized failures of Chapter 2, while insisting on their own theatricality. Whether through bricolage or irony, the simulations enacted are simultaneously dismantled, calling attention to the fissures of representation that most clearly distinguish theater from film. The most successful of these experiments wants it both ways: on the one hand, audiences must be sufficiently persuaded that online theater can tell a story that they are willing to engage with in the new form, even if only as an alternative to in-person experiences; on the other, the conspicuous artificiality of that form and the very need for simulation to supplement it privilege alienation over verisimilitude. Simulation is thus more than an attempt to compensate for what digital theater cannot replicate: its fraught relationship with analog equivalents foregrounds the self-awareness of digital theater as its distinguishing characteristic, its postdramatic signature. In this sense, the simulations of digital theater in the context of pandemic are far from the Baudrillardian simulacrum, or the anomie of the hyperreal: in a context of profound longing for in-person performance, they insist instead on a Brechtian distance from realism as a condition for theater.

Snap-Transformations Snapchat’s Snap Camera program, which makes the popular lenses available on livestreams or video chats, proved an attractive resource for theater practitioners eager to take advantage of their virtual condition. The augmented reality of the filters compensated for digital theater’s general lack of the apparatus that usually accompanies a production— costumes, hair and makeup, sets and stage design, props, and so forth.

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Yet it also allowed for greater playfulness and exploration, achieving effects that no designer could pull off. As Eli Simon of UC Irvine’s New Swan Shakespeare Festival noted, the “instant transformation” afforded by the filters is one of the obvious advantages of digital theater.2 The filters were adopted by companies that had not necessarily explored technological solutions before the pandemic, but who were open to new solutions in a new context. The Mexico City company EFE Tres had long experimented with Hispanic classical theater, turning its challenges, such as large casts, into opportunities for artistic creativity.3 Before the 2020 pandemic, this experimentation had generally taken the form of creating frame tales to make classical works more accessible or of having two actors virtuosically play every role (a Golden Age type of performance known as ñaque) as for their El Príncipe Ynocente, from a play by Lope de Vega. With El merolico (The Mountebank), EFE Tres went one step further, moving from ñaque to bululú—a performance by a single actor in every role that foregrounds the similarities between the small-town traveling salesman and the showman. The merolico is the remarkably talented Fernando Villa Proal, one of the founders of the company, who performs a series of Cervantes’ entremeses—fastpaced comical interludes, originally designed to be presented between the acts of a longer play. Villa had been touring since 2017, appearing in both traditional theaters in Mexico and the United States and openair festivals across Spain. In a tour de force of performance, he would embody six or eight characters over the course of a single interlude, sometimes presenting two or three of them in a row, with the aid of very simple props—a small valise, some hats, a piece of fabric multiply repurposed, a cape that appeared almost magically endowed with transformative powers in the performer’s able hands. The pandemic led Villa to improvise a distanced, urban Merolico on his Mexico City balcony, which I discuss in Chapter 7. Yet the company also decided to experiment with Snap Camera’s lenses, which proved perfectly suited for the kind of vertiginous transformations that the entremeses require. Producer Allan Flores had previously played with Snap Camera lenses on Mexican late-night TV, spicing up interviews

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that slowed unexpectedly with a mushroom lens, which the audience loved. When EFE Tres set out to design a virtual Merolico, they decided to use the lenses “as though they were masks.”4 As part of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater’s online conference in July, Villa presented a virtual version of Los habladores,5 an interlude often attributed to Cervantes,6 in which he played all eight characters. The interlude is about people afflicted with extreme loquacity and offers an actor the opportunity to spin endless tales. The Snap Camera lenses, used in Zoom via a plug-in and applied sequentially to the single performer, effectively enhanced his quick moves into and out of these various talkers, which he had previously achieved by means of simple props. Gender, age, social status could all be established in a flash, through the simulacrum applied to the actor’s face. While beards or different hairstyles served as predictable signifiers of identity, the use of the “Time Machine” age filter to make the performer seem much younger, as he briefly played the son of the house, was particularly striking. The effect was uncanny—although we were clearly watching the same actor at work, the reverse aging in particular made it seem as though there was more than one person onstage. The assisted virtual transformation thus enhanced Villa’s virtuosic skill. As Flores noted to me, the company chose not to develop custom lenses not only because the process would have been time-consuming but also because they anticipated that audiences would enjoy recognizing the Snap Camera lenses that they had already encountered—and perhaps used themselves—on social media.7 The popularity of the lenses was confirmed when Zoom incorporated them as an option for the platform itself in early August.8 Simon’s A Midsummer Night’s Zoom for the New Swan also made use of Snap Camera lenses.9 The director was intrigued by the possibilities of using technology to enhance the magic of the play, especially given the constraints of a virtual performance, with actors dialing in from across the country and no access to makeup or much in the way of costumes. The lenses would not only compensate for these missing elements but also offer enhancements truly unique to Zoom theater.

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Although Snapchat offers the ability to design bespoke lenses, Simon found that the ready-made ones could provide wings for his fairies, a marvelous mask for Titania, and, of course, an ass’s head for Bottom (Figure 8). To judge by the comments in the chat and during the online talk-back after the performance, the audience for A Midsummer Night’s Zoom was quite effectively enchanted, even with the stock lenses. In both these pieces, augmented reality was used sparingly, to enable the transformation of the performer (in the case of Los habladores) or the characters (in A Midsummer Night’s Zoom). Unlike actual masks, the virtual appurtenances do not impede the actors’ breathing or sight, or complicate their movement; conversely, they do not provide those actors with a physical, bodily reminder of their transformation. To put it another way, does a digital wardrobe give the actor enough of a physical scaffolding for constructing character? Or must it—however shiny and dazzling—cede to the primacy of the performance? In neither of these cases did the lenses obscure the centrality of the actors, nor the theatrical qualities of the experience. In this sense, both pieces are a far cry from the virtual reality experiences that largely dispense with actors or with the sense of a shared audience. At the same time, these playful, admittedly modest experiments point to what might become far more adventurous uses of augmented reality within digital

Figure 8  Bottom and fairies: Greg Ungar as Bottom, Meg Evans as Titania, Michael Calacino as Peaseblossom, Tolu Ekisola as Cobweb, and Jalon Mathews as Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Zoom, 2020. Courtesy of Eli Simon, New Swan Shakespeare Festival.

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theater as the form develops. One caveat is that though both companies would have preferred to present their work livestreamed, technical complexities forced them to stream instead a prerecorded version. Actual live simulation presents its own challenges, as I discuss below.

Putting It Together If Zoom works well for representing conversation, or relations among bodies that could never actually meet (such as those between present and past selves or a writer and his favorite author in Pig Iron’s Zoom version of Toshiki Okada’s Zero Cost House10), it is obviously less effective when physical contact is at the heart of a scene. As I noted in the introduction, Simon’s Midsummer addressed this by simulating eye contact across boxes, replicating the workaround that Bill Irwin so charmingly discovers in In-Zoom (Chapter 1). Even as Zoom eventually added the capability to place boxes in a specific relation to each other, so that directors no longer had to hope for the right arrangement, contiguity by no means replaces actual shared space, or interaction among bodies. Simulating actors together in a shared space presents a manageable challenge for previously filmed material, as in the Lope de Vega excerpts included in En otro reino extraño (Chapter 2). It is far more daunting for live performances, including two versions of Shakespeare and a dystopian new workplace comedy that essayed very different solutions. Big Telly Theatre Company (Portstewart, Northern Ireland) and Creation Theatre (Oxford) collaborated to present Macbeth (headlined the Belfast International Arts Festival October 14–17, then virtual transfer to Oxford through October 31, 2020), testing the limits of Zoom in a production full of special effects.11 Director Zoe Seaton, a veteran after several digital productions, aimed for a B-movie aesthetic that would keep audiences guessing: “Think of the witches like spyware—a form of malicious behaviour gathering information and infiltrating the system.”12 Seaton expected the audience to notice and enjoy the inevitable

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hiccups of digital theater: “garbled audio, inexplicable dropouts, fake locations, special effects—the unpredictability of the internet—exactly what is live and what is not—like in horror films when there seems to be a power cut—what if your connection hasn’t been lost—what if it’s been taken?”13 In practice, the production stretched the limits of Zoom by making abundant use of filters and superimposition while livestreaming, with a great deal of work behind the scenes. While the audience watched in speaker view, multiple Zoom feeds were digitally combined to create a composite image, such as Macbeth (Dennis Herdman) peering out from behind a stone wall through an arrow slit. Although there was no live chat, the audience was encouraged to keep its camera on so as to participate in the production, via brief glimpses of individual audience members framed to appear in specific scenes and locations. Seaton’s version of Macbeth began with a prologue: a tonguein-cheek press conference on an infestation of witches, wittily referencing the pandemic and introducing the playful special effects that would characterize the performance. Green witches hats—Snap Camera lenses, here used much more sparingly—hovered briefly over various audience members as their Zoom boxes were featured and manipulated. (The effect returned much later, when various audience members were briefly topped with a shiny golden crown.) The prologue made clear just how elaborate this version of Zoom would be: the actors appeared completely framed by their podia and newsroom. The scene was in black and white, for a slightly flat and stiff effect that nonetheless felt considered.14 The dour black and white was maintained for much of the piece, replaced by gloriously intense color when Macbeth was crowned (Figure 9). A running motif had the witches (Aongus Og McAnally, Lucia McAnespie, Dharmesh Patel) as stage managers, with backgrounds of theater wings, lines delivered into their headsets, and much fiddling with ropes. The constant metatheatrical levity—the glimpse behind the scenes, as it were—afforded the production much of its charm. A reduced gallery of Zoom participants on the side revealed how the

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Figure  9  The witches: (left to right) Aonghus Og McAnally, Dharmesh Patel, and Lucia McAnespie in Macbeth, 2020. Courtesy of Big Telly.

superimpositions worked and also gave a sense of the tremendous discipline and timing required of actors and stage managers. Most interesting was the filmic handling of space. While the production was entirely live, the scenes were treated as though they were a series of shots, abandoning the commitment to a single plane of action that characterizes many productions on Zoom. There were certainly moments when more than one actor appeared at once, their backgrounds imperfectly stitched together (a double line of bare trees was surprisingly effective). Yet they were more often presented one at a time in speaker view, their movement carefully calibrated to simulate a response to someone playing opposite them, beyond the fourth wall of the screen. As the focus shifted to that other Zoom “speaker,” the effect was of an alternating shot, borrowing heavily from a horror-movie aesthetic. This was the solution, for example, for many moments of violence, when a close-up of a terrified face stood in for an attack or, in a tour de force of Zoom editing, when Macbeth and MacDuff (McAnally, in a doubled role) traded blows, each punch requiring a quick shift to the next speaker, who received it virtually immediately. The flat, more deliberately bricolaged moments—Macbeth “riding” a carriage or the audience placed around the banquet table—insistently

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remind us that this is not film. After all, as Seaton noted, the goal was always to ensure “that we are making great theatre and not cheap film whilst embracing the opportunities of the platform.”15 Yet Macbeth’s solution to the problem of locating actors in the same space nonetheless troubles the line between film and theater: while carefully foregrounding liveness and audience participation, it nonetheless moves away from another, arguably less fetishized aspect of theater: the single-shot aspect, in which the audience sees everyone onstage, all of the time.16 The closing moments of Macbeth foregrounded its highly creative solutions to the problem of simulating proximity for the actors, by having each of the five members of the cast raise a card with their location as they took their “curtain call.” None of them were even in the same city; instead, they were coming together to perform from locations as far apart as London and Dublin. Simulating actors in a shared space was also critical for San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s King Lear (July 18–September 27, 2020), directed by Elizabeth Carter.17 Originally slated for the company’s “Free Shakespeare in the Park” summer series, the production became instead “Free Shakespeare at Home,” as the company found itself thrust from its more usual haunts in approachable neighborhood parks to the forefront of virtual experimentation. Convinced from the start that some virtual version of the show must go on, the company secured one of the first full Actors’ Equity contracts for a virtual production, after some wrangling over whether it was theater or film.18 Over the course of the summer, twenty-three performances were livestreamed to viewers, reaching an expanded international audience of almost 9,000 people.19 Beyond the innovations to the play itself—a female Lear, played by Jessica Powell, and references to the Black Lives Matter movement introduced via short video clips of protests—the production was perhaps most striking for its technical novelty. The virtual Lear began as so many Zoom productions had begun in spring 2020, with actors broadcasting their performances from their homes, standing in front of

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green screens. Yet in this case they were transmitted to technical director Neal Ormond, who “composited these live feeds in real time onto scenic backgrounds, creating the thrill of a live ensemble performance.”20 Ormond used Open Broadcasting Software (OBS), designed for “real time video/audio capturing and mixing,” which enables an editor to “create scenes made up of multiple sources”21—in this case, the multiple Zoom feeds from the cast. His method essentially cut the actors out from their green screen backgrounds, as so many paper dolls, and pasted them into a composite scene, achieving a simulation of what had once seemed commonplace yet now seemed unattainable: actors in a shared space, passing behind each other, or connecting in a fight scene. By cropping and superimposing the images, Ormond achieved “a virtual space with layers and the illusion of a unified, 3-D space.”22 The composite was then streamed live on YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch, with the actors appearing in a simulated shared space, against shared digital backgrounds—photos of various locations in a realist mode. The company deems this compositing technique the “unified virtual space method” and claims that it is “the first in the world to allow more than a dozen live, remote actors to inhabit a shared virtual space, free from the restrictions of ‘zoom boxes.’ ”23 Both the company’s materials and audience responses underscore the new method as an advance beyond Zoom, a way to break free of its constraints. Indeed, Ormond’s solution makes virtuosic use of these technologies: although there have been other uses of OBS to render multiple actors in a shared virtual space, what made Lear so striking was that this was achieved live, in an instantaneous mode. Ormond also used the editing software to vary “camera views,” for a filmic change of focus that helped avoid overcrowding in the virtual space. The switch in “camera views” enables “multiple different composites of different groups of actors, creating the illusion of a different camera angle” and allowing some actors to become the focus while others remain off-screen.24 Ormond’s method offers greater verisimilitude in the physicality of a scene, especially when actors’ bodies must appear to connect, as

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in the gruesome moment in 3.7 when Cornwall pulls out Gloucester’s eyes. Much was made of this scene in the performance I watched, with a trigger warning about graphic violence at the start. Those familiar with virtual theater waited expectantly for this moment, not from prurience but rather from sheer theatrical curiosity: how could this, of all scenes, work on Zoom? (The company also features it in its “Behind the Scenes” video, acknowledging its centrality as a proofof-concept for the possibilities of the method.) The scene began by alternating between two camera views, with Gloucester (Phil Lowery) and a servant in one, and Regan (Melissa Ortiz) and Cornwall (Gabriella Grier) with two servants in another. At the climactic moment, while Cornwall moved threateningly into the foreground and reached to the far left in one camera view, arm extended beyond the frame, Gloucester moved far into the foreground in the second camera view, so that his eyes also lay beyond the frame. As Cornwall pulled back, dripping eye in hand, Gloucester, too, moved away from the camera, his eye a bloody socket. The video shows Ormond operating the “multi-cam” in real time, composing the various Zoom images into two separate layered views and alternating camera views between them. Despite its possibilities, the unified virtual space method requires great control from the actors, whose movements are limited by the exigencies of sightlines and precise location. Consider “A Day in the Life of a Virtual Actor,” as the company blog puts it: You tap your fingers against your leg, gauging if your camera is in the same place or if the dog had knocked it askew during the night. You can’t tell, which means you have to dig out your measuring tape again. At this point, you should really just stop putting it away. The large greenscreen on its tripod stands is pushed back against the wall and softboxes and umbrella lights fill the rest of the tiny room. You have managed to place everything with just enough room to make a dramatic exit to the left before you have to crouch down out of view and crawl back to the other side for your next entrance. One familiar thing is the scattering of blue tape on the floor marking your positions,

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For gazes and bodies to align correctly and the simulacrum to work, actors must take care not to move in unexpected ways. Even wearing a different pair of shoes, one actor explained, would throw off the calculations and require a recalibration of the relative distances.26 The tolerances for lights and cameras are of half an inch (a little over 1 cm).27 Simulating shared space thus became a central concern of the production: Since none of our actors are in the same space (some are cities away from each other), their interactions are quite different. A large chunk of rehearsal time is dedicated to creating accurate sightlines so it seems as though everyone is looking at their scene partners and making eyecontact while, in reality, everyone is acting in their individual space. This new medium has resulted in the actors having to be highly adaptive, learning to perform a complex dance with their partners in another space, and rely on sound cues for timing.28

While the audiences for Lear appreciated the technical wizardry and resulting simulacrum, I am struck by just how much Ormond’s solution itself constrained actors. Though released from the dreaded Zoom boxes, they operated within a set of minute restrictions, and their “complex dance” often seemed to require limited mobility. The actors’ detailed space diagrams, full of spike marks and bits of tape, show the extent to which they had to regulate every move. As the attached image from Melissa Ortiz, who played Regan, shows, the marks included reference points for the gaze, too. If the actor looked at the guitar

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instead of the plant on a shelf in her room, for example, her gaze might not align as necessary in the composite (Figure 10). These constraints complicate the production’s emphasis on a verisimilar approximation of shared space: if the actors cannot move in new ways or even look in different directions over the course of a production, what does its “liveness” consist in? What varies from one performance to the next? How does the ideal that the production strives for instead approximate the predictability of film? Does the animating sense of risk that Nicholas Ridout associates with live performance migrate in this case from the actors’ labor to that of the technical master behind the scenes?29

Figure 10  Spike marks for playing Regan in King Lear, 2020. Courtesy of Melissa Ortiz.

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Artistic Director Rebecca Ennals reflected on the actors’ experience, acknowledging the demands placed upon them: There was one actor who went through the rehearsal process and performed for the first few weeks but then wanted to leave, because she was a very physical actor, [claiming]: “I don’t know how to do this in a way that feels native to me—I just know that I have to hit my marks” and we released her because that is true—it really is incredibly technical.30

As Ennals explained, “The actors who thrived were often the ones who like doing film, because you do those same things: you have to hit a mark.”31 Yet Ennals resisted the idea that the performances became like film: while the actors’ physical movement may have been constrained and, ideally, unvarying, their emotions and language were not. Ennals confesses that she almost relished the occasional error, which underscored that this was a live, varying performance. Individual cities around the San Francisco Bay were also featured for “their” shows, replicating the company’s usual practice of changing locations over the course of a summer. The unified virtual space method only underscores the trade-off of most digital performance: greater clarity and focus on language at the expense of reduced physicality. For a company accustomed to playing outside, with large gestures and the challenges of ambient noise, the transformation was profound. Yet the audience’s experience of the Shakespearean language was undoubtedly enhanced in the virtual Lear, especially given the exploration of the text in the simultaneous chat. The digital performance also afforded greater access for audiences who themselves lacked mobility. As Ennals notes, “Even as we return to in-person performances in the future, I hope we’ll keep streaming— this crisis has really highlighted access inequities for folks who, under normal circumstances, are unable to attend a park performance.”32 While the simulation of actors in a shared space might be the most visible innovation in SF Shakes’ Lear, Ennals stressed the importance of the guided chat—the simulation of togetherness for the audience—as

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a revelation for the company. The sidebar conversation during the performance replicated the feeling of community for viewers in separate locations while allowing company staff to inform audience response. Interns created a script for guiding the chat, engaging those who deliberately joined and even welcoming virtual passersby, much as they might have done for people wandering past the performance in the park and spontaneously deciding to join.33 Discussions ranged from the meaning of particular words to the impact of casting a woman as Lear. As Ennals ruefully observed, what the chat could not simulate was audience feedback to the actors in real time: while the staff tried to feed comments to the performers during the show, to convey the audience’s delight, the demands of projection and live capture set up “a digital fourth wall for the actors”34—a situation very different than that on the Twitch-enabled performances I discuss in Chapter 3. Nonetheless, the audience’s deep engagement with the guided chat has convinced Ennals that this feature should endure even when the company resumes performances in Bay Area parks. Beyond simulating togetherness for actors, the company’s most lasting discovery may well be how the chat can help convene and engage an audience, virtual or otherwise. Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, codirected by Elizabeth Williamson and Jared Mezzocchi, who also produced the “multi-media design,” suggests how digital theater can both simulate copresence and enlist digital resources to tell new kinds of stories.35 Presented by TheaterWorks Hartford and TheaterSquared, in association with Civilians, the piece explores the noxious pervasiveness of digital media, as purveyed by the online “trolls” who seek to undermine Western democracies; as such, it is arguably most effective in its digital version. Widely reviewed and admired, Russian Troll Farm made a powerful case for digital theater as more than a compensatory form. As Green quipped in the New York Times, “it’s as good an argument as pandemic theater has yet produced for turning on your computer. And also for turning it off.”36

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Russian Troll Farm included brief prerecorded videos but was mainly presented live on Zoom, in another tour de force of digital editing. Mezzocchi had long worked with editing and projection software in the theater and was sensitive to the complexities of introducing digital media into the analog space, as he strove to integrate it to actors’ rhythms.37 When the pandemic made in-person performance impossible, Mezzocchi realized that the tables had turned: Now, we are a digital space. And just as importantly, we have to find the analog in it. Let’s assume the same priority of an analog storyteller being the leader. It’s just a different stage, instead of an analog space, it’s a digital space, but the storyteller remains the same.38

Mezzocchi’s strategy was to think of the digital as a specific site—the website for Russian Troll Farm announces: “A live, site-specific play … for the internet.”39 While he was able to repurpose editing software (Isadora, OBS, QLab) for this new space, perhaps his most important insight was how much more intense the collaboration with the actors and the entire creative team would become from the very start of the project and through the performances themselves. Although each actor worked from home, connecting on Zoom, Mezzocchi brought them together in a virtual space and strove to make the media design as responsive as possible to their performances. Long weeks of “reverse engineering” Zoom to explore the platform’s possibilities also informed his work.40 Beyond the technical legerdemain, the minimalism of the design served the production well: black backgrounds solved the problem of consistency across Zoom boxes and allowed the audience’s imagination to conjure the darkness of a supremely dysfunctional workspace, abstracting from any particular space to a Kafkaesque nightmare. The office setting for so many of the scenes made it natural for the characters to face forward as though at their computers as they spoke to each other, thereby solving one of the most challenging aspects of Zoom—its relentless frontality. The trolls’ tweets and comments scrolled rapidly over their faces as they typed, so that their source was

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clearly established, as was the contrast between the banality of those sources and the incendiary nature of their claims (Figure 11). More elaborate composites in a deliberately bricolaged aesthetic showcased the characters’ fantasies and the history of the USSR. In our interview, Mezzocchi demonstrated how Isadora41 allowed him to treat the various actors’ Zoom boxes as so many feeds and then edit them in real time. Once he had captured my own Zoom box on Isadora, he could multiply it, change its size, light it using different effects, and so forth. In Russian Troll Farm, this enabled Mezzocchi to offer the actors a view of their own images, virtually superimposed in the editor’s central feed, in real time. This simulated their copresence not only for the benefit of the audience but also, crucially, for the actors themselves, who could thus react to each other virtually but in the moment. By live-editing, Mezzocchi could also respond to differences in the actors’ performances from night to night, freeing them to produce the kind of variation that makes liveness both so chancy and so intense: I was watching the gallery view. So, every night when we performed it, if Steve [Ian Lassiter] had a guffaw at a new moment, then I would cut to him. And he would see that I had cut to him. So that listen and response was there. And maybe I would cut back and forth a few

Figure 11  Haskell King and Ian Lassiter in Russian Troll Farm, 2020. Courtesy of Jared Mezzocchi.

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times, and he would see that, so he would explore and heighten his performance there. It was basically me as director in the live moment saying, “Keep scratching at that. Keep going. Keep going.”42

Although Mezzocchi admits that this mode of live-editing-as-directing was “very tedious and arduous”43—and not something he could easily hand over for any of the performances—it represented his deep commitment to liveness. Russian Troll Farm also played with the expectations that audiences bring to Zoom theater, after only a few months of the new form. The scene in which Masha (Danielle Slavik) and Nikolai (Greg Keller), involved in a dangerous office romance, share a kiss felt transgressive and mysterious—a less grisly version of Gloucester’s ordeal. The credits provided the light-hearted explanation, as Slavik and then Keller appeared holding the same small child, in presumably the same household. Although in this case there was nothing for the production to simulate, given two actors who actually shared the same analog space, the scene nonetheless managed to pique the audience’s curiosity by defamiliarizing conventions only recently established. The flourish—which, admittedly, may work best for those habituated to digital theater—nonetheless bespeaks a remarkable artistic maturity for a form so recent. As Russian Troll Farm suggests, Zoom theater has advanced at a dizzying speed in a just a few months, especially as it harnesses the expertise of designers who had long worked with media in actual theaters. Beyond simply simulating what we cannot access at the moment, their work argues for digital theater as a permanent, ongoing part of the performance landscape.

Anybody Out There? As James Baldwin noted long before the pandemic, “This tension between the real and the imagined is the theater, and it is why the theater will always remain a necessity. One is not in the presence of

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shadows, but responding to one’s flesh and blood: in the theater, we are re-creating each other.”44 Replicating the feeling of community, of the theater as shared space where an audience comes together, is doubtless a challenge for all virtual productions. In one of the few New Yorker pieces to date to acknowledge digital theater, Vinson Cunningham observes, “we are undergoing a worldwide reconstrual of what it means to be a member of the crowd.”45 Cunningham stresses the important role that an audience plays in live theater: It’s easy to forget that, in the theatre, each ticket buyer plays a role. The quality of our attention—silent or ecstatic, galled or bored—is a kind of freestanding, always improvising character, and makes each in-person performance unrepeatable. Call it the congregational art, and remember how you once practiced it: it has something to do with location, and feeling, and your invisible relationship with individual performers and the whole panoply of action on the stage.46

Given how important this “congregational art” is to live performance, many companies chose to engage the audience virtually, even if only by opening the chat function. Others devoted more care to curating the communal experience online, as did SF Shakes in their Lear, or Theatre for One in Here We Are, discussed in Chapter 5. Dublin-based Dead Centre’s To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (October 1–10, 2020), based on the 2017 book by Mark O’Connell,47 tackles the question of how an audience might function virtually entirely differently. The company is known for its experimental work, especially for its habit of “casting the audience,” whether by tweaking the implicit contract of the performance event or by actually putting audience members onstage in such pieces as Chekhov’s First Play (2015) and The Interpretation of Dreams (2020).48 With a “digitally configured audience,”49 To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) offers an elaborate virtual simulation integrated with its larger concerns. Both O’Connell’s book and this first theatrical adaptation explore how our bodies intersect with technology and how that technology

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might help us transcend our limitations through cryogenics, implants, and so forth—what is known, in the more optimistic reaches of Silicon Valley, as transhumanism. To Be a Machine was published in 2017, yet its material proves most apposite for a moment when so much human activity and communication has moved online, facilitated by constant interaction with machines for millions of the more fortunate whitecollar workers and students across the world. By foregrounding what it means to be—or not to be—a body onstage, the adaptation offers a witty yet profound reflection on how the question of presence in virtual theater intersects with larger concerns of our digital existence. At the same time, it puts pressure on the notion of theater as an embodied event, one that requires performer and audience to share a space.50 Dead Centre’s adaptation, created by O’Connell with directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, was not initially intended as a virtual piece: the company was in the first stages of planning for a 2021 production in theaters when the pandemic struck. Approached by the Dublin Theatre Festival about the possibility of presenting material in a digital format for the 2020 edition, the collaborators realized that To Be a Machine resonated in important ways with the constraints of the lockdown.51 The piece was streamed live as part of the Festival,52 yet a key aspect required prior participation from the audience. After purchasing a ticket, each of the 110 viewers was sent to a VideoAsk intake webpage, featuring the performer (Jack Gleeson) in a recorded introduction on one half of the screen and a detailed set of instructions on the other. Gleeson warmly intoned: Hello. Good to meet you. I know this isn’t an ideal way for us to meet. I’m just another face on a screen. You’re probably dying to get closer to people, to connect. You probably miss being in a crowded room. After all, that’s why you bought a ticket to the theater. Well, maybe I can help. I’m going to turn you into an audience member.53

A detailed set of instructions directed the viewer to record several takes—the repertoire of an audience, whether attentive, laughing, or

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asleep: “All I need you to do is look into the camera as though you’re watching a show. You don’t need to do anything else, just move your face close to the camera so it practically fills the screen.” The performer offered his warm approval, then guided the viewer through the next recording, this time requiring more active simulation and a deliberate emphasis on the imagination: “That was great. And now I’d like you to imagine I just said something really, really funny. I can’t think of anything right now, so you’ll just have to imagine it. So, look at the camera, press record, and, when it starts recording, remember to laugh.” Given that To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) is full of humor, why not just have the performer tell a joke, and at least try to provoke laughter in the viewer? In the theater, the audience would not ordinarily feel manipulated if made to laugh, yet in this context there is either a reticence or a technological impediment to actually provoking laughter. The consequence, however, is necessarily a manufactured, fake laugh, obediently produced in response to the performer’s polite request. The fleeting exchange brings up important questions, well before the actual performance: What are the trade-offs between autonomy and authenticity in this virtual mode? Is there any greater agency involved in the laugh I produce on command—however gentle that command might be—than in the one that erupts from me, unbid, at a joke? Of course, the technical requirements of capturing video from the audience on VideoAsk may not have allowed for an immediate response to be recorded in the moment. The performer brings all the above issues to the fore by asking, once the video has been uploaded, “Was that a real laugh?” The “real” in question is not like the “real” in “in real life”— it designates authenticity, spontaneity, a lack of control, rather than the immediacy we contrast with virtuality. Yet the question suggests that some uploaded laughs could be “real” even when migrated into a virtual space—a suggestion the performance itself will complicate. The final video clip requires what is perhaps an easier simulation for most, although one that will be put to chilling and effective use when discussing cryogenics. The performer asks the viewer “to close

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your eyes, as though you’ve fallen asleep.” With that, the viewer has been uploaded and is ready to attend a performance that will virtually include her. Describing the rationale behind the simulation, Moukarzel explains: “once it was uploaded, our sound-designer could almost play the audience,” much as when, during the pandemic, professional sports reopened without a live audience yet played its sounds to “deliver the drama” to viewers at home. (To add to the “Borgesian weirdness” of it all, those sports sounds had not been captured from actual matches in the first place, but rather from players on videogame versions, a digital repertoire to be played at will.54) “Playing the crowd” conjures a rich range of possibilities, particularly for a company interested in exploring metadramatic registers. Moukarzel’s reference also recalls the visual simulation of audiences placed on seats at sporting events worldwide to encourage the players, although Dead Centre’s production is the only example I know of a theatrical event that acknowledged and staged the need for an audience. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) opens with a close-up on Gleeson, now reprising his VideoAsk introduction in the role of “Mark.”55 After he tells viewers that he is “just another face on a screen,” the camera moves back to reveal a digital trompe-l’oeil: this is actually Mark’s face on an iPad, on an empty stage.56 Mark stands next to the iPad watching the video of himself, as the Mark-on-video signs off: “Try to forget about the screen you’re staring into—just for a short while—and try to picture me, not in your laptop, but standing on stage.” Yet after Mark explains, from the stage, that his performance is live and waxes poetic about theater bringing us together, the (recorded) iPad Mark deadpans his agreement: “Totally.” This small moment of digital slapstick nicely undercuts the empathetic, soul-felt pronouncements from onstage Mark, alerting viewers to an ironic undercurrent that matches the complex tone of the original book, a quizzical mix of sympathy for transhumanism’s goals and skepticism about its actual possibilities. From the start, the adaptation activates a meta-discussion about what it means to share a performance. What kind of connection operates in a

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digital mode, and what role does the imagination play therein? What is metaphor here, and what is satire? The less mediated Mark continues: Mark (from stage) People sometimes say that theatre’s a dying medium and I actually think that’s true—it’s the dying medium, a place where we die together, in real-time. So it’s great to be here [says date and time] dying in real time … and it’s great that so many of you could be here too.

