Before they were married, my stepdad broke my mom’s jaw. She had to eat through a straw for a really long time. Of course the context was strictly professional, since he was an oral surgeon, an in-demand specialist for correcting TMJ syndrome.
This was around 1990. I was ten. And I remember there was a lot of complaining, fully warranted, about how awful blended food was. Jamba Juice hadn’t replaced all the TCBYs in Orlando’s never-ending stream of strip-malls, so her smoothies and shakes would have to be made at home. The meal-in-a-blender approach led to some awful ideas, made even worse in execution, and always ended up looking gray, or like vomit, or like gray vomit. It was brutal, but of course she put up with it. Because my mom is pretty invincible when she needs to be. And when her jaw wasn’t broken, and she could eat again, she did, because that’s what we do. We eat food and we survive and eat a little more and are nourished and thrive.
Right now, our theatre community has a broken jaw. We can’t engage as usual with that thing that nourishes us, so we take the raw materials we think will work best and put them in a Zoom-blender, or a let’s-film-it-blender, or an archival footage, or a podcast, or radio play-blender, and it all becomes something else and we eat it to survive. Survival is the first step.
The good news is smoothies have come a long way since 1990. So many Jamba Juices out there, and options that are even better – if you can believe it. Some theatre companies have even found recipes for the blender that are tasty enough to let them thrive.
Still, are any of the institutions that have successfully adapted actually confused about the fact that their blended food alternatives are being delivered through a straw? How could they possibly forget that solid food still existed? What kind of psychic break would it have taken for my mom to claim that cheeseburgers might not be real, just because she couldn’t have one when her jaw was broken?
To read the end-of-year think pieces from our biggest American theatres, you’d think this confusion was a real problem, and that an actual cultural amnesia was taking place, where everyone has forgotten what a theatre is and why it’s important to go there.
I get it. The leaders of big performance institutions have far fewer performances to reference when writing summary letters to the board, donors, and ticket-buyers. So instead of talking about the impact of their work, they instead turn to The Big Questions - What Is Theatre Post-Covid? or What Is Theatre? or Will Theatre Change?
In terms of theater, this ritual we usually love but seldom understand why, which is uncannily rendered off-limits in a world of social distancing, some hot questions arise: What are we, when the act of gathering in a room, the very thing that makes theater theater, is neither safe nor legal? Theater, at its essence, is to me as Peter Brook describes it: an actor, a stage, an audience, and — for Playwrights Horizons I feel honor-bound to add — a text. When theater goes digital, are we advocating for our continuance, or our extinction? Are we pleasing the gods? Angering the gods? Or do the gods understand we’re just in a pinch?
- Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director of Playwrights’ Horizons
Theatre leaders and luminaries clutching their pearls over the imagined extinction of theatre is nothing new, an ugly rite of passage for those in power, the dramatic equivalent of “Get off my lawn.” And let’s be clear, it won’t happen. Theatre will not go extinct. People will want and need to gather again. It’s strange how often this gets doubted, particularly by people who seem to have the most available resources for making theatre.
Theatre is hearty, even when in hibernation. What’s actually fragile is a single human life. The longest recorded human existence, according to Guinness World Records, belonged to Jeanne Calment of France. Born in 1875, she was born before Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, yet was still alive up to 1997, when commercial theatre was ruled by technical behemoths like Titanic: the Musical.
(note, the above clip was from a reunion concert Associate Produced by the amazing Katie Hallman)
How many times did theatre adapt during the 122 years of Jeanne Calment’s life? Did theatre go extinct when electricity replaced candles and lamps? With the invention of the cinema, the radio, the television, the Internet? When Jeanne Clement was born, the modern concept of a theatrical director was only thirty years old. Think about how essential the role of a director seems now, and consider it has only been as it is now for less than 4% of theatre’s 4,000 years of recorded history.
This is all to say – The Theatre will change because everything changes and it will also be just fine. It’s time now, please, to stop hemming and hawing about the theatre gods. If those gods exist, they don’t give a damn about your Zoom account. And if those gods exist, please tell me that instead of watching the National Theatre’s archived productions and worrying, “Is this theatre? Have I been… offended?” that instead those gods are using the leadership and collaboration skills colleges tell us theatre teaches, and that they are harnessing those talents to help the health gods, and anyone else who is fighting the coronavirus. Isn’t that what the gods should be worried about?
We might feel like our jaw is wired shut, but it’s also winter and there are people who are actually hungry and people who are homeless and many thousands of people are going to continue dying of the coronavirus. There is pain all around us, and I wish instead of trying to justify themselves in some kind of historical context, these thinkers would simply say: “It hurts not doing theatre the way I know and love. I am scared. And the people that I normally turn to when I am hurting and scared are not people I can turn to right now because I would normally turn to them as we would make theatre the ways we know and love, which not doing hurts.” It is not shameful for this kind of spiritual pain to be expressed, even when there are more tangible kinds of pain to deal with. It’s not all a comparison.
But I do think that all pain fights to distort reality. Dealing with chronic pain this summer I battled a voice telling me my life was not worthwhile. But pain is a liar. It hurts that we can’t safely put on plays, so for some of us pain says “theatre is dying.” But pain is an idiot. Some people feel gravely injured, boy are they hurting, that their political candidates were not elected to office, so pain distorts their realities. It tells them “the election was rigged.” But, as noted before, pain is still a liar and an idiot. Pain is also an asshole. We can listen to it, we kind of have to it’s so loud, but pain is not the best brain-storming partner. And I really wish that more of our theatre thinkers could imagine beyond the pain. Or, at the very least, just take a pause. Theatre will be back when we are back. And when you have a broken jaw, sometimes the best thing to do is keep your mouth shut.
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Thanks for reading! This piece was very much about drama. Sometimes I write more about being a dad. I guess you’ll have to subscribe if you want the receipts.
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What I’m Up To
I cleaned the attic so very well. Then I found a bat. Then I lost the bat. Don’t worry, we’re not terrified even one little bit.
Also, the NBA season is about to start and I love reading stuff on the internet, but I’ve been really wanting one of those pre-season magazines that have a team-by-team breakdown, like I’d get in a grocery store as a kid.
What I’m Into
I’m reading a bunch of plays to get ready for the next year of Out the Box readings. I love plays!
Let’s Head Out To
Skip to 2:52 for baby Jay-Z (or don’t skip because it’s all fire).