Theater of Lockdown

Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic

Barbara Fuchs, William C. Boles, Anja Hartl

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350231832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Offering one of the first scholarly examinations of digital and distanced performance since the global shutdown of theaters in March 2020, Barbara Fuchs provides both a record of the changes and a framework for thinking through theater's transformation. Though born of necessity, recent productions offer a new world of practice, from multi-platform plays on Zoom, WhatsApp, and Instagram, to enhancement via filters 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 access new audiences, while offering a lifeline to artists. This study charts how virtual theater puts pressure on existing assumptions and definitions, transforming the conditions of both theater-making and viewership. How are participatory, site-specific, or devised theater altered under physical-distancing requirements? How do digital productions blur the line between film and theater? What does liveness mean in a time of pandemic? In its seven chapters, Theater of Lockdown focuses on digital and distanced productions from the Americas, Europe, and Australia, offering scholarly analysis and interviews. Productions examined include Theater in Quarantine's "closet work" in New York; Forced Entertainment's (Sheffield, UK), End Meeting for All, I, II, and III; the work of Madrid-based company Grumelot; and the virtuosic showmanship of EFE Tres in Mexico City.

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 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

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 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 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 piece, and huge emotional response gave permission for theater-makers 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 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 M...