The camera then pans to the “audience”: a bank of computer screens, each placed on an individual seat, with each screen displaying the face of a person who bought a ticket for the performance (Figure 12). Here, then, is the “uploaded” audience that each viewer helped create via the videos recorded previously. The experience is uncanny, to say the

Figure 12  Jack Gleeson in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), 2020. Photo by Ste Murray, courtesy of Bush Moukarzel. Dead Centre.

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least—rather than scanning to see if you know anyone at the theater that night, you are scanning for yourself. To Hamlet’s existential (and binary) query, the piece adds a third possibility, neither existence as we know it nor death, but instead a variety of enhanced or suspended states, including our own version of virtuality as an audience onstage.57 “Dying” references the transhumanist concerns of O’Connell’s book and also the fragility of the live performer onstage, whose dying has more to do with the uncertainty of performance than with biology.58 Mark marvels at the assembled company: It’s amazing to see you all like this, bunched up as if around a campfire, side by side with other people, so close you’re almost touching, waiting for the show to begin. Looking around you can see that you’re not alone, you’re part of an audience … in fact, it’s a full house. You each have your own seat, your own individual row and seat number.

Of course, we are neither bunched up nor atavistically gathered around a campfire, but far from actual embodiment or community, at least in the version of us that appears in the theater. Can we even be an audience without a body? But we were already doing that, in our virtual experience of the piece, which does not change substantially for the uploading of what are, we realize, only simulacra, a digital bricolage like those collages of smiling photos from magazines that children paste together. And yet, there is a strange frisson of recognition: that is and is not me; those are and are not us. In another touch of irony, Mark recalls the distinctions inevitably introduced when audiences occupied what was ostensibly the same space, yet was in fact precisely divided by hierarchies of cost and access. While we share a view for the moment, Mark explains, the camera can also reproduce the view “from your own particular seat.” The stage directions then deadpan, “We see Mark from the back row—the ‘worst seat in the house’ ” (emphasis original). So much for idealizing the return to the theater, where some of us will inevitably end up in the worst and cheapest seats. In case the viewer has missed exactly what

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point of view is afforded when we simulate the viewership in an actual theater, Mark patiently explains: There. You’re now all watching this from your own unique point of view—some of you are in the front row, some in the middle, and some of you are watching from the back. For those of you in the back I’m sorry if it seems a bit unfair that you got bad seats but how could it be a real theatre experience if there weren’t some bad seats, right?

As Bourdieu might note, going to the theater is not just about seeing but about being seen, preferably in the expensive seats. It comes as a relief when Mark brings the audience into the joke and we return to the original unencumbered close-up—the “front-row” view, as the stage directions describe it. In a virtual production, everyone has front-row seats, undoing the differential access that applies even when audiences actually manage to attend the theater. Far from fetishizing the presence of the audience, To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) reminds us to consider access when we compare digital productions to their “real-life” equivalents. As Ennals, too, notes, even free performances in the park bring up questions of mobility and of the access that our unmediated bodies might have to those spaces. (My own access to most of the pieces I discuss in this book in fact depended on their digital nature, which afforded me an unprecedented opportunity to discuss productions across the world.) Unsurprisingly, embodiedness is a complicated state of being. Mark acknowledges our ambivalence—“the good thing about this simulation is we can keep the good bits and get rid of the bad bits”— and touts other advantages of the virtual production, such as no wait for the toilet. In fact, even the performer could relieve himself, he playfully suggests, as long as the camera were positioned correctly. But no, that was only water being poured out of sight—scatological trompe-l’oreille this time. The question of O’Connell’s fitful bladder is not just the occasion for bodily humor, however: it returns in a more serious vein when Mark discusses why the author is not playing himself. The limitations

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of O’Connell’s body, Mark explains, led him to find an actor instead. A rich discussion on the nature of identity ensues: are we the same across time? The actual Mark O’Connell, from the iPad onstage, addresses the actor who plays him, and prompts him, “What is a person?” When Mark describes the process of choosing the actor to play the role, the question of self-identity and multiple selves is recast in a theatrical register. The actor worries about losing his own identity as he builds his character: I’d follow you around, and listen to your voice, I’d gather as much data as I can from you so I could sort of upload you as a character. [“During the following dialogue we morph into the face and voice of the real Mark O’Connell.”] I’d adopt your mannerisms, your gestures, your facial tics. I’d listen to recordings of your voice over and over again and adjust mine so it merges with yours. I’d make a thousand tiny changes that gradually, imperceptibly, allow me to be you. And somewhere in the process, I’d get lost.

The stage direction suggests the extent to which digitization can literalize and exacerbate the concerns of the theater, providing a simulation so exact that it undoes what the actor might aspire to or, conversely, fear as the dissolution of his own self. To Be a Machine returns obsessively to the problem of the audience. Having proudly shown us ourselves online, on our separate chairs, and explained the transhumanist conviction that informs our presence— “it’s only when we get rid of our bodies that we become our true selves”—Mark suddenly doubts the simulacrum and becomes unsure that we are really there. The simulated audience does not provide much feedback, and Mark clearly needs reassurance: Are you enjoying the show? Oh wait, I forgot you can’t answer. You are still there, aren’t you? I don’t mean to doubt you—but you could be asleep. (to the whole audience) You could all be asleep or I could’ve had 100 walkouts and be left talking to a room of computers.

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Worried, he turns on the chat so he can communicate with the audience and asks them to write what they miss about going to the theater. Though this exercise begins in the warm glow of nostalgia, it too is quickly overcome by Mark’s suspicion. The witty answers in the chat— actually scripted, as I can confirm now—only lead him to wonder whether they were sent by a chatbot. Increasingly frustrated, Mark decides to attempt the “Turing test” on a member of the audience. The test normally assesses whether a machine can convincingly impersonate a human; Mark tries it on his quasi-human audience to make sure they are not machines. The results are unclear: while an audience member passes the supposed test by offering answers that are “spontaneous and surprising” rather than “predictable and programmatic,” Mark realizes that his own questions are lamentably predictable. The entire exchange becomes metadramatic: given that all the answers in this segment are actually prescripted, the scene also reflects on theater as a dying art, in which we repeatedly exchange predictable and programmed lines: It occurred to me that in some ways a play is also an algorithm—the empty stage a space waiting to be programmed. … Isn’t writing a script a matter of following certain rules in order to guarantee certain outcomes? Tragedy makes people sad, comic timing makes people laugh.

At this moment, the audience laughs—first one, then another, then the entire group, so that Mark, who was not being funny, is quite wounded. The usual function of canned laughter—to underscore the humor in what the performer has said and encourage a live audience to laugh along—is upended, almost as though the laughter machine had malfunctioned, or the algorithm had some bug. Ultimately, the cyborgian audience reveals the limitations of the simulacrum: can performance be live, if reactions are prerecorded? The technical constraints of streaming To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) make this dimension even more interesting. As Moukarzel explained, Dead Centre would have loved to use audience input at the moments of

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supposed improvisation, as they have routinely done in the past: “There’s nothing more beautiful than reality,” he deadpans. Yet the slight delay in streaming by Vimeo—the platform selected for its image quality—made it impossible for the actor to receive input from the chat and respond to it in real time, without introducing awkward gaps.59 Hence the need for plants, unvarying from night to night. Along with its simulacrum of an audience onstage, then, To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) mimicked audience participation and the resulting improvisation, precisely as its protagonist was supposedly testing the authenticity of the live audience. The dizzying levels of simulation here—some shared with the audience, some not—mark an exploration of the illusions involved in theatrical representation as well as those that animate transhumanism. Supremely self-conscious, To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) underscores the extent to which the simulations of digital theater are a red herring of sorts: the point is not whether the analog can be simulated—whether a character can actually be created with a Snapchat filter, actors can occupy virtual space as they do physical space, or audiences can be uploaded. Instead, simulation becomes the most self-conscious dimension of digital theater, a constant reminder that we are all postdramatic now.

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Solo: Small-Scale Theater

Perhaps the most over-the-top meditation on the keenly felt lack of an audience during lockdown was Eugenio Ampudia’s Concierto para el Bioceno at the Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona, in which a string quartet played for an audience of potted plants carefully placed in the seats, while a remote audience watched a streamed version.1 Beyond this one-note reflection on the ecosystem of performance, the question of copresence is clearly central to any discussion of theater during the pandemic. How much coming together does theater require, and what is a company to do when the simple fact of gathering becomes dangerous to everyone’s health? What is gained and lost in one-on-one theatrical experiences, whether live, online, or recorded? These questions are not new, certainly—Theater of War’s conviction of the healing power of theater, which I discuss in Chapter 1, presupposes a communal understanding of the form, inherited from the Greeks. In examining the effects of tragedy, Hans-Thies Lehmann wonders: “Is theatrical experience solitary or communal? Surely the latter. All the same, the question proves more difficult to answer than might seem at first, for the individual provides the only site of experience that we can grasp, both initially and ultimately.”2 The question of the individual versus the collective takes on a new urgency in the context of social distancing and the public health imperatives of the pandemic. This chapter explores the intimacy afforded by productions that replace togetherness with individualized experience—in their cast, audience, or both—and the various ways in which artists attempt to mobilize that individuality.

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Watching alone—or perhaps with a partner in quarantine—has become the norm for an artistic form that always prized community. The virtual simulation of that communal audience through the chat function or, more ironically, through an “uploaded” audience, both discussed in Chapter 4, attempts to correct for isolation. Yet artists have also explored various forms of address that make a virtue of intimacy and a limited audience, as with Theatre for One’s powerful Here We Are. (As I discuss in Chapter 6, audio theater quickly became another mode of establishing an individualized connection, with everything from vibrant new podcast forms to plays over the telephone.) Over the summer of 2020, some companies attempted to quarantine artists within their own bubble, so that socially distanced audiences could at least receive work made communally and in person. Yet this was not often practicable, and as the windows between waves of contagion shrank with the coming of fall, it appeared increasingly unsustainable.3 Other companies instead focused on a single actor and handmade aesthetics, as in the Chilean Yorick: la historia de Hamlet, with noted actor Francisco Reyes performing from home with a cast of marvelous plasticine puppets, or in A Farm for Meme, with Marlene Beltrán playing opposite stylized puppets representing the green shoots of crops.4 Perhaps the most conservative solution involved broadcasting to a limited audience preexisting plays that required limited interaction among actors, as in the Old Vic’s In Camera series, filmed in an empty theater.5 Yet other, less traditional initiatives chose to engage the audience as actors, whether in brief encounters with strangers or in the safety of their own homes. The limits of individuality are constantly thematized within the work as well as encountered in production: What does it mean to create alone, or to insist on one’s autonomy and individuality in a time of crisis? How to balance the aesthetic affordances of solo work with the need for collaboration in production, on the one hand, and for a broader solidarity, on the other? While the work I discussed in Chapter 4 strove to simulate togetherness, the pieces described here interrogate the limits of what can be achieved, or experienced, alone.



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Closet Drama Joshua William Gelb’s Theater in Quarantine project treats the single performer’s enclosure as a set to rotate, frame, and modify. Gelb began by filming his experimental work and gradually moved to live performance, all while consciously avoiding Zoom. His project’s geometry serves as an implicit riposte to the multiplication of static Zoom boxes in so many productions. The New York-based director and performer is explicit about his experimental goals, posing a series of questions that align closely with those that motivated this book: How can theater practitioners artfully push against these new boundaries of social distance to embrace the limitations of remoteness? Is it possible to make theater in a digital arena that doesn’t sacrifice the act of collaboration or our shared theatrical values: feats of liveness, collective experience, ephemeralness, the protean empty space…6

Gelb’s “theatrical laboratory” for exploring these questions, as befits a New York city lockdown, is a reconfigured 4 × 8 × 2 feet (120 × 240 × 60 cm) East Village apartment closet emptied out, repainted, and converted into a “white-box digital theater.”7 (Gelb has posted an accelerated video showing the process of transforming the closet.8) The simplest of frames is thereby transformed into a multitude of spaces; Gelb describes it as “a shared venue both digital and tangible with a formalized aesthetic integrity.”9 Crucially, the box affords Gelb the possibility of including the whole body, however cramped, within the frame: “The perimeter of the closet makes for a fitting proscenium, while the camera’s fixed frame dispenses with the familiar Zoom close-up for unedited wide-shots accentuating the full-body.”10 If Irwin’s In-Zoom mourned the disappearance of the body from the Zoom box, Gelb’s white box ably restores the performer’s body while acknowledging the limitations of its concentric frames: a closet, in an apartment, in a city under lockdown, in what becomes “a singular metaphor for our own containment.”11 Those limitations prove unexpectedly inspiring, transforming the deprivations of lockdown

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into an unprecedented artistic opportunity: “Time free of competition. Free of FOMO. Free of institutional expectation. Free of marketability. And, however unfortunate the circumstance, here it is. The time for experimentation. The time for play.”12 Beyond the affordances of time, Gelb finds it productive to “reduce [his] palette,”13 rebuilding his repertoire in relation to new constraints and technologies as he transforms confinement into an opportunity for creation. In pieces of increasing length, complexity, and interest, Gelb has gradually tested the possibilities of his reduced stage, expanding the repertoire of digital theater as he moves from improvisational studies to more elaborate distanced collaborations. Since early on, choreographer Katie Rose McLaughlin has collaborated on Theater in Quarantine, as befits a project so focused on the movement of the body—by August she had established herself as a “co-creative director.”14 The progress is swift, the results formally intriguing: “Within weeks these prerecorded etudes yielded longer, rehearsed performances crafted over video-conference with remote collaborators, as well as expansive plans for future live-streams, all aiming to explore the ways live performance and video capture might make a hybrid form all its own.”15 Most pieces make a distinction between Gelb’s bounded space as performer, largely treated as a traditional stage, and the broader manipulation of that entire unit on camera, as it is rotated, framed, or, in the later pieces, superimposed with additional takes of the same performer, so that he appears to defy the law of gravity and interact with multiple versions of himself. Themes of isolation and constraint make repeated appearances, from an early meditation on masks to more abstract reflections on how art might transcend even the direst of circumstances. The foregrounding of the frame renders the work remarkably selfaware and is especially effective as Gelb tackles highly self-conscious writers—Beckett, Kafka, Lem, Borges. Remarkably, all productions through September were created via remote collaboration, with the exception of a single sound designer who entered Gelb’s apartment to run cues for 7th Voyage (discussed below), a particularly complex production.16



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While the tableau-like Cashmere (May 5, 2020) is largely static, the surreal Concerto for Toy Piano (April 6, 2020) tests the possibilities of rotating the box 90 degrees, with a tiny piano increasingly out of reach for the hapless performer in a gas mask.17 In Mask Work (April 29, 2020), written by Dan O’Neil, the stage remains static, while the masked performer is showered in a ghostly stream of particles. The voice-over progresses from the matter-of-fact reminder of the importance of masks for avoiding contagion to a more fervent key: “It will help if you believe in your mask.” As abstract images—viruses, perhaps, or lung scans—are projected behind the performer, the piece moves toward its surreal conclusion. The performer removes his mask as the voice-over intones: “If the mask becomes soiled or damp, or is no longer your face, replace it with a new one.” The interlude poses haunting questions: What is our own face, or our own mask? What would it mean to replace it? And what does the proliferation of masks as prophylaxis mean not only for theatrical performers but for our notion of identity more generally? As EMS Anthony Almojera made clear after Theater of War’s Oedipus, discussed in Chapter 1, the occlusion of the face from human interaction is profoundly alienating, both for the person wearing the mask and the ones watching. The Neighbor (streamed live on April 23, 2020, published April 30, 2020), the first piece performed live, is based on a short story by Kafka. Here Gelb doubles the closet/stage, as the neighbor becomes the mirror-image, at times slightly delayed, of the narrator. In this exploration of paranoia and identity, which is the original and which the copy? Hypochondriac! (1) (July 7, 2020), based on Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, frames the box with the effluvia of TV: grainy, saccharine insurance ads, disingenuous warnings against elder abuse. The performer’s box now includes a black and white TV console, surrounded by lines of TV static. The patient waits simultaneously on hold on the phone and for a doctor to come in, fruitlessly complaining over an intercom. Privacy is elusive as we gaze upon him: the curtain he draws across his body, as his chair becomes a toilet, is completely transparent, in an abundance of overlapping humiliations. The frame

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gradually invades the space, in a visual representation of how a corrupt lawyer (Alex Hawthorn) invades the hypochondriac’s mind. When the patient argues with his daughter on Zoom, the switch to the platform and the introduction of a second actor (Jessie Shelton) feel surprising, even jarring. Though the “Zoom heads” are certainly familiar to us by now, in contradistinction with the full-body view of the white box, they feel weirdly limited, as though someone had sawed off those bodies in a particularly grim magic trick. Gelb underscores how the platform challenges his elderly protagonist, presumably unfamiliar with Zoom: not even his whole face is visible, yet he seems unwilling, or unable, to adjust his screen. Topside (June 25, 2020), by Scott R. Sheppard and inspired by Donald Barthelme’s Game, features two isolated performers in a claustrophobic underground bunker, crammed up against the edges of the space. Sheppard’s character sits in a corner in a gas mask, while the voice-over (by Sheppard) traces Gelb’s designs on the mask and his ruminations about how to surmount the difficulties of confinement. His thoughts soon turn to theater: could they not put on Hamlet with cans as the characters? How would they use the space? “His side is for rehearsal, mine is the stage.” The performance could start with a little speech— “In these unprecedented times”—complete with corny jokes—“These cans have really poured themselves into this production!” (perhaps another reference to Forced Entertainment’s Table Top Shakespeare?) Nostalgia for an evening of theater soon overtakes the sardonic humor of the metadramatic interlude: “Remember cocktail napkins and little half-pours of champagne? Do not cry.” Throughout the piece, the mask serves to emphasize the absolute lack of connection between the two characters. Much as in the earlier Mask Work, Gelb shows how masks complicate empathy, even when they are epidemiologically essential. With The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (streamed live on July 30, 2020, published July 31, 2020) coproduced with Sinking Ship Productions, Gelb’s project achieved something like escape velocity. A strong review by Jesse Green in the New York Times (“some of the new medium’s most imaginative work from some of its simplest materials”) brought Theater



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in Quarantine much greater visibility and an audience in the low thousands.18 Based on the 1957 short story collection The Star Diaries (Dzienniki gwiazdowe) by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, The 7th Voyage is more technically complex than its predecessors, with the character multiplied not just into two, as in The Neighbor, but into countless versions of himself, due to an unfortunate space collision and a series of gravitational vortices. The video design, by Jesse Garrison, emphasizes the play between a limited, endlessly repetitive inside and a limitless outside, terrifyingly unknown, both of which resonate for a viewer in lockdown. With a simple wash of blue light, Egon appears to hover outside his ship, attempting to fix it as his wrench floats away into space. A window framing a view of stars at the back of the white box signals its new persona as a spaceship, while cabinet doors to the side are pressed into service as an elevator into the next screen. (An “animatic rough draft assembled during rehearsals” offers a behindthe-scene glimpse into the complexities of the production.19) The multiplication of Egons, all of whom have little information and even less patience, leads to slapstick and violence: “We’re the only person on this ship!” they shout, as they hit each other with a frying pan. The more of him there are, the more they argue, invoking committees, bylaws, and other wonders of bureaucracy until saved by the child versions of themselves (Figure 13). Director Jonathan Levin achieves this multitude by layering various takes of Gelb as he simulates interacting with himself, creating a mosaic of repeating performers in repeated boxes that are nonetheless about as far from a Zoom display as one might imagine. Footnote for the End of Time (streamed live on August 27, 2020, published August 28, 2020), created by Gelb, Levin, and Alex Weston, who also provided the music, was both more whimsical in its form and more weighty, even metaphysical, in its subject matter.20 Based on “The Secret Miracle,” a 1943 short story by Jorge Luis Borges (in a translation by Gelb himself), it tells of a writer, Jaromir Hladík, arrested by the Nazis when they march into Prague and condemned to death before he has had time to conclude his tragedy, The Enemies. The writer

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Figure 13  Joshua William Gelb in The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, presented by Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions, 2020. Courtesy of Theater in Quarantine.

speaks while immobilized on a white surface, as a hand draws busily around him, in the extraordinary illustrations by Jesse Gelaznik. The hand boxes Hladík in a foreboding frame, annotates the page with his bibliography, sketches the city in the background, and gives shape to the contents of the author’s vivid imagination, from his dreams to the play that preoccupies him (Figure 14). With this minimalist recourse, the dramaturgy powerfully renders the immobilization of the protagonist in his cell as he awaits execution. Only in his mind is Hladík free, as he considers the multiple characters in his play—all iterations of Gelb, as in Egon, gallivanting about the stiff narrator. The writer begs God for time: “if I exist at all it is as the author of this play. I need just a year more.” His wish granted, time freezes into a “sentient stillness” as the firing squad shoots him: this is the “secret miracle” of Borges’s title—a year granted the author, but only in his mind, to complete a play that no one will see. This piece, too, takes on a powerful resonance in a year of quarantine: the Borgesian version of internalized creation is extreme, to be sure, in that no one



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Figure 14  Joshua William Gelb in Footnote for the End of Time, presented by Theater in Quarantine, 2020. Courtesy of Theater in Quarantine.

will see, or even know of, the finished play in Hladík’s head, yet the completion of a work of art, however isolated or invisible, remains an act of resistance, even, and perhaps most poignantly, when that work was intended for performance.21 Theater in Quarantine continues to create at a remarkable pace— as I write this, there are over seventy videos on the project’s site and YouTube channel, and a (virtual) residency at La Mama is leading to new explorations, from alternative performers to multiple closets to pieces written specifically for the project, as with Mute Swan (first performed live November 25, 2020) based on a new text by Madeleine George. The company’s latest production, Heather Christian’s I Am Sending You the Sacred Face (first performed live December 18, 2020)—a drag-show one-act musical on the life of Mother Theresa, which I discuss briefly in my postscript—has received almost 4,000 views in two weeks, and even been reviewed in The New Yorker, which has largely ignored theater during the pandemic.22 This remarkable corpus offers important reminders: even work that features an individual performer (however digitally multiplied) involves the labor of many artists, whether choreographers, musicians,

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or designers, so that Gelb now describes Theater in Quarantine as a “company.”23 Even the most personal and modest of explorations, if successful, eventually necessitates investments not just in collaboration but in the technological apparatus that makes it possible, from cameras to computers to an upgraded internet connection—new hurdles that, to some extent, replace the traditional “gatekeepers.”24 If the isolation of lockdown provided the initial fertile soil for Gelb’s project, its blossoming confirms the essentially collaborative nature of theatrical production.

The One and the Many Christine Jones’s Theatre for One, an experimental one-to-one form that predated the pandemic, adapted quickly to its exigencies and to the urgency of the Black Lives Matter protests. Whereas the prepandemic experience featured an especially constructed mobile performance space for one actor and one viewer—a kind of portable black box reminiscent of an instrument case25—the digital version would provide its own, virtual space for small-scale interaction, with the computer as proscenium and the screen as the fourth wall through which artists and audiences attempt to reach.26 With Here We Are (August 20–October 29, 2020, repeatedly extended), a series of eight newly commissioned micro-plays by BIPOC artists, most of them women, Jones and coartistic director Jenny Koons sought to address in a digital format the audience’s need for “intimate engagement,” while also providing an “active artistic response” to the protests and marking the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US constitution, which granted women the vote.27 Koons emphasizes the joint experience of imagining that the digital experience affords, even as the plays are viewed individually: In this moment of heightened disconnection and national reckoning, we find ourselves processing within our own bubbles, questioning



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within our own bubbles, dreaming within our own bubbles. Here We Are is a window into the minds and hearts of our form’s most exciting artists, a peek into strangers’ longings and dreams and pain as we move through this extraordinary time, together. Together, we listen. Together, we witness the intimate and epic questions we grapple with. Together, we imagine a world beyond this world.28

A key aspect of the togetherness was Here We Are’s virtual waiting room, designed by Mark Downie and Paul Kaiser of OpenEndedGroup and carefully curated by the artistic team (Figure 15). Beyond offering a virtual version of the theater lobby or the line outside Theatre For One’s booth, the waiting room served as a portal, designed to shift the audience’s relation to their computers from the workaday to something more attuned and receptive to art.29 After participants logged in with their ticket code, written directions gently led them to the shared space, then invited them to make their presence known via a cursor bar at the bottom of an empty black screen. Soon the voices of strangers began appearing in their own “bubbles”—text boxes of various sizes and fonts—that hover in the blackness for a few seconds before melting away, in an extraordinarily poetic effect, “like fireflies on the screen.”30

Figure 15  The digital waiting room in Here We Are, 2020. Courtesy of Octopus Theatricals.

