The Forgotten Art of Assembly

Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making

Photo by Tyler Callahan.

It’s 11 am. Outside, the city is quiet and the high, pale cast of light is in the window. Inside, a feeling of exhilaration shoots through my body. I’ve successfully made it through the New York State unemployment website, a triumph so sizeable I no longer feel the need to do anything that even resembles productivity for the rest of the day. I, like many other theatre artists, have been laid off from the patchwork of employment that pays my rent and have had all artistic projects put on hold indefinitely. Now, wondering what to do next, confined to my living room, I begin slavishly scrolling through my social media feeds. This is when I notice a jarring dissonance between the kinds of posts that populate it. There are of course the self-aggrandizing posts advertising new quarantine workout routines, the dog and cat videos, and the photographs chronicling every home-cooked meal prepared and served on the same characterless Ikea china. Now that everyone has discovered Mark Bittman’s New York Times No-Knead Bread recipe, trying to escape the image of a mediocre country loaf is nigh impossible. But these aren’t the posts that give me pause, I have been lobbying for more yeasted doughs on Instagram for years. It is the virtual play readings, the 1-minute quarantine play scripts, the archival production footage, the musical theatre songs of hope accompanied on ukulele, the dusted-off college audition monologues, and the posts touting the importance of these endeavors that rest self-satisfied next to stories of mounting death tolls, shortages of life-saving medical equipment, and loved ones dying alone in the ICU that concern me.

As theaters across the world close their doors indefinitely and we adjust to a new normal in the wake of the coronavirus, there has been a concerted effort on the part of theatre artists everywhere to keep making. Now more than ever — a phrase adored by the theatre community — it seems desperately important not to let this virus slow our production of art. Whatever content we are able to muster, we must get it out there! Dive through the archives! What do we have? Put it online! That grainy back-of-the-theater single camera recording of that play from 2006? People need it! Quality? I hardly know her. This is a pandemic, we need Quantity! The people need monologues! In fact, it is the theatre artists, we are told, whose work will heal us. I am here to say I don’t think that’s true, and I think that’s okay. At least for now.

As my inbox floods with more emails of plays being read by housebound celebrities over social media, I wonder how much thought has gone into these ideas. Are we not just grabbing at the closest, easiest, most obvious solutions? “You know what we normally do? Yeah, just do that, but on Facebook Live.” I find there to be a great sadness to these kinds of endeavors. At their best these projects may serve as a momentary distraction from the mounting, unimaginable destruction outside our windows, but at their all too often worst, they serve as a constant reminder of the superiority and the irreplaceability of the very art form they are so desperately trying to recreate.

Watching my fifth hastily written monologue by an otherwise talented playwright for Instagram, my eyes glazing over, I begin to wonder, who is this for? Who is the audience for these kinds of ventures? Is there a demand for them outside of our own community? I wonder if that audience found any real comfort in them. I certainly haven’t. I wonder whether we are really making this art for a terrified audience living under circumstances not seen in modern history, or simply for ourselves. Simply to remind ourselves, or prove to ourselves, that we are still artists, that even in a pandemic we can still create, that our art is needed, and that things are still normal. Artists are addicted to creation, but as our whole world has moved online, it is starting to feel crowded.

When Broadway reopened just 48 hours after 9/11 it felt like an unprecedented move after an unprecedented tragedy. The official death toll would reach 2,605 people, a number already far surpassed by the coronavirus in New York, but just two days after one of the most devastating national tragedies, New York City theaters reopened. Actors, bereaved and uncertain, performed to audience members torn apart by grief, scattered throughout half-empty houses. “Many performers found themselves almost incapacitated by sadness, and many more had been hit by a sense of futility to go with their own grieving,” Chris Jones documents in American Theatre. But audiences and actors showed up, prioritizing the importance of assembly in the face of loss. Greg Kotis, whose new musical Urinetown was set to open on Broadway on September 13th, notes “It was a moment when it felt that theatre mattered more than it usually does. Theatre became about community. To be together in the same place, considering things through a play, that made me feel proud.” We are social creatures and, in times of great loss, seek the comfort of humanity. It is why theatre has the power to feel so incredibly healing and why, in the midst of a tragedy that demands social isolation, we feel so incredibly lost. COVID-19 no longer affords us the privilege of that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” brand of togetherness, but we’ve convinced ourselves that it has.

The coronavirus is so insidious because it attacks one of the central yearnings of human nature, which just so happens to be the bedrock theatre is built on: our desire to assemble. The one galvanizing, unassailable, and gloriously frustrating truth about our field is that like life, theatre is ephemeral. It must not only be experienced live, but also, and just as importantly, together. Theatre is as much about the relationship between actor and audience as it is about the relationship between the audience and itself. Assembly is what defines theatre and this current online output of work seems to ignore this fact.