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The questions posed by Theatre for One’s moderator, which appear in their own bubbles, further enhanced the meditative, confessional feel: “If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?” “Is home where you live, or where you grew up?” “What is your favorite part of entering the theater?” “Are lessons ever new?” The answers from the virtual room on my visit were personal, even moving—a far cry from the bad behavior that online anonymity often produces. When a viewer shared that they were joining from a location that had been in the news, others were quick to express their concern: How was the violence actually experienced in Portland? How bad was the smoke in Los Angeles? There was little skepticism—the only negative comment during my time on the site was one viewer who, unaware that the actual performance had not yet begun, wondered, “How is this performance for one, maybe more like performance for some?” In general, viewers seemed delighted to encounter a moment of community when they might have been anticipating a one-on-one exchange. Koons’s program note suggests that she was fully attuned to the significance of what has been lost in something as ordinary as entering the theater in a crowd: “we feel the loss of interaction with and conversations with strangers, in the grocery line, on the subway, in a theater lobby. Those mundane conversations and tiny windows into a stranger’s heart, pain, longing, dreams, neuroses.”31 With their thoughtfully designed virtual waiting room, OpenEndedGroup provided Theatre for One with an elegant and evocative alternative to the YouTube sidebar or Zoom chat, offering instead an aestheticized moment of reflection. Although the plays (at least those I saw) occurred in a realist mode, the waiting room reminded the audience that they were entering a carefully considered experience. The eight micro-plays (of which I was able to see five) were written, directed, designed, and acted by people of color, with several of the actors credited as collaborating in the writing process. Some pieces include brief moments of improvisation for the performers, as they ask questions of the viewers and riff on the answers. In other cases, the viewer is addressed but not explicitly asked to respond, and even the



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plays that make room for an exchange work when a viewer is too shy or taken aback to contribute much. In general, Jones explained, viewers understand that they are both visible and audible to the performers during the show, though in some cases, such as those who choose to eat while viewing or call loudly to family members, they seem to have not quite processed the implications.32 The exchange is bidirectional: the audience member appears on the actor’s screen while the actor appears on the viewer’s, yet audiences are now so conditioned to the screen as an impermeable divide that they do not entirely understand the dynamic. Over a century after the birth of film, their obliviousness to the live encounter inverts the credulousness of an audience taken in by the image, from the myth of the audience response to the Lumière brothers’ locomotive, to the new affordances of virtual reality. The experience of connecting with the actor varies with each play. whiterly negotiations, by Lydia R. Diamond, features Nikkole Salter, who is also credited for its creation, and is directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene.33 Given that Salter is herself a playwright, whose own micro-play, Here We Are, gives its name to the entire Theatre for One initiative, her casting as the furious writer in Diamond’s play, figuring out how to respond to notes from her white editor, adds a layer of sharp metadramatic humor. Despite the initiative’s appeals to connection and intimacy, this play is bracing, even biting, in complicating the terms of address. The viewer feels implicated in the writer’s anger at her treatment by the literary establishment (especially if that viewer is white), only to discover that most of the monologue is the writer’s private venting about the notes she has received, in a fantasy version of the conversation she dreads having. However much audiences need to hear the point the writers (both character and playwright) are making, what initially seems an address is actually an internal monologue overheard. There is something destabilizing about the transgression of privacy one seems to have committed, even as the accusation is (partially) dodged: this tirade was not actually directed at me, yet surely it is good for me to hear it. In fact, no audience member can sidestep the

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frustration with racism, which goes far beyond this particular writer’s reaction to her editor’s notes. As Green notes, “One thing you can’t feel, because Salter looks right at you, is that you are a disinterested bystander.”34 Given its metatheatricality, this piece in particular invoked for me the WSYWAT manifesto, with its emphasis on BIPOC artists’ gaze over a white theater landscape. whiterly negotiations ends on a satirical note, as the writer composes herself, puts on a sensible cardigan, and enters the actual Zoom meeting with her editor, in which she is mild and agreeable yet barely gets a word in edgewise. Salter’s Here We Are is the only one of the micro-plays I saw that does not opt for a realist mode, though it nonetheless engages with political and artistic issues.35 Instead, the viewer is faced with a Black space traveler (Russell G. Jones), in his suit, newly arrived at our next planetary home and intent on not replicating the problems of Earth. Making powerful use of the form’s immediacy, Salter covers a great deal in a very brief text. The astronaut swears abundantly, then notices the viewer and immediately anticipates disapproval for his profanity: I didn’t ask to be first up here. But I’m not gon’ come to a—a new muthafuckin’ galaxy!—and be all (a quick gesture for “tight-lipped”, or “refined noticing but not speaking”) (takes off mask) Waiting for other people to validate my existence before I speak Naw. Anyway it’s too late. It happened. Here we are muthafuckas are our first words. Here will be the plaque, “First words spoken by humans.”36

Here we are, then, in whatever speech matches the new circumstances, and however much it may differ from Neil Armstrong, or Abraham Lincoln, or even Alex-ander-Ham-ilton (sung for effect). Salter swiftly moves on from the notions of propriety that restrict Black speech to the environmental crises that threaten all of us on



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Earth. The traveler catches a glimpse of our planet and reflects on our role in its destruction: In a minute, I’ll be able to see her, right? (off of their confusion) To see Earth … I bet she’s, like … healing. Now that we’re gone-gone she’s … Now that we’re here, wherever here is, she’s probably… Humph. Just like a woman … She get better when you go, just to make sure you know you were the problem… humph.

Beyond his chagrin at Earth’s recuperation in our absence, here personalized in a feminist twist, the traveler is particularly concerned to ensure that the encounter in this new place will go better than past versions. We not gon’ roll up in here pretendin’ like we found it Like nothing existed before we arrived and shit That’s rule number two You can’t discover nothing that’s already there And when we meet the next species or whatever We gon’ be humble ‘cause they gon’ teach us how to live here unless our reputation precedes us then they might just kill us but I’m gon’ be like It wasn’t me, man! We wasn’t the ones doin’ all that. And they gon’ be like “Oh, alright,” but in their language, of course And we gon’ learn their language and food and religion and fashion And maybe introduce ‘em to soul music ‘cause Who doesn’t like soul music? And they’ll be like “Ohh, that’s nice. What else you got?”

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Here We Are’s preoccupations extend to indigenous concerns, as it imagines an alternative scene of encounter in a new land, with different rules than those so unfortunately applied on Earth, and an unprecedented mutuality. Humility might serve, and an offering of soul music, as long as humanity’s reputation does not precede it. In the context of the anti-racism protests, the piece also underscores Black contributions to US culture and speculates on how they might come across if actually foregrounded. At the same time, the reminder that culture does not come into existence when a privileged gaze notices it takes on a broader symbolic significance in the context of the belated recognition demanded by artists of color in the WSYWAT manifesto. Metadramatic and resonant with allusions, Here We Are urges the viewer to recognize multiple, overlapping crises. Thank You for Coming. Take Care, by Stacey Rose with Patrice Bell, is more conventional in its form yet devastating in its topic.37 The monologue in this case is from a prisoner, who slowly reveals where and who she is. The address to the viewer is visceral: after describing the “blanketed funk” of the place where she is, the character says: You look like you smell like the sky … In May … After a good rain.

Gradually the prisoner reveals the reason for the visit: to arrange for the adoption of her child, who has been in the interlocutor’s—that is, our—foster care for some time. The prisoner’s gratitude for the care of the child is cut by fierce pride of possession: But what I want you to know. What I gotta say to you is … She’ll never be yours.        Beat. … When the time comes, For that little girl to bring forth her next generation, That generation, Will be me.



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They could print a thousand pieces of paper Sayin what rights I don’t have, And that would still be true..        Beat. She is in your care. She is not yours.

The prisoner’s initial despair gives way to fierce maternal love, no matter how distanced and postponed. Strikingly, it is she who ends the exchange, calling for a guard to terminate the visit, in an attempt to assert whatever dignity she can from her position. Perhaps in an inadvertent move to protect myself from the rawness of Thank You for Coming, I found myself distracted by the fact that my screen was not providing the seamless connection intended—a connection that seemed far more important for this play than for the more meta- and playful whiterly negotiations or even Here We Are. I had failed to anticipate how a second monitor, set up to write this book while watching countless productions, would complicate eye contact. Thus Bell gazed intently at the camera on her end, but I could not meet her gaze, because the monitor I was watching did not house my camera. While this did not impede my experience, it did suggest the fragility of virtual intimacy and the particular challenge of eye contact, despite Theatre for One’s “Herculean” efforts to “stabilize the potential for connection” and ensure a reciprocal gaze.38 I have never experienced Theatre for One in its custom analog box, yet I suspect it is far more difficult to avoid connection in that case, short of staring at the floor. Thus while the goal may be “an intimate theatrical exchange in which actor and audience member encounter each other as strangers and are equally dependent on each other,”39 the exchange actually depends on the seamless alignment of technological elements, which must recede in order to enable the fiction of direct exchange. Jones stresses the importance of not bringing a “divided self ” to the piece;40 yet my experience was born not of divided attention but of the attempt to experience it as fully as possible. (When I watched three more of the plays, I made sure to experience them directly, on a single monitor, which improved the experience of immediacy.)

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Theatre for One’s Here We Are initiative embodies important contradictions of the pandemic moment: designed to be experienced individually, it also addressed a shared political condition and the urgency of solidarity if anti-racism was to find any more permanent purchase. The waiting room that the artistic team envisioned as transition and prologue was, at least for this viewer, one of the most powerful parts of the experience, foregrounding community in a highly effective and aestheticized fashion. The project’s commitment to democratic, anti-elitist access, with free tickets available online and a largely randomized assignment to plays (no signing up for the most famous playwright’s slot, for example—not even Green reviewed Nottage’s play) could not transcend the inherent limitations of the one-on-one form. Glowingly and prominently reviewed by Green, who concluded that the timely virtual production was “not just a substitute version of the earlier experience but, in some ways, a moving improvement on it,”41 the series became a pandemic hit. Though it was extended far beyond its original run, the free tickets continued to run out in mere minutes each Monday, as audiences around the world took advantage of the virtual accessibility. Nonetheless, the company reached far more people than ever before, and Jones envisions Theatre for One continuing to operate in the virtual mode once the pandemic passes, even as they return to in-person performances.42 Virtual theater is a genie that will not go back in the lamp—it makes extraordinary new things possible, while showing the limitations of how theater used to do things.

Subtitles in Search of an Actor Based on an initial version in Turkish by Onur Karaoglu, Read Subtitles Aloud offers a “participatory melodrama”43 of thirteen short recorded “chapters” in which an audience of one provides the sole live element.44 “You are the main character in this story,” the screen reads, followed by the title, which then doubles as instruction.45 The piece immediately



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draws attention to a crucial point—one character in the story does not correspond to an actor on the screen. From the start, this ontological distinction signals an interest in how actors and characters align, particularly when the cast is imagined to transcend the distinction between virtual (all the actors onscreen) and actual (the viewer/ main character). In a series of increasingly sophisticated and reflexive episodes, Read Subtitles Aloud charts how autofiction, which explores the thin line between life and the stories we tell ourselves about it, might be staged across this divide.46 Yet genre fiction (“soap operas, telenovelas, melodrama”), with its techniques for audience engagement and staging interpersonal emotion, remains a key referent.47 The piece trades on the constructed digital intimacy of Zoom while exploring the limits of virtual communication. It also asks important political questions: How is cultural authority distributed across borders? Who gets to speak for whom? More abstractly, what does it even mean to follow directions in order to become someone? By reading the subtitles on the screen, the viewer plays X, a lapsed member of a theater collective who has abandoned their partners— both erotic and professional—for TV writing in Los Angeles. (The pronoun “they” is consistently used to refer to the writer; its gender indeterminacy makes room for any audience member to play X, while also reminding us that “they” might have various objects of desire among the company.) Adapted into English by Karaoglu and Kathryn Hamilton/Sister Sylvester, the series hovers between Pirandellian metadramatic games and theatrical autofiction as it creates the constant illusion of dialogue—a voice onscreen meeting one off-screen, a prerecorded voice meeting one that is live. The piece draws heavily on its creators’ long years of working together, with the parts written for actors with “enough shared history;” except for X, all the characters have the same names as the actors who play them.48 Thus in both form and content, Read Subtitles Aloud occurs in the “intermediate, oscillating space” between life and the (now digital) stage that Mauricio Tossi associates with autofiction.49 As Karaoglu notes,

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The piece comes from when you are saying certain things, like when you are processing them in your brain, you say something and you believe it immediately. I mean, we have subtitles and are conditioning people to think in certain ways. I’m not saying that we are trying to make propaganda, but we want people who say certain things to believe in that, or to acknowledge that as you begin to say words, you believe them. You write yourself.50

At the same time, Read Subtitles Aloud deliberately draws attention to the awkwardness of this process. As Hamilton explained, the timing of the pauses in the actors’ speech plays with the idea of liveness—the goal was never simply to slot the viewer into the piece, but to tease out the “mismatch” or dislocation: is there really communication going on, and who has agency within it?51 As a viewer, I was conscious of a slight overdetermined awkwardness, given the heightened emotional stakes of the exchanges as well as the deliberate clunkiness of the form. It is also discomfiting to become X, with the viewer ever more precisely identified with the character as they become more ethically compromised: “We seed the clues bit by bit, and hopefully by the time you realize you’re the villain, you’re also really invested,” explains Hamilton.52 The first chapter, “Digital Kissing,” which some US viewers found jarring,53 explores the extent to which erotic feeling can be transmitted over the screen, by inviting the viewer to share a digital kiss with Onur.54 As subsequent chapters show, however, the very premise of this initial installment is a source of tension for the company, as they debate whether such an opening is necessary in order to hook the audience or get their piece produced. From this uneasy start, the piece becomes more complex and meta with each installment. In the first few chapters, the filmed characters seem to be directing the viewer, whose lines are either scripted or clearly, even emphatically, delineated (“[Say the time] [Say the weather] [REPLY, TRUTHFULLY]”). As the series progresses, the power gradually appears to shift to the viewer, so that X sometimes directs the characters onscreen. The



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viewer’s script thus simultaneously functions as instructions or stage directions, or perhaps even director’s notes. The oscillation nicely reflects the central conflict, involving authorship and control: Whose idea was the very piece that we are watching—an interactive video experience designed for the pandemic—and who backstabbed whom in order to get it produced? As X chats over Zoom with various members of a collaborative no longer collaborating, the betrayals become more elaborate and pronounced, the power plays more blatant. As Hamilton noted, with X situated in Hollywood the piece explores “who is there and who isn’t, and not only what it means to be geographically isolated, but how where you are determines your power in these relationships.”55 By Chapter 10, “The Contract,” the viewer, as X, becomes the secret presence on a video call, in an attempt to entrap Onur. “I feel like I am Polonius hiding behind the curtain,” X muses, in fine metadramatic form. In Chapter 11, “New Lovers,” one of the disgruntled company members gives X access to the company’s files—represented by a shared screen online—and explains how the company has misunderstood X’s idea. An earlier, less successful version of the piece we are watching appears in the shared screen: “The Triumph of Love: A Quarantine Video Dialogue Series Based On The Play By Marivaux—Working Version—Do Not Share.” (Though The Triumph of Love shares with Read Subtitles Aloud an extraordinarily complex plot of impersonation and erotic betrayal, its inclusion here seems as much red herring as road-not-taken.) The two scenes from the inset version are ridiculous— as though a writer were no longer involved. The subtitles here appear in a different font than at other moments—the typographical signal that these are the lines read in the alternative version of the piece. They return to the original font for a final dispensation, as the inset scenes end: “(You can curse at the computer.)” Yet no sooner does X seem to have gained the upper hand that we are plunged into an entirely different mode. Chapter 12, “Dream,” is visually static and, for the first time, includes no actors onscreen. Instead, a placid external view of ferries crossing a body of water (the Bosphorus Strait, as Karaoglu confirmed) occupies the screen for the

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entire episode.56 The dialogue is in Turkish, the viewer assumes, and the dream voices of Onur and Kathryn remain entirely off-screen. X doesn’t seem to understand them either; as we are within a dream logic, it is difficult to tell. The viewer’s lines as X are full of resentment: “Why do you do this? … Stop this non-sense.” “What are you doing in my dream?” “You are horrible people,” X claims, yet the viewer’s inability to verify this in relation to the dialogue only underscores the undecidability of the situation.57 The episode also gestures toward the larger ideological stakes of the piece, underscoring the imbalance of power between an English-speaking center and its peripheries. Here, the tables are turned, and the usual function of subtitles—to supply linguistic insufficiency— is insistently recalled by its absence. All these subtitles tell us is that we do not understand what is being said.58 In Chapter 13, “End of Season One,” Onur proposes a truce, formally rendered by having the viewer read both X and Onur. X demurs, “At this moment I have no idea why I should be speaking to you, let alone for you.” When Onur eventually persuades X, the viewer (inevitably, and all too comically) asks, “Aren’t you over-dramatizing this thing?” Nonetheless, the chapter proceeds with no sound as the struggle plays out. When Onur proposes that X sing for the two of them instead, X resists anew. The typography changes to italics, presumably to indicate the unspoken: “We have no favorite song anymore … I don’t even care. I guess since you can’t reply to me I have the power.” Onur insists: “by reading the subtitles you do karaoke with me. People will love it.”59 Yet X moves to the brutally metadramatic point: They have consulted a lawyer, to assert ownership of the “first season” we have just watched. “I did the first season together with you,” the subtitles explain, “Even though you weren’t aware of it. You forced me to do it with you. And I recorded all the video calls we had, I will put them online … so people will see the true you. It will be the first season.” X has also planned a second season, excluding Onur but instead affording a green card, which Onur desperately wants, to another member of the company. To rub salt in the wounds, Hollywood actors whom Onur despises will play the second season, and if he tries to continue with



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the idea, Netflix will come after him. The petty private rivalry thereby invokes the domination of smaller players around the world by the US film industry. But X is not done: “You are here as I recorded you,” they explain, “But I reinvented myself through these subtitles. X is now someone that you don’t really know. X is not me.” X’s escape hatch is the viewer’s noose. Writers will always betray everyone, Onur notes, but the creative tussle is not over: “We will make our version in Turkey, and you will be the villain,” he announces. X refuses: talk to the lawyers, he says, or put your protest in the comments section below. The ending is deliberately unresolved: Karaoglu and Hamilton hope to expand upon this first season of Read Subtitles Aloud, in the best telenovela style, and thus continue to explore the role of the audience, as “the strongest element of the performance here.”60 I will be there to play X, unless otherwise instructed.

Home Alone If we cannot come to the theater, perhaps the play will come to us, in various forms of distributed and durational theater that occur on the viewer’s own timeline. Of necessity, solo experience is generally the focus of plays that reach the viewer at home, although occasionally these acknowledge that not everyone is alone in lockdown. While some of these privatized experiences—especially the ones that involve no live contact at all—might strain to engage the audience fully, they attempt to offer a general audience the conceptual, intellectual thrill that had once been the purview of experimental theater. At their most powerful, they mobilize an entirely portable emotional response. Baltimore-based The Acme Corporation’s The Institute for Counterfeit Memory (August–September 2020), a “play in a box” written and directed by Lola B. Pierson, arrived at my house by mail a few weeks after I had filled out a whimsical online questionnaire (“Is it a small world, after all?”), presumably so the box could be

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personalized accordingly. The piece satirizes the commercialization of self-realization, from the questionnaire to the idea that “Acme” might help improve our memories: “You are everything that’s ever happened to you. … A trained professional will work with you to simulate recollection, to make you more you.” If Read Subtitles Aloud plays with the construction of character through utterance, Institute tackles memory as constitutive of the self. The meticulously crafted box, though proudly labeled “Changing what it means to remember,” operates in a different emotional register, offering “puzzle pieces of a play you can never see.”61 Nostalgia comes via a miniature music box, an illuminated snow globe in parts for the audience to construct, a vintage slide (of Tintern Abbey, no less) as the “set” for the play. In a world of almost exclusively digital theater, the whimsical objects take on a particular charge as I remove them from the box and distribute them on my desk (Figure 16). Carefully composed text comes on a mini MP3 player and a series of postcards. A looping set of these conjures the theatrical experience that the “play in a box” imperfectly replaces: at the play if we were in the same room together we would have all remembered something together at the exact same moment. we would have watched each other breathe, and you would have held my heart in your hands as i touched yours. i wish you could have seen it. it would have been brilliant. you would have loved it. at the play.

The audio, for its part, weaves memories narrated by various voices with careful instructions for how to manipulate the materials in the box and metadramatic reflections on how various parts of a performance might operate: “The main function of the voice is to express the



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Figure 16  Box from The Institute for Counterfeit Memory, 2020. Photo by Todd Lynch.

inexpressible.” A periodic chime in the audio signals an idea forfeited or lost, whimsically undermining the supposed efficiency of the process. A robotic voice intones repeatedly, almost as a refrain, “This is normal”—when everything about the play in a box reminds us that nothing is, in fact, normal at all. While Acme provided the tangible material presence of a box, others turned to sequential plays by letter, as with Philadelphia’s Hella Fresh Theater’s quirky Frauenschlläechterei, written by John Rosenberg, or by email, as with Eve Leigh’s Invisible Summer (Royal Court Theatre, London), which thematizes questions of access, ableism, and endurance during the pandemic. Yet others set out to furnish theater for the homebound and locked down by means of scripts alone. The New York

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Public Theater, in conjunction with four influential regional theaters— Baltimore’s Center Stage, Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC, and St. Louis’s Repertory Theater— managed simultaneously to offer distraction for those at home and an important source of income for playwrights, by commissioning Play at Home, a series of short plays for the audience to stage while in lockdown. “We’re asking playwrights to consider writing something incredibly joyful, something that can be read intergenerationally, something that could be fun for young people to read with families,” explained Stephanie Ybarra, artistic director for Center Stage: “The subject is decidedly not the pandemic.”62 By May the initiative had grown to include dozens of regional theaters, a hundred commissioned plays, and over 20,000 downloads.63 While these various worthwhile initiatives did not entirely abandon the idea of liveness, they transferred its burden to the audience. One of the most elaborate at-home scripts I encountered was Last Audience, by New York-based choreographer Yanira Castro and her anagrammatic collective, a canary torsi. Originally conceived in 2018 for live, interactive performance, the piece consists of a series of scores for audience members to perform together, now presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. The pandemic version reinvents Last Audience “as manuals for the creation of your own at-home theater,”64 to be downloaded gratis as a pdf or purchased in a printed version.65 The pdf features an introductory text by Castro that explains the origin of the title: despite its ominous resonance during the pandemic, it actually refers to an unfinished 1918 painting by Artur von Ferraris, “The Last Audience of the Hapsburgs,” depicting the final public act of the Austro-Hungarian Empress Zita as she received war orphans shortly before fleeing Vienna. As Castro notes, while the painting impacted her when she originally saw it in 2018, it seemed all the more apposite in 2020: Something about this painting (perhaps how it captures this split in time, where the painted past of a longstanding and absolute rule is



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confronted with an undrawn and uncertain future) resonated for me in the summer of 2018. And here I am, writing to you in summer 2020, when a reckoning is undeniable. I cannot imagine what our circumstances will be when you receive this in your hands in the fall of 2020, during the hot crosshairs of this year’s election.66

Last Audience is in fact proleptic, as Castro issues instructions to be followed by an audience at home sometime in the future. If the immediacy of the piece thereby suffers, it also becomes more flexible, with several of the twenty-eight scores offering options for either a set number or, frequently, “any number”67 of participants, who enact “rituals of judgment and reckoning.”68 Tableaux vivants, cacerolazos, reenactments of protests, witnessing, a final blessing—these are just some of the many forms of action that Castro scores via text, in a powerful, poetic mix of choreography and script. The “sneak peek” that MCA presented virtually on October 24, 2020, features devynn emory and David Thomson of a canary torsi performing the “Dust” section of the score.69 It offers a version of more traditional viewership, even though, as curator Tara Aisha Willis notes, the overall project is designed to “turn performance on its head and take it back to [audiences’] homes” in the midst of the pandemic.70 As Willis notes, the performance of “Dust” is designed to remind the audience of how distinct their response might be and how liberally the score may be interpreted: “What’s at the heart of performance? What’s at the heart of an audience? What’s at the heart of action and choice? What do we do when we’re given instructions?”—all questions that take on a particular force in a context of pandemic, social upheaval, and protest.71 In “Dust,” emory does not follow the incantatory directions voiced by Thomson in any straightforward fashion—the action is not guided by the voice, although their rhythm is linked. The possibilities for at-home performances of these scores are in fact wide open. Like much of the theater of lockdown, Last Audience thereby asks central questions about what it means to follow directives and what the relationship might be between viewership and agency.

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The text ends with a recipe for arroz con gandules, the Puerto Rican dish that Castro cooked and shared with participants in the live version of the piece—an acknowledgment of sorts of how elusive community proves at a distance, no matter how we script it. MCA held an online dinner celebration as a conclusion for the piece on December 13, 2020, with audiences encouraged to cook at home, yet the sensorial plenitude of cooking and breaking bread is truly hard to replicate via digital means. While solo performance and viewership offered one way to grapple with the effects of the pandemic, the communal was often in the wings. Production generally required collaboration, however distanced, as Gelb was first to insist, and as the seemingly paradoxical transformation of Theater in Quarantine into an actual company born of the pandemic confirms. Viewers who signed up for the supposedly individual theatrical experience of Theatre for One were nonetheless charmed and moved by the chance encounters of a virtual waiting room. The title of the project—Here We Are—insisted on a shared experience even as an audience of one encountered a single actor. Read Subtitles Aloud offered a meditation on the dangers of the ego and of failing to recognize the collective sources of creativity, in a global landscape where authority is unevenly distributed. Finally, the many pieces designed for audiences to experience at home alone offered consolation of various sorts, yet their compensatory quality—the sense of what they were attempting to replace—was often all too present.

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Audio Theater, from Telephones to Podcasts

Early in the pandemic, Helen Shaw wrote a review of audio work for New York Magazine: This moment of wild digital transition is the chance to look at components of performance separately and carefully, to better understand our earth, one mineral at a time. … This week, though, was a good time to try to work out what an audience member gets from just listening. You get deliberateness and introspection, it turns out. You narrow the sensory intake valve, and the pressure does go up. Vision is our fast sense, programmed for a cataract of content; our hearing is slower, tied to the parts of the brain that program deep memory. I wonder if I’ll remember these pieces better than the 10,000 Zoom windows I had open on my laptop last night. I guess I have a lot of time to find out.1

While Shaw’s focus on the aural came early, when digital theater was barely getting underway, audio has remained an important subset of theatrical production in the months since. As companies have grappled with the limitations of lockdown, many have chosen to mobilize the voice in the service of intimacy, or engaged the audience as remote actors, already conveniently distanced. Audio productions—some of them underway before the pandemic struck—take advantage of the phenomenal popularity of podcasts, yet must also push back against an increasingly visual culture. If Zoom focuses the audience on language at the expense of the actor’s body, audio theater takes that process even

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further, requiring an absolute reliance on voices to create an absorbing world, and on the audience’s “slower sense” to take it in. Audio theater is perfectly positioned for lockdown—it can be experienced at home or, for those lucky enough to be allowed exercise, while taking that all-important daily walk. While most pieces involve downloading or simply playing digital files, a few operate in a more retro mode, such as over the telephone, deliberately repurposing banal communication—the phone tree, the conference call—for imaginative purposes. Others enhance the audio experience with material delivered via cellphones, for an immersive experience that acknowledges our intense visuality. The challenge is the extent to which audio can satisfyingly replace our fast sense, in Shaw’s terms, while providing a commensurate experience.

Call (on) Me The pandemic has reinvigorated the telephone as an alternative to the relentless self-display of visual platforms and a welcome dose of embodiment, albeit only auditory, when everything seems reduced to the virtual. As Shaw notes, “Being live on the phone forces you to connect, to focus, without that hellish sensation of being Zoomwatched.”2 Yet there is also the particular hell of bureaucratic pleading, what Shaw describes as “begging for administrative relief ”3 from the unemployment agency, the bank, the landlord, or, in even direr circumstances, the hospital. Not every call features a live human being at the other end—in the spring and summer, the news in the United States featured many accounts of people who had called hundreds of times to inquire about their unemployment benefits, without ever reaching the right bureaucrat. In the wake of the protests for racial justice, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington, DC) created Human Resources (October 1– November 1), an audio experience entirely modeled on the corporate customer service phone tree, adapted “for stranger, more tender use”4 in



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a time of great uncertainty. Pressing 1 for general inquiries, as directed, leads to a robotic-sounding voice that intones: “These are disorienting times. Whether you are looking for self-knowledge or deliverance, the Telephonic Literary Union is here to serve you.” The phone tree takes on existential questions such as what it means to find equanimity in 2020: “To file a claim for unhappiness, press 1.” The right sequence of buttons gets one the “Department of Conscious Rearrangement.” Most memorably, for more information on the operations of racism the phone tree leads to a recording of an implacable Toni Morrison. Although Human Resources is a brief audio skit, it ably dismantles the ordinary operations of commerce, replacing them with an experience both deeper and more whimsical. A Thousand Ways, presented by the New York duo 600 HIGHWAYMEN (Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone), offers a telephone call as the first stage in a gradual process of engagement, a “triptych of encounters between strangers.”5 The company appears particularly ready for the challenges of the pandemic, as they focus on “creating intimacy amongst strangers and illuminating the inherent poignancy of people coming together,” with work located at the intersection of theater, dance, performance, and, notably, civic encounter.6 Yet their mandate is almost uncannily opposed to the actual conditions of performance in 2020: “We want audiences and performers to never lose sight of what’s really going on in our public events, which is people sharing time and space together.” The company seeks to isolate that relation between performers and audience in a shared time and space as the essential component of theater: We’re not after any sort of realism other than the realism of being together in a room. That is transporting enough. Through all of this, we are trying to boil away for audiences all the things that are assumed to be required in a theater. We like story, but it isn’t essential. We like acting, but it isn’t essential. We like words, but even those aren’t always needed. To us, it’s always and only about an exchange between the audience and the humans who are performing.7

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How to adapt these artistic goals to the reality of lockdown and isolation? What are the “thousand ways” in which the company might answer this question, as society itself struggles with how to restore “connection, community, and care”?8 The participatory A Thousand Ways casts the audience and offers a “score of instructions, questions, prompts, and physical directives” to guide participants who have never met before as they create performances for each other.9 The three-part piece begins with “A Phone Call” (ongoing, first presented July 2, 2020, as part of the Festival Theaterformen, Braunschweig, Germany). The piece continues with “An Encounter,” in which two strangers will sit across from each other at a table bisected by glass, and, finally, “An Assembly,” in which those who participated in the earlier stages of the process will convene to follow a shared script.10 The sequence—from the purely auditory to the visual to the fully communal—traces a path out of the isolation of lockdown. At the same time, the temporal gap between the various parts insistently recalls the endless belatedness imposed by the pandemic: When will it finally be safe to emerge, much less to gather? As Last Audience (Chapter 5) also asks us to consider, how can our scripts for communal existence be reconstituted after such a hiatus? The many months of lockdown and the resistance to health directives in parts of the United States have significantly eroded the sense of trust and of common ground; while political protest and celebration have brought people together, they have only exacerbated factionalism. As an audio piece designed to help two strangers “make themselves visible to each other,” “A Phone Call” does some of the initial work of rebuilding connection. Two strangers join a conference call and are then guided by a carefully calibrated robotic voice in choosing roles as “A” and “B” to follow its directions. “This is not a conversation,” it explains, “it is a way to see one another.”11 Although some instructions (“count backwards from seventeen, alternating numbers”) involve both A and B, most of the piece consists of different, highly evocative questions asked of one or the other: “Who made you who you are?” “What do you know about that person that others might miss?” “Who have you carried?”



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The appeal to an imaginative connection in the absence of actual shared space, or even a visual connection online, enlists the participants’ empathy and imagination. As I considered my own answers—itself an emotional process—I tried to form a picture of my interlocutor from her memories of her childhood, her talents, the objects she described in her room. As Browde and Silverstone explained in their program notes (also, cleverly, in a call-in audio format, with its own phone tree), they deliberately set out to complicate the categories through which we usually assign identities, offering a momentary alternative and a chance to envision different points of connection.12 The piece gradually scripted my fellow caller and me into action together—lost in the desert, hiking for help, sitting around a campfire. “Someday you’ll tell a story about this,” the voice promised at its most optimistic; “What will become of us?” it asked in a more apprehensive vein. The feeling of empathy, even amid such a fragmentary and limited connection (“words are not always enough”), was intense—a reminder of how natural it feels to try to find common ground with each other. When invited at the end to state one thing we would remember about what the other had said, my interlocutor tried to connect our stories of diaspora. In a time of intense political strife, “A Phone Call” managed to recuperate a more positive meaning of partial—the fraction that is knowable or communicable, and which only leaves us wanting more of another person. At the same time, and like a number of other pieces discussed throughout this book, it raised the question of what it means to follow a script in our interaction with others—why limit ourselves to what the robot asked, why respond to “her” at all, why play by the rules? What if solidarity actually lay not in carefully taking turns but in ignoring the robotic, arbitrary instructions? The absence of a live interlocutor, however many digital traces of him endure, is the central point of Dante or Die’s User Not Found. The piece offers an immersive experience that is primarily aural, yet activates the cellphone as a mediated version of the self, much as in Grumelot’s Game Over (Chapter 3). When the piece was first offered in 2018 at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in various international presentations

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since, it was a “part live, part digital” experience in a café.13 Given the lockdown, it was reimagined as a “video podcast”—entirely portable and individual (first available September 10, 2020), with both versions written by Chris Goode, directed by Daphna Attias, and performed by Terry O’Donovan.14 Although User Not Found had always dealt with death, it took on new significance during the pandemic, as so many experienced loss and the transmutation of lived experiences into purely virtual formats. An incisive review from the 2018 Fringe noted, “It’s a reflective piece about dealing with death and living online—two different kinds of absence wrapped up in one.”15 Those interconnected absences became even more pronounced in 2020. The review continues, in a vaguely sanctimonious tone that reads very differently now: “Technology creates a false sense of intimacy—as cosy as a whisper in your ear— but User Not Found reminds us that it’s not the real thing.”16 From our current vantage point, this is no longer an admonition to live offline, but a reminder of our limited options amid recurring waves of infection. Similarly, scholar Lib Taylor’s description of the 2018 piece becomes almost poignant in 2020: Dante Or Die are concerned with finding ways to enhance somatic participation by deploying more intimate and accessible technologies, functional in unremarkable places. With User Not Found, they use the ubiquitous technologies that have become kinds of bodily prosthetic.17

During the pandemic, those “bodily prosthetics” have, of necessity, become for many the primary mode of interaction with others. User Not Found narrates in the first person the excruciating experience of a man whose former lover has died unexpectedly, leaving him as his digital executor.18 Although Terry hasn’t seen Luka in six months, he is suddenly confronted with the responsibility for managing all of Luka’s social media accounts and deciding how and when to close them down. Unlike in Game Over, the experience of User Not Found is primarily about the audio—although the viewer watches prerecorded screen captures and images on YouTube, the visual elements are often



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designed precisely to resist understanding, as though to render visually Terry’s altered state. Thus texts come in to console him for a loss he is still unaware of; photos are hazy blurs that he seems to be describing through tears, or that are perhaps fading in light of his shock, or in anticipation of how memories erode. Even as he describes his memories of the images in minute detail, Terry repeats in increasing despair, “I can’t picture it.”19 The through line is Terry’s voice, and his anguish at trying to match his own memories of Luka with the faint traces that the relationship has left in his former lover’s social media posts. The audio turns to the surreal—a chilling series of roars—to render the “lioness” of anguish that stalks Terry. When the piece reaches most decisively beyond the aural, at its conclusion, the transition indicates Terry’s first steps on the path to healing. As he describes how overwhelming it is to graze the hand of another person who is alive—even if it is the scowling barista who hands him his daily tea at the café—Terry urges us to share the frisson of humanity by putting our own fingers on a hand pictured on the screen, in an extraordinarily moving moment. While aurality and visuality are ably semanticized to emphasize interiority versus exteriority, isolation versus connection, touch marks the emotional climax of the piece.

Podcast/Play Unlike A Thousand Ways or User Not Found, a number of 2020 productions focused exclusively on audio, for maximum portability. In April, Playwrights Horizons in New York announced a series of short plays for a new podcast series entitled “Soundstage: Theater for Your Ears.” Importantly, this “anthological, scripted fiction series of portable stories” was “written specifically for the ear, not translated or recorded live from the stage.”20 While the series had been commissioned in 2019, and is expected to continue even after the pandemic is over, it was launched a few months ahead of time given its extraordinary timeliness once the theaters closed down. Playwrights Horizons, which focuses on

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promoting the work of contemporary US playwrights, had noted “the new explosion of audio as a medium” and the ferment in the world of scripted audio storytelling, podcasts, and so forth.21 Their goal was to develop work imagined for audio, rather than translating preexisting plays into an audio format: “We’ve been really careful to not ever call these radio plays,” Adam Greenfield, associate artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, explained in an interview to the New York Times (NYT): “Radio drama, to me, connotes a live event that’s recorded in front of an audience with a foley artist who may or may not be banging a couple of coconuts together.”22 Implicit in Greenfield’s distinction is that these pieces were always imagined for individual listening, as “portable stories.” This makes it even more striking to encounter Jordan Harrison’s Play for Any Two People, perhaps the most inventive piece I experienced in the series.23 As the title suggests, the audience of two simultaneously serves as the cast, for a very particular kind of immersive experience. The two participants listen to separate tracks, which they must launch at the same time. (Despite a few false starts in my household, this is actually quite feasible for the amateur.) Each one then hears both stage directions and lines to repeat; if all proceeds according to plan, the play gradually unfolds, following the two separate sets of instructions received by podcast. The experience of simultaneously acting and viewing a play, from beginning to end, is quite unusual—unlike momentary audience participation in a play that clearly exceeds that participation, here the entire play is what you produce, in an even more fully scripted version than in “A Phone Call.” Unlike Last Audience, Play for Any Two People is no participatory ritual—instead, it offers a highly abstract reflection on the nature of identity and what it might mean to have a single mind distributed into two personas. The actor-participants experience the play as a kind of riddle, as they attempt to decipher what exactly is the relationship between them: a damaged mind speaking to itself makes for a riveting, disorienting conversation. (Despite a title that touts the need for collaboration between two people, one could argue that this is very much a “solo” play.) The tightly scripted nature



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of the experience raises important questions of agency and free will. Yet despite being scripted the process is also irreproducible: while one’s performance might conceivably be smoother for having rehearsed, the essential experience of confusion and gradual understanding cannot be replicated beyond the first attempt (with my sincere apologies to readers for giving away too much here). Outtakes, by Qui Nguyen, takes audio into the realm of the metadramatic, by emphasizing the partiality of any account. The playwright is interviewing his parents, supposedly for a play about their experiences in Vietnam.24 (Nguyen’s acclaimed 2016 play, Vietgone, takes on the Vietnamese refugee experience from Saigon in 1975 to resettlement in the United States and ends with a scene between the “Playwright” and his father.) Outtakes mimics found interview tapes, which someone fast-forwards through to great effect. The father keeps insisting he wants to be played by Harrison Ford (“whites love playing Orientals,” he insists). The mother, for her part, insists the father cannot be trusted to tell the story on his own, loudly runs the vacuum, and slaps the exasperated playwright for disagreeing with her (she takes karate at the senior center). She turns to allegory (“In Vietnam, long ago, when I was very small, there was a monkey and a tiger … Tiger was very lonely, because it never listen to Mommy and Daddy”), to the playwright’s disbelieving dismay. More seriously, the parents steadfastly refuse the idea that their experiences can be reduced to the war. They want to tell funny stories about learning to change diapers or not understanding what it means to “ground” a teenager: “Our lives are more than just the years we fought.” The conversation becomes heated as they resist the narrative they assume the playwright is trying to impose: “War came to us … You need to stop thinking you know anything … 1968 was not a good year, but not for the reasons you think.” Devastatingly, the mother accuses the playwright of mining them for material, to make his way in a theatrical world where white audiences are in charge: “You are tired of people only seeing you as funny writer … This stuff too sad for old man and old woman to recount just to help you write a serious play that

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white people will like.” The audience’s awareness that Nguyen in fact wrote a play much like the one he is researching in Outtakes adds a rich layer of metadramatic irony here. Yet even without any awareness of the playwright’s biography, the “found interview” conceit foregrounds the immediacy and freshness of the material, while making the play seem complete as audio. Unlike audio pieces that seem to cry out for a visual dimension, Nguyen’s Outtakes conjures a complete world, experienced in its original and obvious form.

The Public Ear If Playwrights Horizons Soundstage series was content to reach audiences at their most private and individual, The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare on the Radio attempted to make audio theater address the res publica. The Public has a long tradition of underscoring the resonance of Shakespeare for the current moment; it was widely criticized by the right for its June 2017 production of Julius Caesar, which clearly invoked Trump in the titular character. When it became apparent that in 2020 it would be impossible to hold The Public’s extraordinarily popular annual season of Shakespeare in the Park, which routinely presents some of the strongest Shakespeare productions in New York at the outdoor Delacorte Theater, the company turned to a vibrant audio alternative, fully attuned to the social upheavals of the late spring and early summer in the United States. For their pandemic version of Richard II, the theater collaborated with public radio station WNYC to produce an audio recording, directed by Saheem Ali and presented as a “serialized broadcast in four parts” (premiered July 13–16, 2020).25 “From open air to on the air!” the promotional materials announce, emphasizing the desired continuity of accessibility and relative informality between the two versions.26 Ali’s production emphasized the contemporary resonance of Richard II for a moment of deep social upheaval:



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“A fractured society. A man wrongfully murdered. The palpable threat of violence and revenge against a broken system. Revolution and regime change. This was Shakespeare’s backdrop for Richard II. I’m exceptionally proud of this production, recorded for public radio with a predominantly BIPOC ensemble, led by the extraordinary André Holland,” said director Saheem Ali. “It’s my hope that listening to Shakespeare’s words, broadcast in the midst of a pandemic and an uprising, will have powerful resonance in our world.”27

Beyond casting actors of color in most roles, Ali contextualized the various sections of the play via conversations with BIPOC critics and scholars. Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker joined Ayanna Thompson and James Shapiro in prefatory discussions, while interviews with the cast considered what it means to stage the play in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the protests for racial justice, and the repressive response by both the Trump administration and local law enforcement. Shakespeare’s text was carefully and deliberately transformed into a podcast. A key insight was to recognize how difficult it would be for the audience to remain engaged for the entire length of the play; breaking the text up into four sections both made it more manageable for modern attention spans and created the space for the supplementary materials. These not only serve to explicate the play and identify its resonance but also humanize it by allowing the actors to reflect on their characters. Also important was the decision to add a narrator (Lupita Nyong’o) in judiciously timed interventions. The resulting version actually centers us on the text; as Robin Kello notes, “the radio drama heightens the audience’s attention to language, allowing us to truly ‘hear’ the play, as Elizabethan theatergoers said.”28 At every level, the production was intently focused on questions of power and representation. Ali explained to Cunningham that, having decided to cast Holland in the title role, he could not imagine anyone other than a Black woman taking power from a Black man, hence his decision to cast Miriam A. Hyman as Bolingbroke.29

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Although Richard II is one of the least accessible of Shakespeare’s history plays, and not often produced in the United States, The Public’s audio version gambles on an audience sufficiently entranced by the actors’ voices, and supported by the ancillary materials, to see the production through. If anything, the new format productively destabilizes the text, giving the last word to the narrator, who poses a question for the ages and urgently for the now: “Has justice been served?”

Walking and Talking Spanish company [los números imaginarios] first developed their immersive promenade experience Quijotes & Sanchos for Madrid, in the brief late summer respite from the pandemic (September 24– October 24, 2020). At the time, I commissioned the company to adapt the piece for the LA Escena festival of Hispanic classical theater in Los Angeles, which I direct—the sole embodied experience in what otherwise became an entirely digital program. My account here is largely of the piece as I experienced it in Los Angeles on November 15, 2020, and of our efforts to translate it to a new city, testing the limits of its portability.30 [los números imaginarios] has a long history with participatory theater, and the Madrid experience of Quijotes & Sanchos relied at least in part on simultaneity and the participants’ awareness of others in the group, paradoxically present even as itineraries diverged over the course of their walk. The piece was individually experienced via audiotape on a very retro Walkman, yet the twenty participants met at the Teatro de la Abadía, which had commissioned the piece, launched their walk from a shared point of origin, and returned to the same point. For this original version, the company stressed the piece as a response to the pandemic: “Es nuestra respuesta como compañía a estos tiempos de incertidumbre y miedo. A nuestra necesidad de salir a la calle, de reencontrarnos”31 [“It is our response as a company to these



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times of uncertainty and fear. To our need to be out on the street, to meet again.”] The piece bills itself as a return to theater, despite its ambulatory nature: Quijotes & Sanchos es regresar al Teatro para armarte y caminar en un mundo nuevo. Es permitirse “ser otro/a” durante una tarde … Como espectador / oyente decidirás cuál es tu recorrido, cuál será tu deriva personal e íntima por la ciudad, por lo que cada vez que lo hagas será diferente.32 [Quijotes & Sanchos is to return to the Theater to arm yourself and walk in a new world. It is to allow yourself to “be another” for an afternoon. As spectator/listener you will decide what your itinerary is, what your personal and intimate wandering through the city will be, so that it will be different every time you do it.]

Beyond transforming the audience into would-be knights-errant or squires, the piece stresses its focus on “Cervantes’ questions, which now become ours:” Qué es ser Quijote o Sancho hoy en día, qué identidad tengo y cuál podría tener, qué es acompañar y cómo lo hacemos, qué mundo recorremos y cómo modificarlo a través de mi mirada. Hoy más que nunca. [What does it mean to be Quijote or Sancho nowadays, what is my identity and what could it be, what does it mean to accompany someone and how do we do it, what world do we traverse and how can I modify it with my gaze. Now more than ever.]33

Thus although it involves walking through the city, much of Quijotes & Sanchos is introspective, based as much on the questions pondered while listening on the walk as on what was encountered along the way. The focus on deeper questions rather than momentary encounters makes Quijotes & Sanchos more portable than it might otherwise be as a piece of promenade theater. For the Los Angeles version, the Spanish company conferred with their local translators to build in references specific to the city: Los Angeles as a locus of self-transformation and

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idealizing myths of the self; the Hollywood version of heroism that animates superhero stories; the car as the armor Angelenos put on every day. Yet the overall experience remained focused on the central questions that the company took from the novel. In Los Angeles, there was no central meeting place, given the unpredictability of the public health situation and the challenge of identifying a single point of origin in a city of its characteristics. Instead, audience members received digital audio files via the Telegram app, with whimsical written instructions and audio voiced by different members of the company. Each participant began the experience at home, contemplating what might animate their quest and how they would prepare for adventure. What to wear? What to carry as an amulet? What book or recording to protect, in case anyone tried to destroy one’s library while one was away? Participants then left their own houses on foot (though driving was offered as an alternative) to find their own version of Quijote’s inn and the Sierra Morena in Los Angeles neighborhoods. They were invited to share their experience via photos and texts on a separate Telegram channel, although toggling between instructions and reports tended to break the immersive flow. Even as the multiplicity of Quijotes and Sanchos, as characters, allows each participant to inhabit the texts (both novel and audiowalk) in their own way, the impermeability of the piece nonetheless makes a strong argument for the universality of Cervantes. Whimsical episodes imagine Don Quijote in letters found in a Japanese bookstore, or in the Australian outback, read obsessively by a long-distance trucker. These combine with the participants’ own experience to suggest a ubiquitous presence. Perhaps fittingly, much is left to the imagination. Although it occurs in the city, Quijotes & Sanchos is not particularly about place. Instead, it largely abstracts from the world before it to explore how participants make meaning or impose it on the world. Its individuality and portability serve the theater of lockdown, globalized by the pandemic, even as it disregards its setting in the service of its story.



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Facing the Absence An interesting variation on the audio play was the intimate production of Neil LaBute’s True Love Will Find You in the End at Denizen Theater (New Paltz, NY, October 8–November 22, 2020), directed by J. J. Kandel.34 Originally written for an outdoor production with live performers, the piece was adapted as a result of the pandemic, with the decision made early on to avoid Zoom and integrate the audience in some way. In the resulting production, a black box theater sat eight audience members per performance, masked and arranged at a safe distance around the perimeter of the room, two per side. The two actors recorded their lines at home, and the play was delivered entirely via voice-over. A minimal installation by local artist Marcele Mitscherlich occupied the center of the stage. This sculptural element suggested interlocked wedding bands, with an oculus above from which drops of water dripped onto the ground, while the placement invoked also the fire around which a group might gather to hear a story.35 Different tonalities for the lights as the two characters spoke—blue for the man, pink for the woman—helped guide the ear, as they related the story of a brief affair and its aftermath in the stifling fishbowl of working at home during the pandemic. Kandel stressed the attention to layering light and sound, with speakers placed strategically throughout the space: “I did not want the show to feel like something that could be had with a pair of earbuds at home.”36 As Jesse Green notes in his NYT review, no matter how good the actors’ voice work, “I found it impossible not to miss their bodies. If characters are going to love and lie, you want to see them do it.”37 Yet Green soon finds a compensatory solution: To correct for that, as perhaps LaBute and Kandel intended, I began unconsciously but then deliberately to associate each voice with someone in the tiny audience. The “wife” sat across from me, often twirling her hair. The “husband” was cater-corner to her until, oops,

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he fell asleep. Whether that was marriage I cannot say—but it was, finally, theater.38

The absence of actors as the audience contemplates each other across largely empty space extravagantly marks the spot where performance would have occurred. Green’s need to assign the voices to the bodies before him, however improbably, suggests the limitations of audio, particularly for an audience newly returned to the theater. Although, as Shaw argues, narrowed sensory intake can lead to “deliberateness and introspection,” for Green the staging of that deprivation seems to have exacerbated it without particularly compensating for it. One might also imagine an audience that sized each other up more fully, in the kind of frank, open survey of strangers that might lead to encounters such as the play relates, yet that did not seem to be the case for the audience on the video I consulted—instead, the viewers seemed uncomfortably on display and eager to disappear into their hoodies. As Kandel explains, “It took a few audience members a moment to fully process a show without live performers (we did make this fact very clear in all our marketing materials), but they ultimately came around to listening” (Figure 17). “It was interesting to observe the varying degrees of

Figure 17  Audience, preshow in True Love Will Find You in the End, 2020. Photo by Sarah Cronk, for DENIZEN Theatre.



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discomfort with sitting still, and being observed. Some people clutched or fidgeted with their cell phones. Others simply closed their eyes and let the story unfold.”39 On the video I consulted, the production feels very spare, given how little the audio offers beyond the two voices—at one point one of the actors draws attention to the sound of breathing, but overall the few background sounds (birds chirping and so forth) are simply used to indicate location. The tension builds as the female character increasingly appeals to the audience, without ever specifying who her addressee is: “Please tell me what to do.” “Please believe me.” At certain moments the speakers seem to hear each other, or even share a conversation, yet at other points their monologues run in parallel. On the video, the onstage audience seems exhausted by the end, but then revives and congregates around the central scenic element, to peer at the oculus and ponder what the falling drops might signify. The affordances of audio are limited, as this inquiring audience reminds us: though it may see us through a dry spell, we want to see it rain.

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Distanced Theater: Reinhabiting the City and Beyond

Part of what has made Covid-19 so damaging to in-person theater is the virus’s ability to spread through tiny drops that can remain in the air for hours. As the science on transmission became clearer over the course of 2020, and the focus shifted from fomites (transmission through touch) to airborne droplets and aerosols, it also became obvious that indoor performances would remain among the most dangerous of activities, no matter how often handrails and seats were disinfected. The distinction between outdoors, where risk could be safely and inexpensively managed through social distancing and masks, and indoors, where much would depend on the possibility of adding ventilation, became readily apparent. By late summer in the Northern Hemisphere, social and cultural activities outdoors had come to seem like an attractive alternative for a population starved of human contact. The general expectation that fall would bring colder temperatures and a resurgence of the virus—in places where summer had offered any respite at all—added a sense of urgency. Theater outdoors—in streets and courtyards, on wagons and benches, and even beyond the city—became an important outlet for practitioners and audiences alike. In Europe, even as some houses were allowed to reopen with stringent rules to preserve social distancing, productions nonetheless continued to explore digital versions, given how radically capacity was reduced and the recognition that some patrons, especially those in high-risk groups, would not readily venture to the theater.1 In Montréal, urban distanced theater quickly turned its eye to what had and had not changed due to the pandemic—gentrification, urban

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alienation, the fragility and delight of neighborly ties. In Los Angeles, I experienced the ironic juxtaposition of a distanced piece about global warming that could only be accessed by car, and a dystopian meditation on future social arrangements via a subterranean rehabilitation of the drive-in. Even when artists managed to navigate the closures of the theaters, the pandemic dictated the “performance geography” within which work occurred, establishing both the conditions of possibility and its limitations.2 Given the constraints, artists increasingly situated their work outside traditional theatrical spaces, or even outdoor spaces typically devoted to live performance (such as “Shakespeare in the Park”). Instead of seeking the largest possible audience, companies sought to identify spaces where not too many people could congregate, enabling experiences at once public and separate. For the sake of public health, they worked at least partly against the grain of urban theater. This led to a number of different strategies, from limited advertising and pop-up performances, to the use of headphones to enable outdoor audiences to hear even as they positioned themselves at a distance, to a privileging of spaces with built-in distancing or limitations. Theater practitioners activated private or semiprivate spaces (balconies, courtyards), especially in apartment buildings, to safely offer physically distanced performances in dense urban environments. They used the car as a ready-made private space, or even went far beyond the city. Promenade theater, which brings participants together for an immersive experience that moves through a location, was forced to forgo large groups and focus instead on individualized experience or restricted numbers as it probed the limits of the theatrical. Strikingly, theater also harnessed older traditions of participatory and urban performance, from the Spanish corral de comedias—an outdoor theater configured in the space between buildings—to the wagons of the English morality play, to make theater in nontraditional urban spaces. In toto, this work raises important questions: what counts as public space when congregating is prohibited or discouraged? How must site-specific work evolve when public space is itself deserted, or cordoned off?



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Writing this chapter underscored for me the extraordinary access to performance that digital theater provided during the pandemic. While I was able to see some of the Los Angeles performances in person (or participate in them, as the case may be), my repertoire for this chapter is obviously far more limited by the vicissitudes of geography and distance than any other in the book. For most performances beyond Los Angeles, I depended on the companies’ commitment to recording and disseminating their work, or on the simultaneous streaming of a performance that occurred before a live audience. Because the move to digital has so radically underscored the question of access, even the companies discussed here—pioneers in their attempts to return to theater with an in-person audience via socially distanced productions— have in many cases simultaneously produced digital versions of their work for those who could not attend. When I first imagined this book, in the early months of the pandemic, the dichotomy between digital and distanced theater seemed clear. I now recognize a more complex overlap and interaction between the categories, with digital technology used to enable distancing even for in-person audiences and expanding circles of audiences accessing the work in different modes.

Courtyards In Chapter 4, I discussed Mexican company EFE Tres’s use of Snapchat lenses to enhance the virtuosic transformations of a single actor, Fernando Villa, in the interlude Los habladores. By contrast, their El merolico desde su balcón (which roughly translates to The Mountebank from his balcony), presented live in Mexico City on May 17, 2020, was simultaneously of-the-moment and deliberately lowtech.3 While the Merolico series predated the pandemic, this version reanimated the figure of the mountebank to show how itinerant performance can inhabit private spaces, effectively transforming them into public stages. Villa performed in the central courtyard of his apartment building, in the Colonia del Valle neighborhood

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Figure 18  Fernando Villa in El merolico, 2020. Photo by Patricia Soto, courtesy of EFE Tres.

(Figure 18). Although the piece was streamed, the primary audience was made up of Villa’s neighbors in the surrounding apartments, who viewed the performance from their own balconies and windows.4 As producer Allan Flores explained, the piece was born of the simple need to make theater: after several weeks of lockdown, Villa proposed the idea of playing in the courtyard. The initial goal was simply to provide his immediate neighbors with much-needed relief; the company then decided to stream it simultaneously and thus began its first experiments with digital theater.5 The streamed version is filmed from above, reproducing the point of view of a live viewer. As the piece begins, we can see the cars in their carports and the unadorned space of the courtyard, furnished simply with some stands on which hang various coats and hats. The camera occasionally pans up to show the neighbors arrayed above the courtyard, watching from their own apartments. The performer interacts with them often, and occasionally addresses those watching the streaming version. He plays dozens of characters over the course of an hour, his minimal wardrobe and considerable talent achieving what the lenses approximate in the Snap Camera version.