These immediate, ad hoc, digital projects highlight not a resiliency, but a deep fear. The coronavirus has exposed us all, desperately afraid of being alone. We have found ourselves the subject of an Edward Hopper painting, no longer simply the owner of an Edward Hopper coffee table book. You see this starved desire for assembly in our willingness to post a photo of ourselves as a part of a big Brady Brunch enclave of Zoom squares, grasping at some sense of togetherness only underlining our own deep isolation. We are not together, but maybe if we present a portrait of inclusion and assembly we will be? This contradiction cuts to the great lie at the center of social media: if we perform a truth, it will materialize. If I look like I’m enjoying my day at the beach, or my college reunion, or my relationship, maybe I will. Our devotion to our devices foregrounds their promise of connectivity, but also disappointingly reveals how they have come up short in realizing that promise.

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe writes “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.” Our need for each other is fundamental and it is this very need that the theatre so brilliantly capitalizes on. For over two-thousand years live performance has survived and weathered the storm of technological innovation. Be it under the marble arches of Lincoln Center or around a bonfire in the woods, we will continue to come together and share stories.

The Playwrights Horizons production of Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play. Photo by Joan Marcus.

No play better emphasizes this fact than Anne Washburn’s prophetic Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which tells the story of a group of survivors recalling and retelling the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons shortly after a global catastrophe. The smallness of this act of storytelling and assembly morphs from campfire recollection to full-fledged musical pageantry by the play’s climactic third act, 75-years later. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley celebrated that “Washburn makes us appreciate anew the profound value of storytelling in and of itself and makes a case for theater as the most glorious and durable storyteller of all.” In the wake of tragedy, we will still come together, and we will still tell stories, it’s in our DNA, not as theatremakers, but as humans. However, the migration of our art form to a digital medium seems to deny theatre that durability, not increase it. There’s a reason theatremakers weren’t staging readings of plays over Zoom two-months ago, it’s the same reason we continue to turn to theatre, even when Hulu programs a bigger season than any off-Broadway theater possibly could. The singular transcendence of human congregation is irreplaceable. So why are we trying so hard to make theatre without it?

I worry that my cynicism for this emergency style of digital performance will be labeled as pessimism or defeatism. I assure you it isn’t. It is, in fact, born out of a deep, complicated love. Describing her relationship with theatre, Sara Holdren, whose voice in theatrical criticism is sorely missed, compares it to “a person I love, with equal parts anxiety, absurdity, and fierce loyalty. Theater annoys the living hell out of me,” she says. “There are times I want to punch its stupid face and never speak to it again. I also want to spend the rest of my life with it.” It is my love for theatre that cringes when I see it inch closer and closer to becoming a TikTok.

I don’t mean to dismiss the grave economic reality many companies and artists are facing in this moment. The financial blow the theatre and the entertainment industry is being dealt is both unknown and unprecedented. Theaters like A.C.T., Berkley Rep, and Rattlestick streaming recordings of their canceled productions for ticket holders are honoring the work their artists labored over for months, while also, understandably, trying to maintain a revenue stream. But as that kind of work starts to run dry, unions cause disruptions, and we inch closer towards the one-month quarantine mark, I worry where our industry is headed. What longevity is there for this kind of performance? The burden shouldn’t be on the artists to keep dancing like court jesters trying to earn enough money to scrape by when their stage has been stolen from them.

Simply relocating existing structures of theatrical art production online doesn’t solve the problems that existed in those structures IRL. Instead of rushing at cleverness and temporary solutions, contorting theatre inside out, maybe we ought to examine the capitalist establishment we live under that demands artists, natural-born hustlers, empaths, and problem solvers keep hustling to make a buck online, a field already overpopulated with free content, during an unprecedented global pandemic. Nevermind the fact that, in doing so, we’re ignoring the one defining quality of our field, its liveness.

However, this period of time affords us the opportunity to start building a better future and to reimagine those structures that have gone uninterrogated. We have time to consider how we build a system that prioritizes people so that when the next tragedy hits, artists can be paid for their work, not furloughed and apologized to. As we look toward the horizon, perhaps the importance of “Patron Lounges” and glamorous building renovations will wane as we come to realize that theatre exists in the artists that make it, not the buildings that house it. In 1935, in the wake of The Great Depression, The Federal Theater Project laid the groundwork for regional theatre as we’ve come to understand it. As that project nears its centennial, we again have a say in what the next hundred years will look like. How can we rebuild our financial structures to support what is really important? How can we be more prepared for when this happens again?

There are undoubtedly going to be casualties. Theatre companies won’t survive, and the ones that do will be more strapped for cash than they already were. But this environment of scarcity must not be a time for artistic safety, rather a time for leanness and daring. Provocative, risk-taking, unabashedly theatrical work is going to be critical when we are finally allowed within six feet of each other again. Only in our excellence will we make a full-throated argument for the urgency and value of our form. We can use this surplus of time to prepare for that triumphant return, not just to distract ourselves while we wait for it.