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Although the performance may seem like extraordinarily elaborate busking, Villa makes a point of connecting it to the long history of Hispanic classical theater and the corral de comedias. In the time of Cervantes, he explains at the end, performance spaces were originally just empty lots, where companies put on comedias (full-length plays, whether comic or tragic) and entremeses (interludes) while neighbors watched from their balconies. In this case, of course, the simultaneous streaming meant that the performance was accessible both to the most immediate audience, who did not even need to leave their apartments for live theater, and to an extended audience from as far afield as Canada, the United States, and various cities across Mexico.6 If El merolico harks back to the Golden Age, Gemma Lawrence’s Sunnymead Court (September 24–October 11, 2020) activates the apartment courtyard in a fully contemporary idiom.7 Presented by Defibrillator in association with The Actors Centre (London, UK), the production took place in the actual Tristan Bates Theatre soon after government restrictions on indoor theater were lifted on August 15. As director James Hillier explains, the challenge when The Actors Centre asked Defibrillator to come up with a “socially distanced theatre experiment” in May 2020 was to imagine what such a play should look like.8 Lawrence adds, “the brief was both simple and seemingly impossible. How can we create a piece of Covid-secure theatre, that could serve as an experiment or blueprint for other theatre-makers going forward?”9 Lawrence, an actor writing her first produced play, decided to focus on offering a “tonic,”10 so that the first “intrepid audience” to come back to the theater would encounter a positive message.11 At the same time, she set out to emphasize the particular challenges of the lockdown for LGBTQ+ people, many of whom were forced back into hostile living situations, as well as for those dealing with mental health issues.12 Although Sunnymead Court was designed for the actual theater, live streaming was always imagined as a parallel dimension for the production. As Lawrence explains, streaming had already transformed the delivery of the theatrical experience in the UK and

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beyond: “Overnight, theatre became accessible to millions. With some (not all) barriers removed, British theatre found a whole new audience, and that wasn’t something we were prepared to lose with this production.”13 Although everything ultimately went as hoped, there were plans in place to record and stream exclusively if necessary, given the highly unstable and unpredictable public health situation.14 Lawrence also wrote Sunnymead Court to be portable, so that it could be produced in other theaters, in site-specific locations, or even “in the middle of a field.”15 The rehearsal process observed social distancing rules: the two actors formed a bubble, which they maintained throughout the production, and there were strict protocols for the rest of the production team: separate green rooms and bathrooms, filtered air, masks, and social distancing.16 When it opened in late September, the production played simultaneously to a reduced, socially distanced, masked audience of twenty-eight, and to an online audience via streaming. As the press release announced, this was simply “acknowledging the new normal.”17 The streamed experience varied in significant ways from the production in the house and offered an early glimpse of how live theater may eventually make its return via multiple and even simultaneous modes of delivery. To state the obvious, the international audience for this small-scale London play, which was even reviewed in Broadway World,18 would not have been possible without the streamed version. Although Lawrence’s play was intended for a theater, the urban experience of the pandemic is at the heart of her text. Set in two tower blocks that face each other, the play reflects on how urban life involves a performance of the self, even for the most reclusive among us, and on how immense even the smallest distances can appear when we are isolated. Marie (played by Lawrence herself), an anxious copywriter, feels her body disappearing as her life moves increasingly online in her apartment, with music on the balcony providing a limited respite from her grim solitary routine. She is not helped by her material: she composes ads encouraging others to relinquish bothersome (or perilous) human contact by moving all their activities onto the web. As she writes copy



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“On one thing only: how the world is moving online and leaving the face-to-face behind,”19 Marie comes to believe her own hype: “Human touch does not sell. It is scary, dirty, unsafe. I live my life behind a screen now. I’ve become a hologram, or just disembodied head and shoulders. I can feel bits of my body slowly pulling apart and floating away.” As the play begins, the different modes of audience experience reflect its thematics. In the theater, Marie first appears as a face projected onto a large screen behind her, while the audience is faced with her back “for about 20 minutes”20—or halfway through the play. The refusal of connection with an audience eager to encounter a live performer is deliberate, their disappointment feeding into the construction of Marie’s character. The online audience, meanwhile, who are already in the digital world that Marie frequents, experience her face from the start. In full contrast with the digital Marie, the gregarious, charismatic Stella (Remmie Milner) bounds onto the stage. As Lawrence’s stage directions put it, “A real live human. She is vibrant and full of energy.” Across the courtyard from Marie, Stella has moved back in with her homophobic ailing mother, her adult life on hold during the pandemic as she longs for human interaction: “PEOPLE. Hot sweaty people. Yeah fuck I miss them.” The song that Marie blasts every day, like clockwork, draws Stella’s attention from her own tower block, as the women gradually move toward an impassioned connection. The fact that Marie is white and Stella is Black is treated as matter-of-factly as is their queer attraction. In this courtyard courtship, communication is delightfully analog. The two first really notice each other as they rush home during a hailstorm, joining in an impromptu, ecstatic dance from their safe distance. (There is a great deal of violent weather in the play, suggesting a concern with global warning as an insistent backdrop to the pandemic.) Marie plants red geraniums to match the ones on Stella’s balcony, without knowing they are her mother’s. Stella wears her bright red top to acknowledge the gesture. It takes the chatty postman, who cannot quite pull off the impersonality of

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lockdown mode, to finally introduce the two. When a power outage during yet another storm takes out Stella’s mother’s ventilator, Marie tries to save the day by running to the apartment across the way. Her generosity is rendered unnecessary when the power returns, however, and she never quite runs into Stella. Nonetheless, this breathless excursion brings Marie fully into the now and into the space of the audience: Marie My Red Lady sees me for a second, then disappears with her Mum indoors. I look up at the sky, the moon, look at my feet on the ground, the people passing by. I could reach out and touch them. I am a quiet part of the world. For the first time in months I feel certain I actually exist. She is now fully part of the space with the audience, the digital world left behind. I walk slowly back towards my block, looking at my hands and turning them over. They look like hands. I use them to punch in the code and I climb the six flights of stairs to my flat. When I get in I am genuinely exhausted.

Stella thanks Marie via a sign on the balcony; emboldened, Marie writes an invitation on her own banner that she hangs outside. But Stella, stopped in her tracks by the murder of George Floyd and its implications for Black people just as she is considering “quiet possibilities” for her own future, never sees it. Lawrence builds significant tension, raising the emotional stakes of what is an intimate, personal story to an ending full of intense, though appealingly modest, possibility. For all its quiet quirkiness, Sunnymead Court resonates with the millions of lives on hold, seeking consolation—if not rapturous union— in the chance encounters afforded us in a time of distancing. Across a space at once so insignificant and yet so enormous as the courtyard between two tower blocks, Lawrence builds a dense weave of emotional and imaginative connections.



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Wagons and Writing Desks Every Everyman, by the West Philadelphia company Shakespeare in Clark Park, attempted to rescue community-oriented performance in a time of pandemic.21 The company has a long history of involving the community in its productions, held both in Clark Park and in other sites around the city. When the pandemic made the usual summer performances impossible, the company decided to “bring the park to you,” via a performance wagon inspired by medieval morality plays. Director Kittson O’Neill explains how she came to the decision: I thought, okay, well, we’re in the middle of a plague, so let’s let the middle ages like inspire us. And one of the things that would sometimes happen with a pageant wagon is if there was a town that was closed because of plague, the wagon would come outside the walls. The people would gather on the walls of the city and watch the show from a distance. … Well, we can do that in a real porch culture, especially West Philly. We have a lot of streets where all the houses have porches. … People are really invested in the micro-community of their block in many parts of West Philly. So we were like, we’re going to build a trailer that can open up and we’ll have a little stage on it, and we’ll drag it around to the different blocks and perform for people live in their homes.22

The wagon was duly constructed by Paul Kuhn of Curio Theatre Company.23 Whereas in a regular summer as many as a thousand people might have congregated in Clark Park for a show, the seven disaggregated, block-by-block pageant-wagon performances allowed instead for a safely distanced audience of a few dozen people, with all actors wearing masks throughout the performance.24 While the city of Philadelphia was instrumental in making the piece possible, consulting closely with the theater-makers, it also requested that performances not be advertised beyond the block, so as to avoid overcrowding.25 Given the overlapping contexts of the pandemic and the protests for racial justice, O’Neill decided to turn Everyman over to her cast of

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BIPOC artists and have them devise their own version.26 After many delays and postponements, the company’s version of the late fifteenthcentury morality play begins with light satire, as God (James Whitfield) and Death (Kaitlin Chin) communicate via email and discuss their mission statement. The jokes get darker as the humans plead for more time: “I’m just executing,” Death explains. The mix of whimsy and realism continues, as performers in street clothes and masks contrast with an enormous Death puppet and fanciful headgear for the various allegorical figures. When Death recommends that humanity find an advocate before God, the modern Virtues and Vices (Ebony Pullum) step in. Social Media offers her services, then demurs: “Do you even follow God?” Health & Wellness is similarly ambivalent: “Why don’t you run from Death, or meditate?” Accolades, in a graduation cap, is too busy to bother. Death offers extra time, if only so the Everyman characters (Cameron Del Grosso, Ezra Ali-Dow, Karen Getz, Katrina Hall, and Marisol Rosa-Shapiro) can write their own eulogies. They summon their best qualities: Kindness, Courage, but find that their own memories of each other offer the most powerful argument for their goodness. One demurs at the exercise and argues against letting fear run their life: “It feels sacrilegious to ignore this, this communion … What we had before Death crashed our party—Death is always around, but it never stopped us from dancing before.” Despite all the fellowship and good cheer, the piece does not shy away from the inevitability of death—“Everyone is afraid… Endings are hard”—as each Everyman says goodbye and passes under Death’s enormous puppet arm into a space beyond the wagon stage. Despite the lively dancing as the company takes a bow, something has changed, with the audience scattered among lawn chairs and stoops invited to reconcile the mundane and the existential. As Every Everyman suggests, true consolation involves more than distraction: one must also face the losses experienced. The Console, a whimsical one-man performance project in Brooklyn, New York, takes on this challenge at a modest, human, scale, simultaneously



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foregrounding the distances that separate us in a time of pandemic and attempting to bridge them. Brandon Woolf ’s “postdramatic” piece— all puns intended—occurs next to a mailbox, with a typewriter, paper, envelopes, stamps, and hand sanitizer for props, and a sign announcing, “Free Letters for Friends Feeling Blue.”27 Amid the isolation of the pandemic, Woolf, who is a director, writer, and scholar of contemporary performance, found himself heartened to discover the long tradition of the literature of consolation, with its conviction that stoicism could actually make us feel better. At the same time, he felt an intense need for the liveness of performance to counter an overabundance of Zoom and began thinking about how an artist might occupy public space at such a vexed moment.28 Accounts of mailboxes decommissioned in the run-up to a presidential election that would necessarily involve huge numbers of mail-in ballots brought them to his attention. After spending some time observing how the mailboxes around Prospect Park were variously used (rarely) or ignored (for the most part), Woolf decided to “sit with” them.29 At his portable desk, he spent the month of October writing letters for anyone who requested it, as a way to address the triple threat of “politics, the economy, and the coronavirus,”30 even as the news media considered whether the US Postal Service would be able to deliver ballots in a timely fashion. As Woolf ’s website explains: Let’s not mourn our mailboxes Maligned As vessels of civic futility. But make renewed use of them. To sit together (at a distance) And console one another. And those we love. Posting letters from the edge.31

Composing letters together, typing them out, placing them in the mailbox—all these actions took on a particular resonance in a time of generalized suspicion and despair, when the imminence of the election was unavoidable: as Ben Gassman notes, Woolf ’s was “a performance,

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built for waiting—actively—in the thrill and tension of abrupt intimacy.”32 The Console explores the contingency of connection—the act of approaching a stranger, after so many months of avoiding other people; the uncertainty of sharing emotion in a public space; the quick intimacy of cowriting and cocreating without knowing what will ensue.33 Woolf ’s performance restores the chance encounter, with all its attendant possibilities, while sidestepping capitalist forms of exchange. Instead, it pushes back against fear and doubt, reminding us that it may be a positive experience to engage a stranger. By demonstrating the analog forms of communication and community that the mailbox enables, Woolf both recognizes and recasts its politicization.

Life at the Office Dutch Kills Theater and Wolf 359’s Temping (October 24–December 4, 2020), an “interactive gallery experience for one audience member” at the Wild Project Gallery in New York, reflects on the office, one of the many mundane urban spaces drastically transformed by the conditions of pandemic.34 Temping predates the theater closures, but has been adapted and resignified in the current moment. The piece is so carefully distanced that I might well have addressed it as a “Solo” experience in Chapter 5: the single audience member occupies the transformed gallery space for the duration and also serves as performer, without interacting directly with anyone (a single actor appears on camera to greet the temp and remind her of Covid-19 rules). Moreover, as the participant soon discovers, the temporary position at “Harold, Adams, McNutt and Joy, LLP” is to replace an actuary, charged with reviewing and updating tables on life expectancy. Temping thus balances the mundanity and the enormity of calculating the span of human existences, particularly as so many lives are being cut short by Covid-19.35 Like Woolly Mammoth’s Human Resources (Chapter 6), it simultaneously replicates and interrogates the numbing apparatus of late capitalism. Yet whereas that



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piece retains at least an illusion of choice for the participant, Temping subjects her to a barrage of “email, voicemails, and printer messages”— an onslaught of tasks from a manager and others in the office—with no perceived ability to change her experience.36 As Cheyenne Ligon notes on No Proscenium: The beauty of Temping is in the precise timing. As soon as I get through with one task, I get assigned another. The minute I put down a piece of paper I’m meant to read, the lights change. As soon as I finish listening to a voicemail, I get an email. I never felt overwhelmed or neglected; everything was exactly catered to my pace.37

Laura Collins-Hughes notes that the lighting changes in response to what the temp is doing—confirmation that “behind the scenes, someone is watching.”38 Yet despite the careful calibration of the tempo and light, Ligon never expected “that anything I did would get a reaction out of the other characters,” or in any way affect the outcome of the piece.39 The Kafkaesque perversity is palpable: no matter how efficiently one does the job, there is always more to do. Whatever illusions one might hold, efficiency and goodwill change nothing at all. Ligon astutely notes how the piece collapses the distinctions between temp and regular worker: is the situation actually any different for the person whose entire work life is spent under these conditions?40 How much greater is the quiet desperation, when the job involves calculating how long we have on this earth?

Hollywood Mountains Although Los Angeles did feature at least one drive-in play in a parking garage,41 as one might expect from such a car-based city, one of the most interesting, distanced theater productions during the pandemic actually engaged the natural world in and around the city. Los Angeles-based immersive theater company Capital W presented Fire Season (October 3–25) during the actual season of its title—the most

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destructive one in the state’s history.42 The immersive piece took place in Paramount Ranch, a fabled section of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area about 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The ranch, purchased by Paramount in 1927, is famous for its role in film history: originally prized for its diverse settings, which represented everything from colonial Massachusetts to ancient China in films of the 1930s, its Western Town set became an iconic part of countless TV productions from the 1950s to the late 1990s.43 In November 2018, the Woolsey fire destroyed most of the structures in Western Town, making the location particularly apt for a piece on our relationship to fire. All is not as it seems here: what looks like timeless emptiness of meadows and rolling hills was until recently a built environment, however ersatz. Written and performed by Monica Miklas, and directed and produced by Lauren Ludwig, Fire Season offered a carefully socially distanced version of immersive theater. After checking in and passing a health check at a table by the parking lot, duly masked participants were given a sanitized transmitter and headphones, as well as a portable camping stool. The instructions were to walk into the hills and to stop at will. Halfway through the piece, participants were reminded to retrace their steps and return to the central spot from which Miklas had been broadcasting, in a small camping tent, for a final gathering, still at a safe distance (Figure 19). There Miklas addressed the group, still speaking through the radio and foregrounding the question of her own liveness and presence in the landscape. The modesty of the little green tent, which disguised the equipment, proved an apt symbol for our transient presence in the landscape. Western Town may yet be rebuilt, but Fire Season transpires with no apparent permanent trace of its own. Yet at the same time it explores how humanity has left its mark on this and all landscapes, by warming the planet at a geologically unprecedented rate and increasing the frequency and severity of fires. Although Fire Season had been in development before the Covid-19 pandemic, it took on a different sort of urgency due to the overlapping crises that engulfed the United States in 2020. The original guiding question—“how do you build a life amidst climate crisis?”44—was



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Figure 19  Monica Miklas broadcasting from her tent in Fire Season, 2020. Photo by Nick Cimiluca.

only made more urgent when the emergencies multiplied. As Ludwig explains, the location was doubly apposite, as a previous burn site that offered a certain amount of audience choice and agency via its multiple available paths.45 It was almost uncanny to traipse through an actual burn site—and one that had itself served to project a mythical idea of the West to so many film and TV audiences—while listening to Miklas’s countervailing narrative. Miklas’s poetic and powerful text ranges from myth—Achilles’s vulnerability, Eve’s discovery of fire, Persephone’s responsibility to a blighted landscape—to ethnography and environmental history. At once intensely personal and allusive, it engages participants in her own experience of fire while invoking geological and cosmic temporalities. The emphasis on the vulnerability and transformation of bodies in their broader natural context feels particularly apt for a time of pandemic: My body is an ancient sea. I teem with life. The flora of my gut, the invisible cells atop my skin: I am host to an orgy. Soft bodies grow

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supported by my gentle tides and sway beneath a placid moon, an ever-summer sun. All the living things float through a temperate eternity, a shallow bliss. … When I am a desert, will it matter who loved me? Will my bones, bleached by the radiation of this white-hot fire remember the currents that contracted, extended, relaxed, as fingers touched my skin?46

Although Fire Season is very spare in terms of its human appurtenances, the enveloping nature more than makes up for it. A haunting contrast develops between the highly crafted text that Miklas broadcasts and the vistas of hills, the woodpeckers flitting through the oaks, the green shoots at the base of so many burned trees. The juxtaposition constantly raises the pressing question of how we shape nature and how much we do or do not control. In a time of Covid-19, the questions about the intersections between humanity and a nature that can turn deadly take on additional resonance. There is something jolting, too, about encountering the other participants in their masks along the way: they recall the tension between the range and reach of the piece and our protracted limitations. How much interactivity can we manage, these days? How can we fully immerse ourselves in anything, conscious as we are of the need for constant precautions? Yet the impact of Fire Season goes beyond the moment—it offers a more ruminative, thoughtful mode of being in nature, where respite meets a recognition of our implication and ongoing responsibility.

Pointed Interventions In the historically working-class Pointe-Saint-Charles neighborhood of Montréal, Tableau D’Hôte Theatre presented a series of bilingual, socially distanced micro-plays, written and directed by Mathieu Murphy-Perron, under the title En Pointe (August 6–September 27).47



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Beyond referring to the rapidly transforming neighborhood, the term means “on your toes” or, more loosely, “pointedly,” and captures well the acerbic quality of the various plays. On doorsteps and stoops, squares and sidewalks, the production explores the peculiarities of quotidian urban experience during the pandemic, with a special attention to questions of class. Although En Pointe’s outdoor settings responded to the need for social distancing, they ironically reflected also how gentrification reduces the spaces available for artists and artistic performance.48 It remains to be seen whether, in the wake of Covid19, cities will dedicate newly emptied commercial and office spaces to artists and the arts, and whether those uses will last. The nine plays that constitute En Pointe were deliberately kept short so as to minimize both rehearsal time and the audience’s time in proximity. The director also sought out real-life couples to cast, to minimize the possibility of transmission among members of the company.49 In the neighborhood itself, locations were revealed only on the day of the show, presumably to avoid crowding as well as for an element of surprise. Despite their strong thematic and experiential connection to a specific location, however, the plays were also made available to a broader audience, in both filmed versions (for which this distant scholar was particularly grateful) and “webcomics” by Jaclyn Turner, which minutely reproduced the staging panel by panel.50 The first of the micro-plays, (Partial) Reopening Day (La réouverture [partielle]), features young neighbors (Devon Hardy and Anne-Marie Saheb) out on the street commiserating with each other after 108 days of lockdown. Even as they find some connection to each other, they fail to notice, much less acknowledge, the distraught older man (Richard Jutras) on the stoop above, who is quite audibly terrified at the thought of resuming contact with others. The Kitchen of the Unemployed (La cuisine des sans-emplois) features Dave (Justin Johnson), a vegan Black chef feeding delicacies to his former employer and other neighbors on the sidewalk before a church. A series of encounters allows MurphyPerron to skirt easy generalizations and find nuance in everyday interactions. Thus Chef Dave’s former boss (George Bekiaris) is

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sympathetic, yet cannot offer any actual financial support. Generational and linguistic differences are easily negotiated, as when an older Frenchspeaking woman (France Rolland) is charmed by free gourmet treats. Other disparities, in particular those of a rapidly gentrifying workingclass neighborhood, are more difficult to overcome: “I’m getting evicted because some bougie fucks want to make a buck,” explains Frank (Matt Holland), an older, conservative white man, in colorful English. No amount of racial bonhomie and gourmet adventurousness will change his circumstances. Kitchen also pokes gentle fun at the late-capitalist fantasies of the protagonist, who is convinced that he can overcome what the pandemic has wrought if only he can brand himself effectively on social media. The slighter Forbidden Touch (Toucher interdit) presents Dimitri (Ryan Bommarito) and Sandy (Devon Hardy) on a socially distanced Tinder date in the park, wondering where things can possibly go next. While the episodes are independent, certain characters, such as the gentrifying real-estate developers Eliza (Delphine Bienvenu) and Léopold (Frédéric Paquet), recur. In Seller’s Kingdom (Le royaume du vendeur), we first encounter them outside the property they have fixed up (and doubled in price), as they await potential buyers for an open house. Eliza expresses her doubts about selling during the pandemic: “This isn’t just a sanitary crisis, it’s human, too. People are hurting.” But Léopold reassures her that “On peut faire du bien ici” (“We can do good here”), and that they are allowed to reap the fruit of their labor in transforming the house. The piece ends when Vincent (Amir Sám Nakhjavani), a young man in coveralls, walks by. He shares his memories of the house in question and the family that lived there. His incomprehension—Why are the owners selling again, when the house last sold but nine months ago? Don’t they live there? Don’t they like the neighborhood?—exposes the strange logic of gentrification. His concern for an older neighbor, whom he enquires about and offers to assist but whom Eliza has clearly never met, shows up the shallowness of the flippers’ connection to place. Despite the clearly delineated politics of Sellers’ Kingdom,



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Murphy-Perron resists the temptation to make caricatures of the gentrifiers: Eliza’s discomfort is palpable throughout and is explored again in subsequent pieces. Though the play was effective in the recorded version I watched online, it had much greater immediacy on site, with the masked, socially distanced audience on the narrow lawn between the house for sale and the adjacent building. The ordinariness of the situation—this was just a house for sale, like so many in the gentrifying neighborhood—only drives home the point of the micro-play. Why Y explores the closing of the local YMCA after 160 years, with the various characters from earlier plays arrayed on the street before the building. This piece takes on the question of gentrification with new urgency: not only are people being pushed out of their homes, the institution at which they come together, and which keeps their children engaged and off the streets, is to be closed and sold off. Neighbors, developers, activists, and city councilors join in a tense debate over neighborhood priorities. As one points out, the pandemic has made gathering even more precious. The piece ends with an extraordinarily tense confrontation between Frank and Eliza, who owns the building from which he is being evicted so it can be remodeled and rented at a higher price. When she attempts to placate him by pointing out that she herself grew up poor, he becomes even angrier and accuses her of being a class traitor. Emilie Gagnon’s review emphasizes how the site-specific, immersive piece drew in its live audience: The passionate characters and the conversation also seemed to fire up several audience members, many of whom I assume must be locals. You really felt the gravity of the situation and their opinions on the matter from the boos and cheers. The touch of having the actual neighbourhood YMCA looming over the “stage” as part of the scenery made it all the more real.51

The fact that the neighborhood YMCA building had in fact been recently sold off also increased the poignancy of Why Y.

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The Laundromat (La buanderie) follows Eliza and Léopold as they venture out to do their laundry after their home machine breaks down. With minimal dialogue, the piece makes clear how differently this space functions for husband and wife: Léopold is disgusted and worried that someone will see him in this déclassé place. Eliza loudly eats potato chips, to her husband’s barely concealed annoyance, and is reminded of her own straitened childhood, when visits to the laundromat were routine. As Monika Jackiewitz notes, there is rich complexity in Eliza’s evocation of “the quiet pleasures of unspoken working class solidarity.”52 When Vincent arrives to wait for his laundry and takes out his own bag of chips, that solidarity is reinvoked, as Eliza ignores her husband and instead exchanges pleasantries about the weather with the young man. Jackiewitz emphasizes how, for in-person viewers, the piece harnessed the storefront as proscenium or screen: “Watching a play from the outside of a real life laundromat, looking into its large windows as if it were a giant, fluorescently glowing television embedded into a building wall was not an experience I will soon forget.”53 The Laundromat thus ironically invokes the screens to which theater has largely been confined during 2020, even as it reinhabits urban space (Figure 20).

Figure 20  Delphine Bienvenu and Amir Sám Nakhjavani in En Pointe, 2020. Courtesy of Tableau D’Hôte Theatre.



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En Pointe wrapped up in late September, just before the Québec government closed down theaters once again,54 in an unfortunate culmination to a series about venturing out and reinhabiting the city’s public spaces. As I conclude this chapter, and indeed this book, in-person theater seems very precarious, as the possibility of even distanced productions recedes before the reality of Covid-19’s enduring reach. With vaccinations underway, the wait is now bounded, yet the resilience and adaptability of the theater of lockdown seem more essential than ever.

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There were glimmers of possibility in the middle of 2020, as large portions of Asia, Australasia, and Europe began to reopen and cautiously attempt the move back to theaters. Yet tremendous uncertainty remained, with performances and entire festivals announced, then canceled, postponed, or moved back online. A rare handful of productions moved from virtual to in-person formats, while many more faced increasing restrictions. As I write this at the end of a very long year, Europe and the United States face a new and ever more deadly surge amid the proliferation of variant versions of Covid-19, even as vaccinations have begun. In the UK, William Shakespeare was the second person to be vaccinated, in what seemed like it must be a good augur for theater (“All’s Well that Ends Well,” observed the BBC headline).1 While prediction seems presumptuous amid such turmoil, these months suggest that theater will come back with new energy. The theatrical landscape has been scrambled, to say the least, and recovery from the financial impact of the pandemic may take years. Yet a great deal of creativity has been unleashed under the extraordinarily difficult conditions of lockdown. Theater-makers have learned a great deal about how to engage audiences, increase viewership, and mobilize technology. Companies around the world are now committed to preserving digital access— whether livestreamed or in recorded versions of productions—for patrons who cannot or will not come to the theater, even postpandemic. Multimodal delivery will certainly bring theater to new and expanded audiences; it may also offer additional income streams. While many of us long to be back in theaters, the interactive aspects of Zoom, Twitch, and

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the YouTube chat have paradoxically made some audience members feel more engaged, more part of a collective, than any night at the theater. Whether by illuminating creative resilience or identifying outmoded assumptions, the theater of lockdown has shone a bright light. Many theater-makers have stressed that they have no desire to go back to theater as it was. While they may not agree entirely on the most pressing issues that the pandemic rendered acutely visible—and these obviously vary across locations—common themes have emerged. The vulnerability of the artists that make theater possible became evident and led many to argue for fairer and more sustainable arrangements. Of necessity, the crisis rallied artists in advocating for the importance of arts and culture as a sector of the economy—in the United States, the Save Our Stages and Be an Arts Hero campaigns have been especially visible.2 Even governments that seem endlessly suspicious of the arts have offered support, with a major package passed in the UK in July and a much belated one in the United States at the end of December.3 The ravages of the pandemic may paradoxically lead to a more full-throated and solidary theater industry in its wake. Theater’s commitment to inclusion has similarly been energized by a period in which it became clear that theaters had never been accessible to all, whether in production or in reception. How can the commitment to diversity that ensued from the anti-racism protests of 2020 be institutionalized and preserved? If more people than ever watched theater during the pandemic, as may well be the case, how might that access be maintained even when theaters reopen? The role that theaters can and should play within communities also became evident, both as theater offered consolation early in the pandemic and as it addressed the ongoing political crises of 2020. On New Year’s Day 2021, as I was preparing to turn in this manuscript, I watched, without even intending to write about them, both Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical and Theater in Quarantine’s latest offering, I Am Sending You the Sacred Face. The first, a crowdsourced collaboration, originated with fans who felt that the 2007 Disney movie really deserved the musical treatment and created individual songs and dances on TikTok.4 Along the way they convened an international

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community and garnered over 200 million views on the platform.5 Their work then received the Broadway treatment, in a benefit production that combined primarily BIPOC performers (most with Tony nominations to their name) with a stitched-together TikTok aesthetic, as nostalgia mixed with affectionate parody (Figure 21). Everything from A Chorus Line, Les Miz, and Cats to more recent hits such as Six to the actual Disney songs of the past few decades was grist for this mill. Cheesy, yes, but with a soupçon of hope, it raised two million dollars for the Actors Fund in seventy-two hours—the most successful fundraiser in the organization’s history.6 The second is the most defiantly theatrical of Theater in Quarantine’s many productions: Joshua Gelb breaks spectacularly with playing to type, instead lip-synching in drag a one-act musical version of the life of Mother Teresa, to a haunting score and libretto performed by its composer, Heather Christian.7 Gelb and Christian explore the complexities of self-denial, rendering both physically and musically the intense negotiations of the protagonist with herself and with her God.

Figure 21  Left to right: Tituss Burgess, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Ashley Park in Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, 2020. Courtesy of Seaview Productions.

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Theater of Lockdown

A red phone pulled out of Gelb’s lamé gown literalizes the calling, while a ring light stands in for a halo (Figure 22). As Alexandra Schwartz notes in her ecstatic New Yorker review, Stivo Arnoczy’s “wizardly video design … uses a series of loops and alternating simultaneous streams to multiply Gelb like the loaves and fishes, while Kristen Robinson’s dazzling scenography serves as a reminder of the trippy strain that runs through Catholic aesthetics.”8 Together, these pieces abundantly prove how in a few short months theater has been remade, and point the way to further possibilities. They also envision and engage new audiences—and at least the second should still be available to watch online when this is published. Christian’s resonant last words in Face challenge us to look forward. I cannot imagine a better conclusion for this book: And when your new soul arrives on the doorstep of the new world, don’t be like the children of Egypt, who when they were given manna craved onions from before the war. Let yourself get unused to how it was. The night will wipe your memory if you let it. Let it. We will not be going back.

Figure 22  Joshua William Gelb in I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, music/ lyrics by Heather Christian, presented by Theater in Quarantine and Theater Mitu’s Expansion Works, 2020. Courtesy of Theater in Quarantine.

Appendix: List of Works And So We Come Forth, Apple Family Productions (New York, USA) The Art of Facing Fear, Company of Angels (Los Angeles, USA) Cashmere, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) Concerto for Toy Piano, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) Concierto para el Bioceno, Eugenio Ampudia (Barcelona, Spain) The Console, Brandon Woolf (New York, USA) En otro reino extraño, Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (Madrid, Spain) En Pointe, Tableau d’Hôte (Montréal, Canada) End Meeting for All, Forced Entertainment (Sheffield, UK) Every Everyman, Shakespeare in Clark Park (Philadelphia, PA) Faith Healer, Old Vic (London, UK) A Farm for Meme, allgo, Cara Mia Theater, and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance (USA) Fire Season, Capital W (Los Angeles, USA) Flash Acts, Forum for Cultural Engagement (New York, USA) Footnote for the End of Time, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) Frauenschlläechterei, Hella Fresh Theater (Philadelphia, USA) Game Over, Grumelot (Madrid, Spain) Los habladores, EFE Tres Teatro (Mexico City, Mexico) Here We Are, Theatre for One (New York, USA) The Humans, Olney Theatre (USA) Human Resources, Woolly Mammoth (Washington DC, USA) Hypochondriac! (1), Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) In Love and Warcraft, American Conservatory Theater (San Francisco, USA) In These Uncertain Times, Source Material Collective (New York, USA) In-Zoom, Bill Irwin (San Diego, USA) Incidental Moments of the Day, Apple Family Productions (New York, USA) The Institute for Counterfeit Memory, The Acme Corporation (Baltimore, USA) Invisible Summer, Royal Court Theatre (London, UK) Julius Caesar, Public Theater (New York, USA)

188

List of Works

King Lear, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival (San Francisco, USA) Last Audience, a canary torsi/MCA (Chicago, USA) Lockdown: Love and Death in the Age of COVID, NIDA (Sydney, Australia) Lungs, Old Vic (London, UK) Macbeth, Big Telly Theater Company (Portstewart, Northern Ireland)/ Creation Theatre (Oxford, UK) March, Playwrights’ Arena (Los Angeles, USA) Mask Work, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) El merolico desde su balcón, EFE Tres Teatro (Mexico City, Mexico) A Midsummer Night’s Zoom, New Swan Shakespeare Festival (Irvine, USA) Mute Swan, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) The Neighbor, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) Oedipus the King, Theater of War (New York, USA) Outtakes, Playwrights Horizons (New York, USA) Play for Any Two People, Playwrights Horizons (New York, USA) Quijotes & Sanchos, [los números imaginarios] (Madrid, Spain, and Los Angeles, USA) Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, Seaview Productions (USA) Read Subtitles Aloud, Media Art Exploration (USA) Richard II, Public Theater/WYNC (New York, USA) Romeo and Juliet, Independent Shakespeare Company (Los Angeles, USA) Roundabout, NIDA (Sydney, Australia) Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, TheaterWorks Hartford and TheatreSquared, in association with Civilians (USA) A School for Fools, Belarus Free Theatre (Minsk, Belarus and London, UK) The Seagull on the Sims 4, New York Theater Workshop (New York, USA) The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) Sunnymead Court, Defibrillator/The Actors Centre (London, UK) Table Top Shakespeare At Home, Forced Entertainment (Sheffield, UK) Tartuffe, Molière in the Park (New York, USA) Temping, Dutch Kills Theater/Wolf 359 (New York, USA) Thank you for Coming. Take Care, Theatre for One (New York, USA) A Thousand Ways, Part 1: A Phone Call, 600 HIGHWAYMEN (New York, USA) Three Kings, Old Vic (London, UK) Tis Pity She’s A Whore, Red Bull (New York, USA)



List of Works

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To Be A Machine (Version 1.0), Dead Centre (Dublin, Ireland) Topside, Theater in Quarantine (New York, USA) Traces of Antigone, Elli Papakonstantinou/ODC Ensemble (Athens, Greece) True Love Will Find You in the End, Denizen Theater (New Paltz, NY) User Not Found, Dante or Die (UK) What Do We Need to Talk About, Public Theater (New York, USA) whiterly negotations, Theatre for One (New York, USA) Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte, Grumelot (Madrid, Spain) Yorick: la historia de Hamlet, Francisco Reyes (Santiago, Chile) Zero Cost House, Pig Iron Theatre Company (Philadelphia, USA) Zoo Motel, Thaddeus Phillips (Cajicá, Colombia)

190

Notes Introduction 1 The Lorax, Crossroads Middle School, directed by Zoey Zimmerman, presented on Zoom, May 2, 2020. 2 Signal Fires, accessed December 9, 2020, https://signalfires.co.uk/. 3 Philip Auslander, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (September 2012): 3–11, citation on 6. 4 For various versions, with different emphases, see Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004); Steve Dixon with contributions by Barry Smith, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Andy Lavender identifies the Hamnet Players’ Hamnet: Shakespeare’s Play Adapted for IRC [Internet Relay Chat], from 1993, as the “originary example of Internet theatre” (“The Internet, Theatre, and Time: Transmediating the Theatron,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27, no. 3 [2017]: 340–52 citation on 346). 5 See, for example, New Paradise Laboratories’ Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (2011), which Andy Lavender has persuasively analyzed (“The Internet, Theatre, and Time”). 6 Seda Ilter, “Mediatised Dramaturgy” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2013), 2, http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/46456/. See also Ilter, “Rethinking Play Texts in the Age of Mediatization: Simon Stephens’s Pornography,” Modern Drama 58, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 238–62. 7 In an interview with Annie Jin Wang, Kathryn Hamilton notes, You know, this whole idea of suddenly there exists all this online theater—that’s actually been going on for a very long time. Take 2016 as an example: everyone was experimenting with digital forms, there was so much need for it, because there was also an

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Notes inability to travel but for a different reason. A whole section of the Edinburgh Festival was translated into hybrid online forms because a bunch of people had their visas denied. There has been a lot of online hybrid theater forms previous to this, and so it’s a little strange sometimes just to see the US acting as if it’s becoming an event right now. (“An Interview with the Artists Behind ‘Read Subtitles Aloud,’ ” PlayCo, accessed December 3, 2020, https:// playco.org/interview-read-subtitles-aloud/)

8 As Lavender’s title makes clear, he privileges the term “transmediation” for the complex ways in which “the newer mediality [of the Internet] accommodates theatrical presentation similarly to but differently from the mediality of theatre” (342). My sense is that the more familiar “remediation” more clearly conveys the wholesale migration of theater online in 2020, even if it does not capture the complexities of each individual instance. On remediation, see Steve Dixon, “Remediating Theater in a Digital Proscenium,” Digital Creativity 10, no. 3 (1999): 135– 42; and Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 9 Dixon and Smith, 3. 10 Again, while Dixon and Smith had noted these possibilities, they had not been widely adopted: “the Internet has proved particularly significant … not only as an immense interactive database, but also as a performance collaboration and distribution medium” (3). 11 Lavender, 346. 12 Auslander reviews and updates his own earlier work on the topic in “Digital Liveness.” 13 Jesse Green, “When the Audience Is Stuck at Home, the Play Is in the Mail,” New York Times, September 10, 2020, accessed December 8, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/theater/plays-by-mail-portaleza.html/. 14 Bryan Doerries, interview with author, September 11, 2020. 15 For the stakes of the Peggy Phelan/Philip Auslander debate and its recent instantiations, see Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, “Liveness: Phelan, Auslander, and After,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 29, no. 2 (2015): 69–79. 16 “Under the influence of new technologies, the concept of liveness has developed to only refer to temporality (if the event in the theatre and in

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the cinema happen at the same time, the event in the cinema is also live), at the expense of the once indispensable feature of corporeality” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe, “Liveness,” 71). 17 Peter J. Kuo, “Opening the Screen on ‘Live Video Theatre,’” HowlRound, June 10, 2020, accessed October 6, 2020, https://howlround.com/ opening-screen-live-video-theatre/. 18 Jared Mezzocchi, interview with author, November 3, 2020. 19 The key reference is Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006). On hypermediacy, see Bolter and Grusin, 273. 20 Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf, “Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre,” in their edited volume, Postdramatic Theatre and Form (London: Methuen, 2019), 14. 21 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 17. 22 For this problematic bifurcation, see Boyle, Cornish, and Woolf, “Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre.” 23 Ibid. 24 As Charlie Morley, general manager of Creation Theatre, and Sinead Owens, the stage manager for Big Telly/Creation Theatre’s Macbeth, note in their conversation, for companies used to doing unconventional things in unusual spaces, Zoom was one more such space (“Episode 29: Macbeth Stage Manager Sinead,” Creation Theatre, October 20, 2020, consulted October 30, 2020, podcast, 5:40, https://www.creationtheatre. co.uk/macbeth-sinead/). Designer Jared Mezzocchi raised a similar point (interview with author). 25 “NT at Home April to July 2020,” National Theatre, accessed December 20, 2020, https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home/. 26 “NT Live FAQs,” National Theatre Live, accessed December 20, 2020, https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-the-national-theatre/press/ nt-live-press/nt-live-faqs/. Even before the pandemic, the audience figures were remarkable: more than 690,000 people saw Benedict Cumberbatch play Hamlet in the broadcast version; total viewership for National Theatre Live had reached 6.5 million by 2017. 27 The initiative is described as follows on the Old Vic website: Rekindling live performance in this irrepressible 202-year-old venue, albeit with minimal staging and accessible only via camera,

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Notes is a genuine thrill for us. But this series is both an exciting creative experiment and also crucial in igniting the box office now all our usual channels of revenue have been entirely wiped out and we fight to preserve this beloved theatre for our audiences, surrounding schools and communities, staff, crew, and the myriad of writers, performers and creatives that work with us. (“Old Vic: IN CAMERA,” The Old Vic, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www. oldvictheatre.com/whats-on/2020/old-vic-in-camera/)

28 In his New York Times review, Jesse Green notes the use of “not just the split screens, but cross-fades and edits—to help tell the story” (“Review: In ‘Three Kings,’ Hot Priest Sheds His Cassock,” New York Times, September 6, 2020, accessed September 7, 2020, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/09/06/theater/review-three-kings-andrew-scott. html/). 29 Green, “Review: In ‘Three Kings.’ ” 30 I reached out repeatedly to the Old Vic for comment on the rationale for their decision to limit tickets and was informed that, due to reduced staffing, no one was available to answer my inquiry. 31 Green, “Review: In ‘Three Kings.’ ” As of this writing, the Old Vic seems to have slightly rethought its approach and has now added a “Watch Again: In Camera: Playback” option, albeit in a narrow two-day window per production (“Old Vic: IN CAMERA”). 32 Jesse Berger and Jim Bredesen (Red Bull Managing Director), interview with author, October 7, 2020. 33 Ibid. 34 Helen Shaw, “Livestreaming and Labor: A Collision of Good Intentions at Red Bull Theater,” New York Magazine, April 2, 2020, accessed October 9, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/livestreaming-and-labor-a-clashof-good-intentions.html/. 35 “Theatre Authority,” Actors’ Equity, accessed October 9, 2020, https:// www.actorsequity.org/resources/theatre-authority/. 36 The situation is exacerbated by the overall effects of the pandemic on the funds that provide health insurance to actors, which depend on contributions from employers and theater practitioners. In an effort to continue covering as many members as possible, the Equity League Health Fund increased by almost 50% the number of weeks that

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union members must be employed under contract to qualify for health insurance in 2021, even as theaters remain almost universally closed in the United States (“Equity-League Health Fund benefits changes effective January 1,” Equity-League Benefit Funds, accessed October 9, 2020, https://equityleague.org/ equity-league-health-fund-benefits-changes-effective-january-1/. 37 Michael Paulson, “There’s Not Much Work for Actors. Now Their Unions Are Fighting,” New York Times, October 7, 2020, consulted October 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/theater/actors-equity-unionbattle.html/. 38 Michael Paulson, “She Gave Up a Lot to Play Othello,” New York Times, September 4, 2020, accessed October 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/09/04/theater/othello-jessika-williams.html/. 39 Michael Paulson, “Are Streamed Plays Theater or TV? Unions Settle a Dispute,” New York Times, November 19, 2020, updated November 20, 2020, accessed November 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/11/19/theater/Sag-aftra-equity-settle-dispute.html/. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 “The Humans Streaming,” Olney Theatre Center, accessed December 20, 2020, https://www.olneytheatre.org/whats-playing/humansstreaming/; “Zero Cost House (For Zoom),” Pig Iron Theatre Company, accessed December 20, 2020, https://pigiron.org/productions/ zero-cost-house-zoom/. 43 “Digital Stage,” Center Theatre Group, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.centertheatregroup.org/digitalstage/. 44 Daryl H. Miller, “COVID Pushes L.A.’s Small Theaters to Unite. Survival Starts with this Festival,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2020, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/ story/2020-10-01/alternative-theatre-los-angeles-formation-virtualfestival/. 45 Mark Brown, “National Theatre Launches Pay-for-Plays Streaming Service,” The Guardian, December 1, 2020, accessed December 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/dec/01/national-theatrelaunches-pay-for-plays-streaming-service.

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46 “Showtimes,” Zoo Motel, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www. zoomotel.org/time-zones/. The piece was originally presented by Lucidity Suitcase/Miami Light Project, September 28–October 25, 2020. 47 Laura Collins-Hughes, “‘Zoo Motel’ Review: Got the Key. Where’s the Minibar?” New York Times, October 6, 2020, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/theater/zoo-motel-reviewthaddeus-phillips.html/. 48 “Zoo Motel,” Theatre Nation, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www. theatrenation.org/zoo-motel/. 49 “Flash Acts Plays,” Flash Acts Festival, accessed October 19, 2020, https:// www.flashactsfestival.org/flash-acts/. 50 We See You W.A.T. (website), accessed October 8, 2020, https://www. weseeyouwat.com/. 51 Kuo, “Opening the Screen.” 52 Elli Papakonstantinou, interview with author, September 24, 2020. 53 Doerries, interview with author. 54 “BFT’s Theatre Live(s) Online presents the World Premiere of A School For Fools,” Belarus Free Theatre, accessed December 15, 2020, http:// belarusfreetheatre.com/school_for_fools/. See also the powerful account by Verity Healey, “At Home and in Lockdown with Belarus Free Theatre,” HowlRound, June 30, 2020, accessed December 15, 2020, https:// howlround.com/home-and-lockdown-belarus-free-theatre/. 55 No Proscenium, https://noproscenium.com/. 56 Laura Collins-Hughes and Alexis Soloski, “When the Critic Is Also the Star. And The Audience,” New York Times, November 15, 2020, accessed November 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/theater/ temping-pandemic-phone-call.html/. 57 Chris Wiegand, “Guardian to Spotlight Dazzling Unstaged Scripts in a New Series,” The Guardian, October 5, 2020, accessed December 17, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/oct/05/future-playsspotlights-dazzling-new-scripts-yet-to-be-staged/, and “Futures,” Dublin Theatre Festival, October 23, 2020, accessed December 17, 2020, https:// dublintheatrefestival.ie/about/news/assemble/. 58 Rebecca Ennals, interview with author, October 13, 2020; Luis Sorolla, interview with author, October 22, 2020.

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59 “The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs,” Red Bull Theater, livestreamed on Zoom, November 16, 2020. 60 Joshua Gelb, “Thoughts from a Closet: On the Theater in Quarantine,” NY Drama Alumni Clan, May 5, 2020, accessed September 10, 2020, https:// nydac.org/2020/05/05/thoughts-from-a-closet-on-the-theater-in-quarantine/. 61 Carrie Klewin Lawrence and Amy Lawrence, “Devised Experiments in Breaking Zoom,” HowlRound, October 6, 2020, accessed December 20, 2020, https://howlround.com/devised-experiments-breaking-zoom/, Carrie speaking. 62 Melissa Errico, “Just Me and the Music and the Green Screen,” New York Times, December 2, 2020, accessed December 20, 2020, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/12/02/theater/melissa-errico-meet-me-in-st-louis. html/. 63 Wesleyan Advanced Directing Class (Spring 2020), “Directing on Zoom,” Wesleyan University Google Sites, May 20, 2020, accessed October 1, 2020, https://sites.google.com/wesleyan.edu/directing-on-zoom/home/. 64 Nathan Baron Silvern, “Meditations: A Thank You Note to Zoom,” Wesleyan University Google Sites, May 20, 2020, accessed October 1, 2020, https://sites.google.com/wesleyan.edu/directing-on-zoom/ ontology-of-zoom/meditations/. 65 Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.sociallydistantperformance.com/. 66 Ibid. 67 “Tools,” Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.sociallydistantperformance.com/tools/. 68 Araoz and I explained our rationale for the DDATA (Digital and Distanced Advances in the Theater Arts) list in “Crowdsourcing Theatre Practice in a Time of COVID,” HowlRound, August 20, 2020, accessed December 15, 2020, https://howlround.com/crowdsourcing-theatrepractice-time-covid/. 69 Eli Simon, interview with author, September 28, 2020. 70 Healey, “At Home and in Lockdown with Belarus Free Theater.” 71 Amid the deluge of new demand during the pandemic, Zoom has not prioritized artistic uses, leaving directors and designers to negotiate the platform’s peculiarities through trial and error. New features gradually addressed at least some of the issues that had vexed Simon: the ability

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for a host to arrange boxes and make everyone follow their order and the ability to “multispotlight” up to nine people, for example, were added in September. Instead of having to plan for carefully orchestrated entrances, so that a scene would end up with the right arrangement of Zoom boxes, directors could now simply arrange them as they wished. As I discuss below, designers also gradually expanded their understanding of how best to use Zoom’s capabilities for theatrical purposes. 72 Errico, “Just Me and the Music and the Green Screen.” 73 Mezzocchi, interview with author. 74 Ibid.

1  Straight to Zoom: Theater Moves Online 1 Andy Lavender, “The Internet, Theatre, and Time: Transmediating the Theatron,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27, no. 3 (2017), 340–52, at 352. 2 Richard Nelson, program note, “What Do We Need to Talk About?,” The Public Theater, accessed September 1, 2020, https://publictheater.org/ news-items/buckets/conversations/what-do-we-need-to-talk-about/. 3 Stuart Emmrich, “New York’s Public Theater Debuts the First Great Play of the Zoom Era,” review of What Do We Need to Talk About?, written and directed by Richard Nelson, The Public Theater, Vogue, April 30, 2020, accessed September 1, 2020, https://www.vogue.com/article/whatdo-we-need-to-talk-about-public-theater-zoom; Alexis Soloski, “The Apple Family’s Checking In on Zoom. You’re Invited, Too,” New York Times, April 25, 2020, accessed September 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/25/theater/richard-nelson-apple-play-zoom-coronavirus. html 4 Soloski, “The Apple Family’s Checking In on Zoom.” 5 What Do We Need to Talk About?, written and directed by Richard Nelson, The Public Theater, streamed live on April 29, 2020, YouTube video. 6 Emmrich, “The First Great Play of the Zoom Era.” 7 Helen Shaw, “Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Is Muted in Grief and Unmuted on Zoom,” review of What Do We Need to Talk About?, written and directed by Richard Nelson, The Public Theater, New York Magazine,

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April 30, 2020, accessed September 1, 2020, https://www.vulture. com/2020/04/the-apple-family-is-muted-in-grief-but-not-on-zoom.html/. 8 Emmrich. 9 Soloski. 10 Ben Brantley, “Same Apple Family, New Kind of Theater,” review of What Do We Need to Talk About?, written and directed by Richard Nelson, The Public Theater, New York Times, April 30, 2020, accessed September 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/theater/what-do-we-needto-talk-about-review.html/. 11 Figures offered by an actor in the preamble to And So We Come Forth. 12 And So We Come Forth, written and directed by Richard Nelson, Apple Family Productions, streamed live on July 1, 2020, YouTube video. 13 Jesse Green, “Apple-Picking Time Again, in ‘And So We Come Forth,’ ” review of And So We Come Forth, written and directed by Richard Nelson, Apple Family Productions, New York Times, July 2, 2020, accessed September 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/theater/reviewand-so-we-come-forth-apple-family.html/. 14 Incidental Moments of the Day, written and directed by Richard Nelson, Apple Family Productions, streamed live on September 10, 2020, YouTube video. 15 Ben Brantley, “A Family Gropes for Words in ‘Incidental Moments,’ ” review of Incidental Moments of the Day, written and directed by Richard Nelson, Apple Family Productions, New York Times, September 11, 2020, accessed September 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/ theater/review-incidental-moments-of-the-day.html/. 16 Mark Lawson, review of Incidental Moments of the Day, written and directed by Richard Nelson, Apple Family Productions, The Guardian, September 13, 2020, accessed September 15, 2020, https://www .theguardian.com/stage/2020/sep/13/ incidental-moments-of-the-day-review-richard-nelson-apple-family/. 17 Jonathan Mandell, “Incidental Moments of the Day: The Apple Family Finally Talks About Race,” review of Incidental Moments of the Day, written and directed by Richard Nelson, Apple Family Productions, DC Theatre Scene, September 11, 2020, accessed September 16, 2020, https:// dctheatrescene.com/2020/09/11/review-incidental-moments-of-the-daythe-apple-family-finally-talk-about-race/.

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18 Bryan Doerries, interview with author, September 11, 2020. 19 Ibid. 20 As Elif Batuman notes, “Doerries started thinking of Greek tragedy in functional terms, as ‘ritual reintegration, for combat veterans, by combat veterans’ … as an ‘ancient technology’—a program that you run, on an audience, to do something specific. What if he could start it up again?” Elif Batuman, “Can Greek Tragedy Get Us through the Pandemic?” New Yorker, September 1, 2020, accessed September 8, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ can-greek-tragedy-get-us-through-the-pandemic/. 21 Doerries, interview with author. 22 Bryan Doerries, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 263. 23 Ibid., 262. 24 Ibid., 258. 25 Doerries, interview with author. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Oedipus the King, written by Sophocles, translated and directed by Bryan Doerries, Theater of War Productions, streamed live on May 7, 2020, Zoom. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 “People were just so taken by the intimacy of having an exchange where there was someone in the room with them that wasn’t really part of the discussion who was knitting. It felt like you were in their bedroom with them, just deepening the intimacy of the exchange,” ibid. 32 Writing in the NYT, Maya Phillips questions the attempt to bring the classics to bear on the pandemic, suggesting that “the plague as a literary device isn’t well served by adaptations, or by framing that seeks to baldly tie its relevance to Covid-19.” Phillips is especially troubled by the role of fate in plays such as Oedipus or Romeo and Juliet, which would seem to limit human agency (“A Plague on Your Houses: Reading Covid-19 Into Disease Onstage,” New York Times, July, 15, 2020, accessed September 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/theater/oedipus-the-kingplague-covid.html/). Yet her argument flattens the texts, which are clearly interested exactly in how much responsibility rests with human agents.

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Cf. Batuman for a more nuanced reading of the pandemic response, and Doerries on the oversimplification of “inescapable fate” (20). 33 Batuman, “Can Greek Tragedy Get Us through the Pandemic?” 34 I am grateful to Bryan Doerries and Marjorie Goldsmith of Theater of War for making available a recording of the May 7 reading and discussion, from which these citations are taken. 35 Batuman, “Can Greek Tragedy Get Us through the Pandemic?” 36 Ibid. 37 “The Oedipus Project,” Theater of War Productions, accessed September 3, 2020, https://theaterofwar.com/projects/the-oedipus-project/. 38 Doerries, interview with author. 39 “Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers,” Theater of War Productions, accessed September 3, 2020, https://theaterofwar.com/ projects/theater-of-war-for-medical-communities/. 40 Ibid. 41 Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration, streamed live on April 26, 2020, YouTube video. Recording available here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=A92wZIvEUAw. 42 In-Zoom, created by Bill Irwin, The Old Globe, streamed live on May 14, 2020, YouTube video. Recording available here: https://www.theoldglobe. org/in-zoom-thursday/. 43 Bill Irwin, “Can Physical Comedy Work on Zoom? Bill Irwin Wants to Find Out,” interview by Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times, May 12, 2020, accessed September 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/ theater/bill-irwin-zoom.html/.

2  Bending the Rules: Experimenting with Zoom 1 Tim Etchells, “By Means of Fire: Forced Entertainment, Prediction, and the Community of Audience,” Theater 46, no. 3 (November 2016): 15. 2 Forced Entertainment, End Meeting For All, directed by Tim Etchells, recording viewed on May 19, 2020, YouTube video. 3 Tim Etchells, “Falling into Place: A Note on End Meeting for All,” Forced Entertainment, accessed September 23, 2020, https://www.

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forcedentertainment.com/falling-into-place-a-note-on-end-meetingfor-all/. 4 Ibid. 5 Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151. 6 Ibid. 7 Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (New York: Routledge, 2011), 63. 8 Ridout, Stage Fright. 9 Traces of Antigone, concept and art direction by Elli Papakonstantinou, text by Christina Ouzounidis, streamed live on May 18, 2020, Zoom. I watched a streamed version on Vimeo, on September 15, 2020. 10 “Traces of Antigone,” ArtConnect, accessed September 21, 2020, https:// www.artconnect.com/projects/traces-of-antigone/. 11 Elli Papakonstantinou, email message to author, September 22, 2020. Adapted from an interview by Anna Bandettini, Il Venerdì di Repubblica, published October 9, 2020. 12 “Traces of Antigone,” website of Elli Papakonstantinou, accessed September 22, 2020, https://elli.site/projects/traces-of-antigone/. 13 Elli Papakonstantinou, interview with author, September 24, 2020. 14 “Traces of Antigone,” website of Elli Papakonstantinou. 15 Papakonstantinou, interview. 16 Papakonstantinou, email. 17 Papakonstantinou, interview. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 On intermedial modes contributing to the “reactivation of the polis (agora),” see Katia Arfara, Aneta Mancewicz, and Ralf Remshardt, eds., “Introduction: In and Out: Intermedial Practices in the New Public Sphere,” in Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 6. 21 “Traces of Antigone,” website of Elli Papakonstantinou. 22 Papakonstantinou, interview. 23 Traces of Antigone infopack, shared with the author by Papakonstantinou.

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24 Source Material Collective, In These Uncertain Times, directed by Samantha Shay, streamed live on July 25, 2020, Zoom. 25 Source Material postponement announcement, June 10, 2020. I am grateful to Samantha Shay for sharing a copy of this document and a recording of In These Uncertain Times, as well as generously answering my questions about the piece over email. 26 Todd London, “The Art of Theater,” in The Art of Governance: Boards in the Performing Arts, ed. Nancy Roche and Jaan Whitehead (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 8. 27 Shay, email message to author, September 26, 2020. 28 “En compañia de los clásicos” was the CNTC’s broader initiative to engage audiences from their homes, with a combination of interviews, streamed work, and other content. Highlights include the video piece Martin Arnold sueña la vida, by Iñigo Rodríguez-Claro, which brings together Austrian video artist Martin Arnold’s distinctive cuts and deconstructed footage with Calderón’s La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) to reflect on the pandemic. 29 En otro reino extraño, directed by David Boceta, Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, streamed live on June 29, 2020, Zoom. All translations mine unless otherwise noted. 30 Director’s note by David Boceta, “En otro reino extraño,” Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, accessed October 8, 2020, http://teatroclasico. mcu.es/2020/06/04/en-otro-reino-extrano-2/. 31 Esther Fernández, “Classical Theatre in Another Strange Land,” Howlround, September 3, 2020, accessed October 8, 2020, https://howlround.com/ classical-theatre-another-strange-land/. 32 Luis Sorolla, interview with author, October 22, 2020. 33 Fernández, “Classical Theatre in Another Strange Land.” 34 Sorolla, interview. 35 The latter is slightly more familiar in the United States, as it has been adapted by Caridad Svich as The Labyrinth of Desire (2006). 36 Fernández, “Classical Theatre in Another Strange Land.” 37 Álvaro Luna, audio message to author, October 14, 2020. My translation. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

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40 Ibid. 41 Sorolla, interview. 42 Ibid. I rely here on Fernández’s account of this transfer to Almagro, as I was only able to see the virtual version. 43 Sorolla, interview. 44 Javier Vallejo, “La audacia con la prudencia,” review of the Festival de Almagro, El País, July 18, 2020, accessed October 22, 2020, https://elpais. com/cultura/2020/07/16/babelia/1594912731_722672.html/. 45 “Roundabout,” National Institute of Dramatic Art, accessed September 16, 2020, https://www.nida.edu.au/productions/digital-theatre-festival/ roundabout/. I discuss the multiplatform, participatory Roundabout in Chapter 3. 46 Lockdown: Love and Death in the Age of COVID, directed by Nigel Jamieson, National Institute of Dramatic Art, streamed live August 5–9, 2020. I viewed the piece on YouTube on August 24, 2020. 47 Nigel Jamieson, in an introductory note to the streamed piece. 48 The Art of Facing Fear, written by Ivam Cabral and Rodolfo García Vázquez, directed by Rodolfo García Vázquez, streamed live September 5–27, 2020, Zoom, viewed on September 6. 49 “Introduction,” The Art of Facing Fear, US program.