Until the world rebounds, this self-imposed pressure to produce must be lifted. There is no dearth of art in the world. And there is no dearth of art available in people’s living rooms; one of the many positive wonders of technology. Theatre makers don’t need to provide a supply of art that there isn’t a demand for. Let’s use this time to engage with the world not as artists, but as audience members, consuming a medium different from our own. I promise you Tiger King is more enjoyable than Hedda Gabler on Instagram Live. And when your eyes demand a break from the blue light, you can finally crack open that book you bought at The Strand, Instagrammed, and never read. You’ll be able to engage with these works of art on the terms their author intended you to. In doing so, you can also expose yourself to the diversity of work made by theatre artists. Try going one scene in HBO’s High Maintenance or Succession without spotting a downtown theatre mainstay. Or explore a theatre writer’s non-dramatic cannon, Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write and Anaïs Mitchell’s Young Man in America are both exceptional. Or leave the theatre behind, Dua Lipa’s new album is a bop.

We don’t need this rushed, frantic grab at a return to normalcy. We don’t need to keep up the illusion that theatre is still going — still thriving! “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” as the curtain burns up exposing us all standing on rickety stilts with no government funding. Someone dies of coronavirus every 3 minutes in New York City. The national death toll is now predicted to reach over 200,000 if we do things “perfectly.” Field hospitals are being erected in the middle of Central Park. Italy’s morgues and crematoriums can’t handle the influx of dead. India is forcing their people to stay inside their homes even if it means starving. Doctors are intubating their own doctors. And nurses working 14-hour shifts without proper protective equipment, too afraid to go home for fear of infecting their family, are helping dying patients say goodbye to their loved ones over FaceTime because they won’t be allowed to see them in person and will die alone. What are we trying to prove? This isn’t normal.

This is a humanitarian crisis, not an artistic one. We must acknowledge that to be cooped up and bored in an apartment deciding whether to use this time to finally hang those pictures that have been leaning against the wall for years or to watch or make “quarantine art” is a profound privilege not afforded to the people keeping this country alive. I think a lot of artists understandably feel helpless and are just looking to help the only way they know how, through continued artistic output. But, as Cuomo’s press conferences start to bleed into one another, his casual Friday polo shirt being the only real evidence a week has passed, I can’t shake my own feeling of inadequacy. Surely, we should all become doctors, nurses, scientists, journalists, politicians, some career that would help us feel like we are making a tangible difference. People are dying and we’re just sitting around! But as I take a breath and turn the television off, what I realize I am really reckoning with is my own non-essentialism. Theatre and its practitioners have been deemed non-essential in this moment and our refusal to acknowledge this has resulted in disposable digital work that dismantles the very intimacy our form demands. We’re being asked to exit the stage, not give an encore.

Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back”

In “Be Right Back,” the first episode of the second season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, Martha, a grief-stricken widow, dangerously afraid of confronting the loss of her husband, tries to circumvent her pain by logging on to an app programmed to recreate her dead spouse. Through a compilation of his texts, emails, and social media posts she is able to message and later talk over the phone with a computer replica of him. In only a matter of time, she is standing face to face with a fully-realized AI replica of her husband. Though she initially feels like this replacement will be adequate — if not better than her flesh and blood husband — it, of course, isn’t. It provides some immediate comfort, but her relationship with it is untenable. Martha eventually breaks down, hitting him in the chest repeatedly, wailing “You’re not enough of him! You’re nothing! You’re nothing!” It isn’t him, as much as he looks and behaves like him and as much as she would like him to be. Misleadingly, the episode is not about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Rather, it instead exposes the futility of trying to cheat the uncomfortable, human necessity of grief. And in this moment, we are all Martha, desperately pounding on our AI husband’s chest wanting him to be more than he ever possibly could be, ignoring a pain we must ultimately confront.

We must lean into this pain. We must feel the grief. We must mourn. Mourn the loss of work, the loss of jobs, the loss of money, the loss of life. Mourn the temporary loss of an art form that demands assembly. Lean into the grief. Lean in. Lean in. Lean in. We must remind ourselves that mourning is a human act, not a digital one. It is only in this acknowledgment that we will survive. The internet isn’t going to save us, we are.

The fear and uncertainty we feel right now — while the industry that we’ve dedicated our lives to grinds to a halt — is real. We don’t have to pretend it isn’t and we don’t have to keep making. We can help healthcare workers and our fellow humans by staying home and we can honor the art form we love so deeply by pressing pause, not trying to reanimate it. When the bans are lifted, our gaze will divert from our screens in an act of quiet liberation. We will shake the dust, our weathered, battered, lonely bodies coming together to look at ourselves in the mirror. We come to the theatre to see a part of ourselves reflected back, to feel seen, to recognize that we exist in a community. When the world rebounds and we push our heads out from the rubble, and there will be rubble, we will seek each other out with a renewed sense of gratitude. When we embrace each other for the first time in months and are reminded what it means to hold someone you love in your arms, the weight of them heavy on your heart, when the red-headed bartender serves us a cocktail just how we like and flashes us a smile and we think: what an astonishing thing it is to be alive, or when our barber cuts our hair for the first time in months and we share a glance in the mirror, we will be reminded of our invisible, indispensable need for each other and we will return to the theatre to celebrate, to mourn, to heal, and to assemble.