3  Thinking outside the Box: Multiplatform 1 Sean Stewart, interview with author, September 21, 2020. 2 Independent Shakespeare Company, Romeo and Juliet, adapted from William Shakespeare, directed by Melissa Chalsma, livestreamed September 17–27, 2020. 3 Experimental “multimodal” theater, including digital performance, predates the pandemic, of course. See, for example, Andy Lavender’s crucial “The Internet, Theatre, and Time: Transmediating the Theatron,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27, no. 3 (2017), 340–52, which anticipates many of the questions that animate this book. Unlike some of the work analyzed by Lavender in his article, however, the performances described in this chapter are entirely digital, although they involve different platforms and feature companies or artists forced online by the pandemic.

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4 Lavender, “The Internet, Theatre, and Time,” 344. 5 Game Over occurred live on Zoom, with some WhatsApp messages arriving in advance. Grumelot, Game Over, directed by Carlota Gaviño and Iñigo Rodríguez Claro, streamed live on July 4, 2020, Zoom. All citations are from the production and my translation, unless otherwise noted. 6 The letters are available in English as Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, ed. Jean Benedetti (New York: Echo, 1997). Carol Rocamora’s play based on the correspondence, Ta Main Dans La Mienne (Your Hand in Mine) was presented at the Barbican Pit Theatre in 2005, in a production directed by Peter Brook. 7 Carlota Gaviño and Iñigo Rodríguez Claro, interview with author, July 27, 2020. 8 Ibid. 9 One of the challenges of this kind of work is the built-in limitation in audience/participants, dictated by both the maximum size of a WhatsApp group and the individualized nature of the interactions included in the piece (phone calls, one-on-one exchanges in Zoom breakout rooms, etc.). 10 Lavender, “The Internet, Theatre, and Time,” 348. 11 Grumelot, Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte, directed by Carlota Gaviño and Iara Solano, streamed live on November 14, 2020, Zoom. 12 Gaviño and Rodríguez Claro, interview. 13 “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (@sorjuanalapeor), Instagram post, September 14, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CFIjlXXK-jJ/. 14 WhatsApp communication from Grumelot to registered attendees, November 14, 2020. 15 The Seagull on The Sims 4, written and performed by Celine Song, adapted from Anton Chekhov, New York Theater Workshop, streamed live October 27 and 28, Twitch. 16 “The Seagull on the SIMS 4 FAQs,” Google Docs, accessed October 28, 2020, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wyuGFTQJEsAEnpZTrTI2d h6ZJkhBFx62wiEfE1EQh74/edit/. 17 “Artistic Instigators,” New York Theatre Workshop, accessed November 2, 2020, https://www.nytw.org/artistic-instigators/. 18 Forced Entertainment, Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare: At Home, directed by Tim Etchells, streamed live from September 17–November

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21

22

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24 25

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15, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-blz3 DjyJIyhGeDEPROuy6WqwDd6mTKO/. “Hundreds of People Watched a Play Unfold in The Sims 4,” Polygon, accessed November 2, 2020, https://www.polygon.com/2020/10/29/ 21540644/sims-4-chekhov-the-seagull-new-york-theatre-workshop/. As Patrick B. McLean’s notes in his review of a piece I discuss below, “Twitch allows performers to share an experience with an ever growing audience without requiring anyone to be on camera constantly” (McLean, “A ‘Roundabout’ Worth Getting Stuck In,” No Proscenium, August 20, 2020, accessed September 18, 2020, https://noproscenium. com/a-roundabout-worth-getting-stuck-in-review-dfe514573204/. I cite from my notes from the two nights of performance. Wherever possible, I have tried to assign comments to particular participants, especially those who used their full names in the chat, but as anyone who has experienced a Twitch stream will recognize, the comments fly by in semi-anonymity. When comments come from the telephone conversation between Song and various callers, I signal the distinction. An important precedent for this playfulness is Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis’s famous waitingforgodot.com, which inaugurated Desktop Theater, their long-term digital performance project on online discussion groups such as The Palace (1997–2002). For more detail on this groundbreaking project, including a range of critical responses, see Adriene Jenik’s website: https://ajenik.faculty.asu.edu/projects_dt.html. On the Web 2.0, Song’s Seagull expands on these early experiments, enabled by the sophistication of the Sims 4 platform and the ability to foreground audience participation via Twitch, so that the viewer’s interaction with her fully becomes the point. Whereas those who happened to find themselves in the chat rooms where Jenik and Brenneis staged their work were often unwitting participants, the audience for Song’s Seagull is there to riff on Chekhov. Cornel West, interview by Sam Fragoso, “State of the Union with Cornel West,” Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, October 18, 2020, accessed November 2, 2020, podcast, 6:25, http://talkeasypod.com/artist/cornel-west/. Ibid., 6:40. Ibid., 7:59.

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26 Roundabout, written and directed by Sean Stewart, National Institute of Dramatic Art, Twitch streamed live on August 4–9, 2020, recordings viewed on August 20–21, 2020, YouTube video. 27 Sean Stewart, online program notes on Roundabout, National Institute of Dramatic Art, accessed September 17, 2020, https://www.nida.edu.au/ productions/digital-theatre-festival/roundabout/. 28 Stewart, online program notes. 29 Jeff Damiani, “Sean Stewart Debuts ‘Roundabout,’ A Groundbreaking Interactive, Livestreamed Play, As The Headliner Of NIDA’s Digital Theatre Festival,” Forbes, August 5, 2020, accessed September 17, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2020/08/05/sean-stewartdebuts-roundabout-a-groundbreaking-interactive-livestreamed-play-asthe-headliner-of-nidas-digital-theatre-festival/#1b578ca36c47/. 30 Sean Stewart, interview by Noah Nelson, “NoPro Podcast 259: Sean Stewart—Roundabout,” No Proscenium, July 31, 2020, accessed September 17, 2020, podcast, 14:50, https://noproscenium.com/ nopro-podcast-259-sean-stewart-roundabout-e27734cd2e30/. 31 Stewart, interview with author. 32 Sean Stewart, “Swings and Roundabouts: Theater Strikes Back,” personal website, July 26, 2020, accessed September 18, 2020, http://www. seanstewart.org/swings-and-roundabouts-theater-strikes-back/. 33 Stewart, No Proscenium podcast, 18:05. 34 Stewart, “Swings and Roundabouts: Theater Strikes Back.” Stewart notes Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode as an example of how film might attempt a choose-your-own-adventure or branching narrative strategy, but notes the enormous costs of filming even short alternative segments for one storyline, and the limited number of choices typically available. 35 Stewart, “Swings and Roundabouts: Theater Strikes Back.” 36 Stewart, interview with author. 37 Ibid. 38 All citations from Roundabout are from the performances made available on YouTube in August 2020. 39 Stewart, online program notes on Roundabout. 40 Ibid. 41 Stewart, interview with author.

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4  Thinking outside the Box: Simulation 1 Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1966): 24–37, citation on 26. 2 Eli Simon, interview with author, September 28, 2020. 3 Glenda Nieto-Cuebas, “Conversación con Fernando Villa y Allan Flores: Efe Tres Teatro,” Anagnórisis: Revista de investigación teatral 20 (December 2019): 471–83. 4 Allan Flores, email message to author, October 1, 2020. 5 Los habladores, performed by Fernando Villa, EFE Tres Teatro, streamed on July 15, 2020, Zoom. 6 Ignacio D. Arellano-Torres, “El entremés de Los habladores, atribuido a Cervantes,” Anales Cervantinos 50 (2018): 299–323, https://doi.org/10.3989/ anacervantinos.2018.013/. 7 Allan Flores, email message to author. 8 Jen Hill, “Filters, Reactions, Lighting & More! New Features to Liven Up Your Meetings,” Zoom Blog, August 4, 2020, accessed December 18, 2020, https://blog.zoom.us/filters-reactions-lighting-features-zoom-meetings-2/. 9 A Midsummer Night’s Zoom, adapted from William Shakespeare, directed by Eli Simon, New Swan Shakespeare Festival, streamed on August 26–29, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzp ifEBBmjeSmEgatu8_bV-XuhHqtvKmA/. 10 “Zero Cost House (For Zoom),” Pig Iron Theatre Company, accessed December 18, 2020, https://pigiron.org/productions/zero-cost-housezoom/. 11 Macbeth, adapted from William Shakespeare, directed by Zoe Seaton, Creation Theatre/Big Telly Theatre Company, streamed live on October 25, 2020, Zoom. 12 “Macbeth reboot coming for this October,” Fairy Powered Productions, September 8, 2020, accessed October 26, 2020, http:// fairypoweredproductions.com/macbeth-reboot-coming-for-this-october/. 13 Ibid. 14 An interesting predecessor to this use of Zoom was the Tartuffe presented by the Brooklyn, NY, company Molière in the Park (June 27–July 1, 2020), which offered an earlier version of elaborately framed and disguised boxes: https://www.moliereinthepark.org/tartuffe-online/.

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15 Kirsty Herrington, “Interview with Zoe Seaton,” From Page to Stage— and Everything In Between, October 7, 2020, accessed October 26, 2020, https://from-page-to-stage.com/2020/10/07/interview-with-zoe-seaton/. 16 Cf. Álvaro Luna’s account of how the video design for En otro reino extraño was conceived, in Chapter 2. Luna emphasized both liveness and the single-shot view as key elements of the theatrical quality they wished to foreground in the piece. 17 King Lear, adapted from William Shakespeare, directed by Elizabeth Carter, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, streamed live on August 2, 2020, YouTube video. 18 “Free Shakespeare at Home: Reflections on Summer 2020,” San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, accessed October 12, 2020, http://www.sfshakes.org/ performances/free-shakespeare-at-home-reflections-on-summer-2020/. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Open Broadcaster Software, accessed October 5, 2020, https://obsproject. com/. 22 Arin Roberson and Eliana Lewis-Eme, “A Peek behind the (Virtual) Curtain of King Lear,” Shake It Up: the Blog for San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, July 15, 2020, accessed October 12, 2020, https://sfshakes. wordpress.com/2020/07/15/a-peek-behind-the-virtual-curtian-ofking-lear/. 23 “Behind the Scenes—Unified Virtual Space method,” SFShakes, September 24, 2020, accessed October 5, 2020, YouTube video, 0:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1E0ul0X9zM/. 24 Roberson and Lewis-Eme, “A Peek.” 25 Ibid. 26 Audience talk-back, August 2, 2020. 27 Roberson and Lewis-Eme, “A Peek.” 28 Ibid. 29 Ridout, Stage Fright. 30 Rebecca Ennals, Artistic Director, interview with author, October 13, 2020. 31 Ibid. 32 Edmund Campos, “O for a Zoom of Fire: Reimagining Free Shakespeare in the Park,” Shake It Up: the Blog for San Francisco Shakespeare Festival,

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May 27, 2020, accessed October 15, 2020, https://sfshakes.wordpress. com/2020/05/27/o-for-a-zoom-of-fire-reimagining-free-shakespeare-inthe-park/. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, written by Sarah Gancher, directed by Elizabeth Williamson and Jared Mezzocchi, TheaterWorks Hartford/TheaterSquared, streamed live on October 30, 2020, Zoom. 36 Jesse Green, “ ‘Russian Troll Farm’ Review: Clock In, Undermine Democracy, Clock Out,” New York Times, October 22, 2020, accessed October 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/theater/russiantroll-farm-review.html/. 37 Jared Mezzocchi, interview with author, November 3, 2020. 38 Ibid. 39 Russian Troll Farm, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www. russiantrollfarm.com/. 40 Mezzocchi, interview. 41 “Isadora,” Troikatronix, accessed December 18, 2020, https://troikatronix. com/. 42 Mezzocchi, interview with author. 43 Ibid. 44 James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (1976), in his Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 477–572, citation on 501. 45 Vinson Cunningham, “How Are Audiences Adapting to the Age of Virtual Theatre?” New Yorker, October 5, 2020, accessed October 12, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/12/ how-are-audiences-adapting-to-the-age-of-virtual-theatre/. 46 Ibid. 47 Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (New York: Doubleday, 2017). 48 Bush Moukarzel, interview with author, October 20, 2020. 49 “To Be a Machine (Version 1.0),” Dead Centre, accessed October 16, 2020, https://www.deadcentre.org/tobeamachine/. 50 Moukarzel, interview with author.

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51 Mark O’Connell, interview with author, October 16, 2020. 52 To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), adapted by Mark O’Connell, directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, Dead Centre, streamed live on October 9, 2020, Vimeo. 53 I am grateful to director Bush Moukarzel for making available a link to the preview for the audience upload function. All citations from the audience upload text are from this preview. 54 Moukarzel, interview with author. 55 For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the character as Mark and to the author as O’Connell. 56 All citations from the rehearsal script for To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) are generously furnished by Moukarzel. I am grateful to Moukarzel and O’Connell for permission to cite here. 57 O’Connell clarified to me that he did not intend the reference to Hamlet with his title, which is instead based on a line from Andy Warhol. Once the book is adapted into a theatrical context, however, the echo becomes insistent. 58 On “corpsing” and “dying” on stage, see Ridout, Stage Fright, 130–46. 59 Moukarzel, interview with author.

5  Solo: Small-Scale Theater 1 The piece even made its way into Source Material Collective’s In These Uncertain Times, which I discuss in Chapter 2. 2 Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Routledge, 2016), 122. 3 By fall 2020, the US film industry, with far more resources at its disposal, had largely resumed work with a series of precautionary measures, including the “bubble” model. In cities such as New York and Los Angeles, filming continued even while many activities were shut down again as Covid-19 spread in late fall. 4 Francisco and Simón Reyes’s Yorick was first presented in 2014 and subsequently adapted for Zoom. I viewed a recording kindly furnished by Francisco Reyes (September 20, 2020). A Farm for Meme was written by Virginia Grise and directed by Elena Araoz; performances were

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livestreamed in English and Spanish on August 1 and 2, 2020. Archived footage in both languages is available here: https://howlround.com/ happenings/farm-meme-asl-interpreted?fbclid=IwAR0Agnllqv9cCdf1AP4muTWPz1MITpCzWOtGLzMhh-dBgEpiVcg-00zH4c 5 “Old Vic: In Camera,” The Old Vic Theatre, accessed November 20, 2020, https://www.oldvictheatre.com/whats-on/2020/old-vic-in-camera/. 6 Joshua William Gelb, “Theater in Quarantine,” personal website, accessed September 9, 2020, http://www.joshuawilliamgelb.com/theater-inquarantine/. 7 Joshua William Gelb, “Thoughts from a Closet: On the Theater in Quarantine,” NY Drama Alumni Clan, May 5, 2020, accessed September 10, 2020, https://nydac.org/2020/05/05/ thoughts-from-a-closet-on-the-theater-in-quarantine/. 8 “Building the Quaratine [sic] Theater,” Theater in Quarantine, March 27, 2020, accessed September 29, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=cOf4MVWAtbQ/. Gelb also posts his earliest explorations, as he figures out what happens to his movements when he rotates the box on film. 9 Gelb, “Theater in Quarantine.” 10 Gelb, “Thoughts from a Closet.” 11 Gelb, interview with author, December 7, 2020. Gelb credits a 1980s Bill Irwin sketch about the performer trapped within a TV, as well as Fred Astaire’s apparently gravity-defying routines, as inspiration for his box. 12 Gelb, “Thoughts from a Closet.” 13 Ibid. 14 Gelb, email to author, December 9, 2020. 15 Gelb, “Thoughts from a Closet.” 16 Gelb, email to author, December 9, 2020. 17 Videos of all the pieces are available on Theater in Quarantine’s site and You Tube channel: http://www.joshuawilliamgelb.com/theater-inquarantine. Dates in the text indicate when the videos were published, unless otherwise noted. I viewed the videos discussed here in August– December 2020. 18 Jesse Green, “A Sci-Fi Classic Featuring a Multitude of Stooges,” review of The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, written by Josh Luxenberg, directed by Jonathan Levin, Theater in Quarantine, New York Times, July 31, 2020,

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accessed September 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/ theater/the-7th-voyage-of-egon-tichy-review.html/. 19 “TiQ / 7th voyage / BTS,” Theater in Quarantine, August 11, 2020, accessed September 29, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=74E251fzPHM/. 20 It is almost as though Gelb had decided to take up the challenge issued by Green at the end of the review cited above—“as the company advances further into spoken theater, I hope it finds ways to flesh out its smart playfulness with—how can I put this?—more human gravity”—although of course Footnote was already in the works when that review was published (“A Sci-Fi Classic Featuring a Multitude of Stooges”). 21 For art as resistance and escape in Borges’s story, see Sergio Waisman, “El secreto de ‘El milagro secreto’: traducción y resistencia en la obra de Jaromir Hladík,” Variaciones Borges 26 (2008): 113–24. As Waisman notes, though Hladík’s effort to complete his piece might appear quixotic, “el performance privado de Hladík resulta ser no sólo un acto de valentía sino, además, una muestra de resistencia cultural de una reescritura en acción que abre un campo inesperado de potencialidad en y contra la inevitabilidad de la Historia” [“Hladík’s private performance turns out to be not just an act of courage but also an example of cultural resistance by rewriting in action, which opens up an unexpected field of potential—it struggles in and against the inevitability of History,”] 115. 22 Alexandra Schwartz, “A One-Man Musical About Mother Teresa,” New Yorker, December 28, 2020. 23 Gelb, interview with author. 24 Ibid. 25 Christine Jones, “About Theatre For One,” Theatre for One, accessed September 11, 2020, https://theatreforone.com/about/. 26 BWW News Desk, “THEATRE FOR ONE: HERE WE ARE Announces Extension,” Broadway World, September 10, 2020, accessed September 11, 2020, https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/THEATREFOR-ONE-HERE-WE-ARE-Announces-Extension-20200910/. 27 Theatre for One: Here We Are, Christine Jones, “Program Notes,” in a pdf shared with the author. 28 Theatre for One: Here We Are, Jenny Koons, “Program Notes.”

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29 Christine Jones and Jenny Koons, interview with author, September 28, 2020. For a very different version of audience capture, see To Be a Machine, discussed in Chapter 4. 30 Jesse Green, “It’s Just You and Me and the Modem in ‘Here We Are,’ ” review of Here We Are, Theatre for One, New York Times, August 31, 2020, accessed September 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/ theater/here-we-are-review.html/. 31 Theatre for One: Here We Are, Jenny Koons, “Program Notes.” 32 Jones and Koons, interview. 33 whiterly negotiations, written by Lydia R. Diamond, performed by Nikkole Salter, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, Theatre for One, streamed live on September 10, 2020, Zoom. 34 Green, “It’s Just You and Me and the Modem.” 35 Here We Are, written by Nikkole Salter, performed by Russell G. Jones, directed by Tamilla Woodard, Theatre for One, streamed live on October 15, 2020, Zoom. 36 All citations from the Here We Are plays are from the scripts graciously shared by Theatre for One. 37 Thank you for Coming. Take Care, written by Stacey Rose, performed by Patrice Bell, directed by Candis C. Jones, Theatre for One, streamed live on September 10, 2020, Zoom. 38 Jones, email to author, December 20, 2020. 39 Theatre for One: Here We Are, “Program Notes,” “About Theatre for One.” 40 Jones, email to author, December 20, 2020. 41 Green, “It’s Just You and Me and the Modem.” 42 Jones and Koons, interview. 43 BWW News Desk, “Media Art Xploration Present Read Subtitles Aloud A Participatory Melodrama About the Digital Theater of Life in a Pandemic,” Broadway World, October 29, 2020, accessed December 8, 2020, https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-off-broadway/article/ Media-Art-Xploration-Present-READ-SUBTITLES-ALOUD-AParticipatory-Melodrama-About-The-Digital-Theater-Of-Life-In-APandemic-20201029/. 44 The series was originally presented in Turkish (May 30–June 11, 2020) as Altyazilari Yüksek Sesle Oku. In English, episodes were released November 12–23 and presented by Media Art Xploration, PlayCo,

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and A Corner in the World. The videos were made available on MAX’s YouTube channel. 45 Read Subtitles Aloud, written and directed by Onur Karaoglu and Kathryn Hamilton/Sister Sylvester, Media Art Xploration, recordings viewed on November 23, 2020, YouTube videos, https://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLXotziv-xy98y3WXe3f1Hwv5cni-ovCCc/. 46 On autofiction in drama, see Mauricio Tossi, “Condiciones estéticopolíticas de la autoficción teatral,” in El autor a escena: Intermedialidad y autoficción, ed. Ana Casas (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert, 2017), 59–80. 47 Hamilton, interview with author. 48 Karaoglu and Hamilton, interview with author, December 21, 2020. 49 “los procedimientos y recursos actorales desarrollados en las últimas décadas han propiciado una ‘operación autoficcional’ en la dramaturgia del actor, al forjar un espacio intermedio y singular entre la escena y la vida” [“the procedures and actor strategies developed in the last decades have invited an ‘autofictional operation’ in the actor’s dramaturgy, by forging an intermediate and singular space between the stage and life”], Tossi, “Condiciones estético-políticas,” 69. 50 Karaoglu, in an interview with Annie Jin Wang, “An Interview with the Artists Behind ‘Read Subtitles Aloud,’ ” PlayCo, accessed December 3, 2020, https://playco.org/interview-read-subtitles-aloud/. 51 Karaoglu and Hamilton, interview with author. 52 Ibid. 53 Laura Collins-Hughes and Alexis Soloski, “The Critic as Audience and Star,” New York Times, November 16, 2020, C1 and C5. 54 In what follows, I refer to the characters by their first names and creators by their last name. 55 Hamilton, interview with author. 56 Karaoglu notes that the image is disorienting even for those who are familiar with the geography, given that Zoom flips the image from the expected point of view from the European side. Hamilton notes that the screen offers what X supposedly sees. The centrality of the European perspective as default is yet another interesting dimension to this scene (interview with author).

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57 Karaoglu graciously shared with me a translation of “Dream” so that I could confirm my impressions. For the non-Turkish-speaking viewer, the experience of not understanding is crucial for this episode, hence I do not offer here an account of the lines in Turkish, but only of the English subtitles. 58 Hamilton, interview with author. 59 Karaoke functions as a shorthand for the vexed way words configure characters. In the interview with Wang, Hamilton notes, “It’s kind of like a dialogue karaoke … How much do you embody them by saying them, how much do you believe them? What does it mean to put those words inside of you?” (“An Interview with the Artists Behind ‘Read Subtitles Aloud”). 60 Karaoglu, interview with author. 61 Peter Marks, “Relief from Zoom Sometimes Comes in a Box. A Play in a Box,” Washington Post, September 25, 2020, accessed November 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/onlinetheater-play-in-a-box-humans-olney/2020/09/25/119e63c8-fee3-11ea8d05-9beaaa91c71f_story.html/. 62 Michael Paulson, “Making Art During a Pandemic: Theaters Seek and Share Mini-Plays,” New York Times, April 1, 2020, accessed December 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/theater/theaters-share-miniplays-coronavirus.html/. 63 BWW News Desk, “Play at Home Announces 100th Playwright Commission; Participating Theaters Include The Kennedy Center and More,” Broadway World, May 22, 2020, accessed December 9, 2020, https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/PLAY-AT-HOME-Announces100th-Playwright-Commission-Participating-Theaters-Include-TheKennedy-Center-More-20200522/, and Chloe Veltman, “With Theaters Shut Down, Why Not Put On a ‘Play at Home’?,” Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR, May 17, 2020, accessed December 9, 2020, https://www. npr.org/2020/05/17/857301511/with-theaters-shut-down-why-not-puton-a-play-at-home/. 64 “Last Audience PDF Access,” email message to author, November 25, 2020. 65 Yanira Castro, Last Audience: A Performance Manual, accessed November 25, 2020, https://storage.googleapis.com/mcamca/Last_Audience.pdf/.

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66 Castro, introductory note, Last Audience: A Performance Manual. 67 Castro, Last Audience, passim. 68 Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “a canary torsi | Yanira Castro, Last Audience: a performance manual Oct 24, Dec 13, 2020,” accessed December 14, 2020, https://mcachicago.org/Calendar/2020/09/ACanary-Torsi-Yanira-Castro-Last-Audience-A-Performance-Manual/. 69 A video of this presentation, moderated by MCA curator Tara Aisha Willis, is available on the MCA webpage, “a canary torsi,” October 24, 2020, embedded video. 70 Willis, video, 19:30. 71 Willis, video, 20:50.

6  Audio Theater, from Telephones to Podcasts 1 Helen Shaw, “A Play for Your Ears Only: Heather Christian’s Prime: A Practical Breviary,” New York Magazine, April 13, 2020, accessed November 9, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/review-heatherchristians-prime-a-practical-breviary.html/. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 “Human Resources,” Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, accessed November 9, 2020, https://www.woollymammoth.net/event/humanresources/. The piece was created by Brittany K. Allen, Christopher Chen, Hansol Jung, Sarah Lunnie, Stowe Nelson, Zeniba Now, and Yuvika Tolani. 5 “A Thousand Ways,” 600 HIGHWAYMEN, accessed November 11, 2020, http://www.600highwaymen.org/1000-ways/. 6 “About,” 600 HIGHWAYMEN, accessed November 11, 2020, http://www. 600highwaymen.org/about/. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 “A Thousand Ways.” 10 As this book goes to press, I have only experienced “A Phone Call.” 11 “A Phone Call,” A Thousand Ways, created by 600 HIGHWAYMEN, presented by Center for the Arts of Performance at UCLA, December 13, 2020, audio phone call.

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12 After my phone call on December 13, I received an email from CAP UCLA encouraging me to call a number for further information. A phone tree included options for the history of the piece and the creators discussing various aspects. The phone tree is no longer operational. 13 Kate Wyver, “This Digital Afterlife: Mobile Phone-Based Show Connects Us In Our Grief,” The Guardian, August 24, 2020, accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/aug/24/this-digitalafterlife-mobile-phone-based-show-connects-us-in-our-grief-user-notfound-dante-or-die/. 14 “User Not Found,” Dante or Die, accessed November 19, 2020, https:// danteordie.com/user-not-found/. 15 Matt Trueman, “Review: User Not Found by Dante or Die,” Fest, August 14, 2018, accessed November 20, 2020, https://www.fest-mag.com/ edinburgh/theatre/review-user-not-found-by-dante-or-die/. 16 Ibid. 17 Lib Taylor, foreword to User Not Found, by Dante or Die/Chris Goode (London: Oberon, 2018), 18. 18 User Not Found, written by Chris Goode, directed by Daphna Attias, performed by Terry O’Donovan, Dante or Die, streamed on November 19, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kcCvR4y2yk8/. 19 Dante or Die/Chris Goode, User Not Found, 51–8. I cite from the 2018 published text, although some sections have been adapted for the 2020 version. 20 “Playwrights Horizons: Soundstage,” PodLink, accessed October 7, 2020, https://pod.link/1506030952/. 21 “Introducing: Soundstage,” Playwrights Horizons, streamed on October 7, 2020, podcast, https://pod.link/1506030952/. 22 Peter Libbey, “No Stage? No Problem. Playwrights Horizons Debuts a Series of Audio Plays,” New York Times, April 9, 2020, accessed October 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/theater/playwrightshorizons-audio-plays.html/. 23 Soundstage: Play for Any Two People, written by Jordan Harrison, directed by Morgan Green, Playwrights Horizons, streamed on October 7, 2020, podcast, https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/ play-any-two-people-jordan-harrison/.

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24 Soundstage: Outtakes, written by Qui Nguyen, directed by May Adrales, Playwrights Horizons, streamed on October 7, 2020, podcast, https:// www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/outtakes-qui-nguyen/. 25 “Richard II,” The Public Theater, accessed October 8, 2020, https:// publictheater.org/productions/season/1920/richard-ii/. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Robin Kello, “Radio Free Shakespeare: Richard II on WNYC,” Diversifying the Classics blog, July 24, 2020, accessed November 19, 2020, http://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu/ radio-free-shakespeare-richard-ii-on-wnyc/. 29 “Richard II: Episode 1,” directed by Saheem Ali, The Public Theater, streamed on July 13, podcast, 11:15, https://www.wnycstudios.org/ podcasts/free-shakespeare-podcast-richard-ii/episodes/. 30 [los números imaginarios], Quijotes y Sanchos, directed by Carlos Tuñón, streamed on November 15, 2020, Telegram app. The Los Angeles version was translated by Rafael Jaime, Saraí Jaramillo, and Robin Kello. 31 “Quijotes y Sanchos,” Teatro de la Abadía, accessed November 17, 2020, https://www.teatroabadia.com/es/archivo/625/quijotes-y-sanchos/, my translation. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 I rely here on a video recording of the live production, generously furnished by director J. J. Kandel. 35 Kandel, email message to author, December 14, 2020. 36 Ibid. 37 Jesse Green, “Review: From Neil LaBute, a Case of He Said, She Said, No One Said,” review of True Love Will Find You in the End, written by Neil LaBute, directed by J. J. Kandel, Denizen Theater, New York Times, October 28, 2020, accessed October 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/10/28/theater/neil-labute-true-love-will-find-you.html/. 38 Ibid. 39 Kandel, email message to author.

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7  Distanced Theater: Reinhabiting the City and Beyond 1 In the United States, there were a handful of performances with live actors and socially distanced audiences over the summer, most of them in rural settings where the number of cases had never been very high: the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, West Virginia put on productions of Othello and Twelfth Night for their Summer/ Fall 2020 “SafeStart Season” (https://extras.americanshakespearecenter. com/othello/), Berkshire Theatre Group presented Godspell in western Massachusetts (https://www.berkshiretheatregroup.org/history-andimpact-of-godspell/), and Weathervane Theatre produced a few in-person shows, including Little Shop of Horrors, in Whitefield, New Hampshire (https://www.broadwayworld.com/new-hampshire/article/Weathervaneto-Open-Equity-Approved-LITTLE-SHOP-OF-HORRORS-andMIRACLE-ON-SOUTH-DIVISION-STREET-This-Week-20200908). 2 The term, originally proposed by Sonjah Stanley Niaah, is expanded to postdramatic performance by Jasmine Mahmoud in “Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle,” in Postdramatic Theatre and Form, ed. Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf (New York: Methuen Drama, 2019), 48–65. Mahmoud defines postdramatic geography “as both a space given meaning by postdramatic aesthetic acts and as space where, due to collapse or other political economic conditions, geographic meanings are in flux in ways that fragment perception and semiotics providing space especially suitable for postdramatic practices” (55). 3 EFE Tres Teatro, El merolico desde su balcón, adapted and performed by Fernando Villa, recording viewed on October 21, 2020, Facebook video, https://www.facebook.com/EFETRESteatro/videos/1081665785567238/. My description above is based on this recording. 4 For a review of the streamed performance, see Laura Muñoz, “El merolico desde su balcón Brings Theater at a Distance,” Diversifying the Classics blog, May 23, 2020, accessed October 21, 2020, http://diversifyingthe classics.humanities.ucla.edu/el-merolico-desde-su-balcon-bringstheater-at-a-distance/. 5 Allan Flores, email message to author, October 1, 2020.

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6 Ibid. 7 Sunnymead Court, written by Gemma Lawrence, directed by James Hillier, The Actors Centre, streamed live on October 2, 2020, 8 James Hillier, “Who’d Put on a Play During a Pandemic?” Sunnymead Court digital program, p. 2. 9 Gemma Lawrence, “Connection, Isolation, and Hope,” Sunnymead Court digital program, p. 3. 10 Ibid. 11 Gemma Lawrence, interview with author, October 26, 2020. 12 Lawrence, “Connection, Isolation, and Hope.” 13 Ibid. 14 Lawrence, interview. 15 Ibid. 16 Gemma Lawrence, email message to author, October 27, 2020. 17 “Announcing the World Premiere of Sunnymead Court, Presented by Defibrillator in Association with The Actors Centre,” The Actors Centre, August 14, 2020, accessed October 21, 2020, https://www.actorscentre. co.uk/news/announcing-the-world-premiere-of-sunnymead-courtpresented-by-defibrillator-in-association-with-the-actors-centre/. 18 Louise Penn, review of Sunnymead Court, Broadway World, September 25, 2020, accessed October 21, 2020, https://www.broadwayworld.com/ westend/article/BWW-Review-SUNNYMEAD-COURT-Tristan-BatesTheatre-20200925/. 19 I am grateful to Gemma Lawrence for making a copy of the script available to me. 20 Lawrence, interview. 21 Shakespeare in Clark Park, Every Everyman, directed by Kittson O’Neill, assistant director and writer Ang Bey, recording viewed on November 2, 2020, Facebook video, https://www.facebook.com/ shakespeareinclarkpark/videos/391430735230411/. All citations of the performance are from this version. 22 Kittson O’Neill, interview with Michael Van Osch, The Hark Journal, November 14, 2020, accessed December 4, 2020, https://harkjournal. com/interview-with-shakespeare-in-clark-park/. 23 BWW News Desk, “Shakespeare in Clark Park Produces Mobile, Socially-Distanced Theater,” Broadway World, October 27, 2020, accessed

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December 6, 2020, https://www.broadwayworld.com/philadelphia/ article/Shakespeare-in-Clark-Park-Produces-Mobile-Socially-DistantTheatre-20201027, 24 O’Neill, interview. 25 “Shakespeare in Clark Park,” Broadway World. 26 O’Neill, interview. 27 I was not able to experience Woolf ’s highly localized, participatory piece, and rely here on Deborah L. Jacobs, “Why This Professor is Writing Letters for People Feeling Blue,” New York Times, October 30, 2020, accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/ nyregion/coronavirus-letter-writing-brooklyn.html, and Ben Gassman’s “This Box Tickles Fascists: On Brandon Woolf ’s The Console,” Culture Bot, October 28, 2020, accessed November 30, 2020, https://www. culturebot.org/2020/10/61144/this-box-tickles-fascists-on-brandonwoolfs-the-console/, as well as Woolf ’s own website (http://www. brandonwoolfperformance.com/) and my interview with him. As an analog mode of connection, the handwritten letter remains an object of powerful filmic fascination, from the retired schoolteacher who serves as a scrivener for illiterate customers at the Rio de Janeiro train station in Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil (1998), to the whimsical company that produces handwritten missives on demand in a world pervaded by artificial intelligence in Spike Jonze’s 2013 Her. 28 Brandon Woolf, interview with author, November 30, 2020. 29 Ibid. 30 Jacobs, “Why This Professor Is Writing Letters for People Feeling Blue.” 31 “The Console,” Brandon Woolf Performance Projects, accessed November 19, 2020, http://www.brandonwoolfperformance. com/?portfolio=the-console/. 32 Gassman, “This Box Tickles Fascists.” 33 Woolf, interview. 34 Temping, written by Michael Yates Crowley, directed by Michael Rau, Dutch Kills Theater, October 24–December 4, 2020. While I did not experience the site-specific Temping and rely here on the website (https:// dutchkillstheater.com/temping/) for the piece as well as the reviews cited below, it seemed important to chronicle its resignification of the office—a habitual location for so many—during the pandemic.

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35 In its focus on calculating the statistical probability of death, Temping is also reminiscent of Deborah Pearson’s The Future Show, in which she performed “an account of what was going to happen to her between the end of that evening’s performance and her death” (Philip Watkinson, “Time: Unsettling the Present,” in Postdramatic Theatre and Form, ed. Boyle, Cornish and Woolf, 66–80, citation on 72). 36 Cheyenne Ligon, “Temping Makes Riveting Drama of Workplace Desperation,” No Proscenium, November 17, 2020, accessed November 20, 2020, https://noproscenium.com/temping-makes-riveting-drama-ofworkplace-desperation-review-f671d068ae50/. 37 Ibid. The demands on the participant/actor productively complicate the boundaries of the “real.” Cf. the rich discussion in Ryan Anthony Hatch, “Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real” (Postdramatic Theatre and Form, 131–46) of what is required of the performer in such cases: “to enter into a zone of ontological indistinction, to live their lives as characters, to inhabit and be inhabited by fiction long enough for this very fictiveness to begin to falter, that is to say, to fold into itself that reality which dramatic space, in order to constitute itself, designates as its outside” (133). 38 Laura Collins-Hughes and Alexis Soloski, “When the Critic is Also the Star. And The Audience,” New York Times, November 15, 2020, accessed November 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/theater/ temping-pandemic-phone-call.html/. 39 Ligon, “Temping Makes Riveting Drama of Workplace Desperation.” 40 Ibid. 41 March, conceived and directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera, was presented October 17–November 15, 2020, by the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center and Playwrights’ Arena, in the Parking Garage, Level 2, of the Anita May Rosenstein Campus. 42 Fire Season, written and performed by Monica Miklas, Capital W, October 18, 2020. 43 “Paramount Ranch,” National Park Service, accessed October 19, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/samo/planyourvisit/paramountranch.htm/. 44 “Fire Season,” Capital W, accessed October 19, 2020, http://www. capitalwperformance.com/fireseason/.

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45 Todd Martens, “A Covid-Safe Interactive Outdoor Theater Explores California Fire Season and Life in 2020,” review of Fire Season, Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/ story/2020-10-04/fire-season-interactive-outdoor-theater-covid-19/. 46 I cite from the Fire Season zine-program distributed at the end of the piece, which reproduces Miklas’s text. 47 En Pointe, written and directed by Mathieu Murphy-Perron, Tableau D’Hôte Theatre, recordings viewed October 10–23, 2020, Vimeo video, https://tableaudhote.ca/. 48 Mahmoud notes how in Seattle, despite the loss of midsize theaters, the Great Recession of 2008–9 made newly marginal spaces temporarily available for artists, amid the city’s “geographies of collapse” (Mahmoud, “Space,” 58). 49 Savannah Stewart, “En Pointe is innovative Covid-safe theatre courtesy of Tableau D’Hote,” Cult MTL, September 14, 2020, accessed October 27, 2020, https://cultmtl.com/2020/09/en-pointe-is-innovative-covid-safetheatre-courtesy-of-tableau-dhote-montreal/. 50 En Pointe, written and directed by Mathieu Murphy-Perron, Tableau D’Hôte Theatre, recordings viewed October 10–23, 2020, Vimeo video, https://tableaudhote.ca/. The short films, comics, and information about each play are available on the website. 51 Emilie Gagnon, “Review: ‘En Pointe,’ Episode 5: Why Y?” Montreal Theatre Hub, August 31, 2020, accessed October 23, 2020, https:// montrealtheatrehub.com/2020/08/31/review-en-pointe-episode-5why-y/. The series of reviews for En Pointe includes images of the socially distanced audiences watching the pieces in their actual locations, which convey some sense of their local impact. 52 Monika Jackiewitz, “Review: ‘En Pointe,’ Episode 7: The Laundromat,” Montreal Theatre Hub, September 15, 2020, accessed October 23, 2020, https://montrealtheatrehub.com/2020/09/15/ review-en-pointe-episode-7-the-laundromat/. 53 Ibid. 54 Emilie Gagnon, Review: ‘En Pointe,’ Episode 9: L’histoire, l’avenir” Montreal Theatre Hub, September 30, 2020, accessed October 27, 2020, https://montrealtheatrehub.com/2020/09/30/ review-en-pointe-episode-9-lhistoire-lavenir/.

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Postscript 1 “Shakespeare Gets Covid Vaccine: All’s Well That Ends Well,” BBC News, December 8, 2020, accessed December 20, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/ news/uk-55233021/. 2 https://beanartshero.com/ and https://www.saveourstages.com/, accessed December 28, 2020. 3 Deb Miller, “Long-awaited government relief package includes $15 billion to Save Our Stages,” DC Metro Theater Arts, December 28, 2020, https:// www.gov.uk/government/news/157-billion-investment-to-protectbritains-world-class-cultural-arts-and-heritage-institutions, and https:// dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2020/12/28/long-awaited-government-reliefpackage-includes-15-billion-to-save-our-stages/, accessed December 28, 2020. 4 Ashley Lee, “Why TikTok’s `Ratatouille’ experiment is the future of musical theater,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2021, https://www.latimes. com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-01-02/tiktok-ratatouille-musicaltheater/, accessed January 2, 2021. 5 Sharareh Drury, “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical Serves Crowdsourced Culinary Content to Aid the Actors’ Fund,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 1, 2021, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ratatouillethe-tiktok-musical-serves-crowdsourced-culinary-content-to-aid-theactors-fund, accessed January 2, 2021. 6 “The Actors Fund Announces That ‘Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical’ Has Raised $2 Million,” press release, January 12, 2021, https:// actorsfund.org/about-us/news/ratatouille-2-million, accessed January 28, 2021. 7 Heather Christian’s I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, described in the credits as “One brief musical act with Mother Teresa: An Expressionist Drag Performance in Triptych,” was presented by Theater in Quarantine in association with Theater Mitu’s Expansion Works, directed and performed by Joshua William Gelb, with choreography and associate direction by Katie Rose McLaughlin, with scenography by Kristen Robinson, drag dramaturgy by Dito van Reigersberg, and video design by Stivo Arnoczy. It was livestreamed

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on YouTube on December 18, 2020. The video is available here: http://www.joshuawilliamgelb.com/theater-in-quarantine 8 Alexandra Schwartz, “A One-Man Musical about Mother Teresa,” review of Theater in Quarantine’s I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, New Yorker, December 21, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/28/aone-man-musical-about-mother-teresa, accessed January 25, 2021.

Index access 2–3, 10–19, 152, 183–4 and economic hierarchies 14–15, 110, 132 and geographic reach 15, 27–8, 35, 95, 111, 132, 163–6 and performance spaces 16–17, 34, 100, 110–11, 152, 162 See also distanced collaboration The Acme Corporation 137–9 The Actors Centre 165 adaptation of pre-existing work to virtual forms: EFE Tres 89–90, 163 Last Audience 140–1 Table Top Shakespeare 75 Theatre for One 124 Theater of War 34–5 To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) 106 True Love Will Find You in the End 157 User Not Found 147–8 Yorick: la historia de Hamlet 211n4 agency and control 10, 18, 66, 200n32 in Fire Season 175 in King Lear 97–100 in Play for Any Two People 150–1 in Read Subtitles Aloud 132–8 in The Seagull on The Sims 4 76-80 in Temping 172–3 in A Thousand Ways 147 in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) 106–14 Ali, Saheem 152–4 Ampudia, Eugenio 55, 115 Apple Family plays 28–9 And So We Come Forth 32, 199n11 Incidental Moments of the Day 32–3

What Do We Need to Talk About 7, 28–33, 44 Araoz, Elena 11, 22, 197n68, 211n4. See also Innovations in Socially Distant Performance The Art of Facing Fear 63–4 audience engagement 2, 17–19, 52, 116, 137, 183–4 audience as performer 132–47, 150–1, 172–3 and audio formats 153–4, 149–50, 157–9 in En otro reino extraño 58–61 and the chat 63–4, 100–1, 105, 125–6 in multiplatform participatory formats 65–85 and one-on-one performance 124–32 and site-specific performance 162–5, 169–72, 176 and Theater of War 33–8 in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) 105–14 audio theater 3–4, 25, 116, 138–9, 143–59 augmented reality 2, 87–93, 114, 163–4, 208n8 Auslander, Philip 5–6, 192n12, 192n15 See also liveness autofiction 133, 215n49 Bailes, Sara Jane 47 See also poetics of failure Baldwin, James 104–5 Batuman, Elif 36, 200n20, 200n32 Belarus Free Theatre 17

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Beltrán, Marlene 116 Bensussen, Melia 19 Berger, Jesse 13. See also labor and unions Big Telly Theatre Company 92, 193n24 Boceta, David 58–61 La boda entre dos maridos 60–1 Borges, Jorge Luis 108, 118, 121–3, 213n21 Brantley, Ben 31, 33 Brechtian theater 8–9, 57, 88 Brenneis, Lisa 206n22 Capital W 173 capitalism 70, 144–5, 172–3, 176–80 Castelvines y Monteses 60–1 Castro, Yanira 140–2 Cervantes, Miguel de 89–90, 155–6, 165 chat function 9, 17–18, 105, 116, 183–4 in The Art of Facing Fear 63–64 in In These Uncertain Times 55–7 in King Lear 100–1 in Roundabout 80–5 in The Seagull on The Sims 4 75-80 in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) 113–14 Chekhov, Anton 33, 56–7, 67–71, 74–80, 105, 205n6, 206n22 Christian, Heather 123, 185–6, 225n7 classical canon 56–62, 66, 72–80 Collins-Hughes, Laura 173 community engagement 28, 104–5, 116, 142, 184, 202n20 in En Pointe 176–80 in Every Everyman 169–70 in Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical 184–5 and Theater of War 9, 33–8 in Traces of Antigone 17, 49–53

Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico 19, 58–9, 203n28 Company of Angels 63 composite editing 24–5, 60– 1, 93–104 Concierto para el Bioceno 55, 115 The Console 170–2, 222n27 copresence 6–7, 9, 11, 25–8, 52, 55, 88, 101–4, 115 Creation Theatre 92, 193n24 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la 72–4 Cunningham, Vinson 105, 153 Dante or Die 147–8 Dead Centre 17, 105–14 La defensa de las mujeres 60 Defibrillator 165 definitions of digital theater 2, 6–10, 30–1, 55, 87–8 and labor unions 12–14 See also film versus theater Desktop Theater 206n22 See also history of digital theater devised theater 2, 44, 62, 66–8, 72, 170, 197n61 distanced collaboration 11, 44, 63–71, 92–5, 118, 142, 184–5, 192n10 distanced theater 2–4, 25, 66, 116, 161–81, 220n1 Dixon, Steve 6, 192n10 Doerries, Bryan 7, 17, 33–8, 200n20, 200n31–32 Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes 83 Dutch Kills Theater 172, 222n34 EFE Tres 89–90, 163–5 embodiment in virtual forms 43, 50–3, 78–9, 82–4, 117–20, 144, 166–7 and augmented reality 90–1 coordination between performers 23, 40, 60–1, 92–100

Index focal points and eye contact 23, 40, 92, 97–9, 131 restricted view 23, 41, 46, 50, 120; and transhumanism 105–12 Emmrich, Stuart 30–1 En otro reino extraño 58–62, 92, 203n35, 204n42, 209n16 En Pointe 176–81, 224n50-51 End Meeting for All 7, 44–8, 54, 56, 63 Ennals, Rebecca 100–1, 111 Errico, Melissa 20, 24 Etchells, Tim 44–8 Every Everyman 169–70 Facebook 96 A Farm for Meme 11, 116, 211n4 Fernández, Esther 58–60, 204n42 film versus theater 2, 7–8, 14, 65, 80–1, 87–8, 94–100, 192n16, 207n34, 208n1. See also definitions of digital theater; liveness Fire Season 173–6 Flash Acts 16 Flores, Allan 89–90, 164 Forced Entertainment 7, 44–5, 75, 120 fourth wall 9, 47, 52, 67, 94, 101, 124, 127 See also metatheatricality Frauenschlläechterei 139 Gagnon, Emilie 179, 224n51 Game Over 66–74, 147–8, 205n9 Gassman, Ben 171–2 Gaviño, Carlota 66–74 Gelb, Joshua William 19–20, 117–24, 142, 185–6, 213n20 Green, Jesse 7, 12, 101, 120, 128, 132, 157–8, 194n28, 213n20 Greenfield, Adam 150. See also audio theater Grumelot 66–74, 85, 147, 205n9

229

Los habladores 90–1, 163 Hamilton, Kathryn 133–7, 191n7, 215n56, 216n59 Hamlet 110, 116, 120, 193n26, 211n57 Harris, Aleshea 76–8 Harris, Jeremy O. 76, 78 Harrison, Jordan 150 Hella Fresh Theater 139 Here We Are (initiative) 105, 116, 124–32, 142 Here We Are (play) 128–31 Thank You for Coming. Take Care 130–1 whiterly negotiations 127–8, 131 Hillier, James 165 history of digital theater 5–7, 28, 96, 191n7, 192n8, 192n10, 204n3 Human Resources 144–5, 172 The Humans 14 Ilter, Seda 5. See also mediatization immersive theater 5, 18, 22 and audio theater 142–59 in multiplatform modes 65–85 and site-specific performance 161–81 In Camera series 12, 116, 193n27 Faith Healer 12 Lungs 12 Three Kings 12, 194n28 In Love and Warcraft 8 In These Uncertain Times 54–9, 63 In-Zoom 19, 39–41, 92, 117 Independent Shakespeare Company (Los Angeles) 65 Innovations in Socially Distant Performance 22 Instagram 1, 4, 55, 65–73 The Institute for Counterfeit Memory 137–9 Invisible Summer 139 Irwin, Bill 19, 39–41, 92, 117, 212n11

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Index

Jackiewitz, Monika 180 Jenik, Adriene 206n22 Jones, Christine 124, 127, 131–2 Julius Caesar 152 Kafka, Franz 102, 118–19, 173 Kandel, J. J. 157–9 Karaoglu, Onur 15, 132–7, 215n56, 216n57 Kello, Robin 153, 219n30 King Lear 95–101, 105 Knipper, Olga 67–71, 205n6 Koons, Jenny 124–6 Kuo, Peter J. 8, 16 LA Escena 72–4, 154–6 labor and unions 12–4, 95, 194n36. See also definitions of digital theater Last Audience 10, 140–2, 146, 150 Lavender, Andy 6, 28, 69, 192n8, 198n1, 204n3 Lawrence, Gemma 165–8 Lawson, Mark 33 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 9, 115. See also postdramatic theater Leigh, Eve 139 Ligon, Cheyenne 173 liveness 5–8, 75, 117, 134, 140, 192n16 Auslander and 5–6, 192n12, 192n15 in The Console 171 digital possibilities for 18, 65, 84 in En otro reino extraño 60, 209n16 in Fire Season 174 in Macbeth 95 Lockdown: Love and Death in the Age of COVID 62–3 London, Todd 55. See also copresence; definitions of digital theater [los números imaginarios] 154–6 Luna, Álvaro 60–1, 209n16

Macbeth 92–5, 193n24, 208n14 Mandell, Jonathan 33 March 173, 223n41 mediatization 5, 191n6. See also Ilter, Seda El merolico desde su balcón 89–90, 163–5 metatheatricality 8–10 in End Meeting for All 47–8 in Game Over 67, 71 in Here We Are 127–30 in The Institute for Counterfeit Memory 138–9 in Macbeth 93 in Outtakes 151–2 in Read Subtitles Aloud 132–7 in The Seagull on The Sims 4 81 in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) 108–14 Mezzocchi, Jared 8, 24–5, 101–4, 193n24 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 80, 83 A Midsummer Night’s Zoom 22–3, 90–2 Miklas, Monica 174–6 Molière 119, 208n14 Moukarzel, Bush 106–14 multilingualism 15–16, 51, 69, 136, 176–8, 216n57 multimodal theater 4–5, 55, 65–74, 183–4, 204n3 National Institute of Dramatic Art (Australia) 62, 80 National Theatre (UK) 7, 11–2, 15, 27, 85, 193n26 Nelson, Richard 7, 28–33, 44 New Swan Shakespeare Festival 22–3, 89–92 New York Theater Workshop 74–6 Nguyen, Qui 151–2 No Proscenium 18, 173 nostalgia 1, 6, 185

Index for in-person theater 17, 70–1, 113, 120, 138 O’Connell, Mark 105–14, 211n55, 211n57 O’Neill, Kittson 169–170 Oedipus the King 7, 9, 33–8, 52, 119, 200n20, 200n31–2 Old Vic 12, 116, 193n27, 194nn30–1. See also access Olney Theatre 14 Othello 13, 220n1 Outtakes 151–2 Papakonstantinou, Elli 17, 49–53 participatory theater 2, 5, 18–9, 52, 162, 223n37 audience as performer 132–47, 150–1, 172–3 and the chat 63–4, 100–1, 105, 125–6 multiplatform modes 65–85, 206n22 and promenade theater 154–6 Paulson, Michael 14 performance geography 162, 220n2 Phillips, Thaddeus 15 Pig Iron Theatre Company 14, 92 Play for Any Two People 150–1 Playwrights Horizons 149–52 Playwrights’ Arena 173, 223n41 poetics of failure 44, 47, 54. See also Bailes, Sarah Janes political engagement in pandemic theater 10, 16–17, 48–64, 184 and the 2020 US election 16, 101, 171–2 and gender issues 49–60, 70–4, 79, 83–4, 124 and LGBTQ+ issues 59–61, 83– 4, 165–7

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and racial justice 16, 32–3, 48, 54– 5, 62–4, 95, 124–32, 144–5, 151–3, 167–70 See also capitalism; We See You White American Theater manifesto postdramatic geography 220n2. See also performance geography; postdramatic theater postdramatic theater 8–10, 88, 114, 171, 220n2, 223n37. See also Lehmann, Hans-Thies El Príncipe Ynocente 89 promenade theater 19, 154–6, 162 La prueba de los ingenios 60–1 The Public Theater (New York) 7, 28–31, 139–40, 152–4 Quijotes & Sanchos 154–6 Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical 184–5 Read Subtitles Aloud 15–16, 132–8, 142, 191n7, 215n56, 216n57, 216n59 Red Bull Theater 13, 19 Reyes, Francisco 11, 116, 211n4 Richard II 152–4 Ridout, Nicholas 45–8, 99, 211n58 Rivera, Jon Lawrence 173, 223n41 Rodríguez Claro, Iñigo 66, 203n28 Romeo and Juliet 60, 65, 200n32 Roundabout 18, 80–5, 206n20, 207n34 Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy 8, 101–4 San Francisco Shakespeare Festival 19, 95–101, 105 A School for Fools 17, 23 Schwartz, Alexandra 186 The Seagull on The Sims 4 18, 74–81, 85, 206nn20–2

232 Seaton, Zoe 92–5 Shakespeare in Clark Park 169–70 Shakespeare, William 19, 75, 120, 152–4, 162, 183. See also Hamlet; Julius Caesar; King Lear; Macbeth; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Midsummer Night’s Zoom; Othello; Richard II; Romeo and Juliet; Table Top Shakespeare; Twelfth Night; Yorick: la historia de Hamlet Shaw, Helen 7, 13, 30, 143–4, 158 Shay, Samantha 54–59 Shekar, Madhuri 8 Signal Fires 4 Simon, Eli 22–3, 89–92, 197n71 The Sims 65, 69, 74–81, 206n22 site-specific theater 2, 11, 66, 162 The Console 170–2 the digital as site 102, 193n24 En Pointe 176–81 Every Everyman 169–70 El merolico desde su balcón 162–6 Fire Season 173–6 Quijotes & Sanchos 154–6 Temping 172–3, 222n34 and theater history 162, 165, 169–70 600 HIGHWAYMEN 4, 145 Smith, Barry 6, 192n10 Snapchat 88–93, 114, 163–4. See also augmented reality Soloski, Alexis 18–9, 31 Song, Celine 75–81, 85, 206n21–2 Sontag, Susan 87 Sorolla, Luis 58–61 Source Material Collective 54 Spotify 67, 69, 71 Stewart, Sean 65, 80–5, 207n34 Sunnymead Court 165–8 Table Top Shakespeare 75, 120 Tableau D’Hôte Theatre 176, 224n50

Index Tartuffe 208n14 Taylor, Lib 148 Temping 172–3, 222n34, 223n35, 223n37 Theater in Quarantine 19, 117–18, 123–4, 142, 212n8, 212n11, 212n17 Cashmere 119 Concerto for Toy Piano 119 Footnote for the End of Time 121– 3, 213n20 Hypochondriac! (1) 119–20 I Am Sending You the Sacred Face 123, 184–6, 225n7 Mask Work 119–20 Mute Swan 123 The Neighbor 119, 121 The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy 118, 120–2 Topside 120 Theater of War 17, 33–8, 115, 119, 200n20, 200n31 Theatre for One 105, 116, 124–32, 142 A Thousand Ways 4, 145–7, 149, 218n12 TikTok 184–5 Tis Pity She’s A Whore 13 To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) 10, 17, 105–14, 211n55, 211n57 To Be a Machine: Adventures among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (2017 book) 105–6, 108, 110, 211n57 Traces of Antigone 17, 49–53, 56 True Love Will Find You in the End 157–9 Twelfth Night 83, 220n1 Twitch 2, 4, 25, 65–6, 96 and audience interaction 18, 75–85, 183–4, 206n20–2 User Not Found 147–9

Index

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Vega, Lope de 58–60, 89, 92 Villa, Fernando 89–90, 163–5 Vimeo 114 virtual reality 19, 91, 127 voyeurism 51–3, 69–71, 75–6, 158–9

Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte 72–4 Yorick: la historia de Hamlet 11, 116, 211n4 YouTube 12, 69, 81, 96, 123, 148 and the chat 17, 126, 184

We See You White American Theater (WSYWAT) manifesto 16, 55, 128, 130 West, Cornel 78–9 WhatsApp 1, 4, 65–74 limitations of 205n9 Wolf 359. See Temping Woolf, Brandon 8, 170–2, 222n27. See also The Console; postdramatic theater Woolly Mammoth 140, 144, 172

Zero Cost House (For Zoom) 14, 92 Zoo Motel 15 Zoom 1–4, 9, 43, 143, 183, 193n24 challenges of 11, 19–25, 40, 92–3, 102, 117, 120 in combination with other platforms 65–74, 90–3 and composite editing 92–104 early experiments with 7, 11, 21–2, 27–41, 43–64 possibilities of 11, 17, 21–8, 34–8, 52, 63–4, 104 technical aspects 21–3, 90, 92, 197n71

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