Director's Note for The Glass Menagerie

Photo by Dan Daly

The Glass Menagerie is the work that defines the term “memory play.” In memory, nothing is quite as it was. This gives the play, as Tennessee Williams writes in his note on the script, an “unusual freedom of convention.” The story unfolds before us as our narrator, Tom, looks back on a version of his past, asking himself questions: Did I do my best? What did I leave behind? How do I persist?

This play catapulted Williams to success in 1944. It is strikingly autobiographical. Some details are different, but the shape of the heartbreak rings true. Tennessee Williams did in fact escape his childhood home in St. Louis, abandoning his sister, Rose. He went on to become a celebrated writer. She underwent a prefrontal lobotomy and was institutionalized for most of her adult life. In the writing of Glass Menagerie, Williams was examining a version of his life, prodding it with questions: Did he do his best? What did he leave behind? How did he persist?

Since its premiere, the play has been mounted countless times on stage and screen. It sits in the American canon, and it is a staple of theater and literature. The play itself has become a cultural memory. Like Amanda reminiscing about her youth in the Old South, this play breathes life into a version of America that no longer exists, and maybe never did. Meeting this play today involves interviewing a past version of ourselves: Did we do our best? What did we leave behind? How do we persist?

Even old plays always take place right now–theater is a medium that lives and dies in the present. Paradoxically, the practice of theater is one of memory, replicating the same words and movements each night. But today’s performance is utterly singular, because you are here. And as you watch this repeated version of a popular story about a copied memory, I invite you to let it ask: Did you do your best? What did you leave behind? How do you persist?

A Director's Note for a Pandemic Play

L to R: Haley Jones and Rebecca Tucker in Or, at The Winnipesaukee Playhouse. Costumes by DW. Photo by Leslie Pankhurst.

A note on the note:

In the early months of 2020, I reached out to the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith, NH. about the possibility of being hired to direct. I had attended their shows over many summers spent in the area, but the email I sent was a shot in the dark. As chance would have it, there was a vacancy to fill in the most “esoteric” play in the “Women in Theatre” season planned for the summer. I signed on to direct Or, by Liz Duffy Adams just as theatres across the nation were shutting down in response to COVID-19 .

As the pandemic worsened and the future of summer 2020 productions became darker, I prepared myself for the show’s inevitable cancellation. In May, I received an email from AD Neil Pankhurst that the summer season was indeed cancelled—with the one exception of Or,.

The production would be moved to a to-be-renovated outdoor amphitheater, the cast, stage manager, and wardrobe would isolate as a pod (helped by two of the three actors already being a couple) , we would distance from the audience, wear masks in rehearsal, take temperatures, sanitize props, get tested, get tested again, follow ever-changing state guidelines on onstage kissing, and be prepared to have the whole endeavor called off at any moment.

It took flexibility, care, consent, patience, ingenuity, humor, sunscreen, intimacy direction, breath, and a lot of trust, but we did it. Or, ran from September 3rd (after a rained out planned opening on September 2nd) through September 12th, 2020. Distanced pods of masked audience members gathered in a new outdoor space to experience a story about the fraught pursuit of happiness in a world beset by sickness, divisiveness, and fear. The old magic of theatre remaking itself once again.

***

“Let’s speak only of what really matters, of poetry, theater, and love,” says King Charles II to Aphra Behn in her prison cell as his nation reels from a decade of civil war, outbreaks of bubonic plague, and the Great Fire of London, which destroyed almost 90% of the city’s homes. England’s coffers were hemorrhaging, its people were hurting, and King Charles II chose this moment in his reign to reopen the theatres after 18 years of Puritanical closures. 

Why theatre, why now? 

Echoing from 1660s England to 2020 America, this question is eerily resonant. 

As businesses shuttered to contain the spread of COVID-19, theatres were among the first to be labeled ‘non-essential.’ In my opinion, rightly so. Not only are theatres hotbeds of intimate interaction on and off the stage, they provide only meager concessions as food, a single seat in the dark as shelter, and historically accurate, but deeply uncomfortable garments as clothing. The vast majority of us that work in the theatre have no medical training. The most we had to offer in the beginning of the pandemic was a healthy stock of toilet paper. 

However, as months of isolation, fear, grief, anxiety, civil unrest, and calls for justice have irreparably changed our society, those of us that have been lucky enough to survive must go about the essential business of living. At this, the theatre excels. We go to the theatre to take pleasure in tragedy of being human, to delight our eyes and ears, to deliciously dream a new world into being. The theatre is a social space where distance—between past and present, reality and artifice, I and thou—is closed by a potent cocktail of collective whimsy and will. We go to the theatre because we want to, not because we need to. 

That is the heart of Charles’ matter, which is the heart of this lovely play by Liz Duffy Adams, which is the heart of our production, constructed with COVID-safe care. The desire to live the fullness of life must supersede the necessary evils of mere survival. As we navigate our time of plague, fire, and war, let us arm ourselves with knowledge and kindness so that we can celebrate the non-essential things that make life really matter: “poetry, theater, and love.” 

-Aileen Wen McGroddy, Director

More photos and information about Or,

L to R: Nick Cochran (Jailer, Wardrobe), Nicholas Wilder (King Charles II, William Scot), Rebecca Tucker (Aphra Behn), Haley Jones (Nell Gwynne, Lady Daveport, Maria), and Kim D’Agnese (Stage Manager) in Or, at The Winnipesaukee Playhouse. Costumes by DW. Photo by Leslie Pankhurst.

A Letter to Kathleen Donovan-Warren on her Retirement

This is addressed to my middle and high school chorus/drama teacher, who singlehandedly inoculated my life with the theatre bug. I wrote this letter for a surprise online retirement party held in her honor.

Dear Mrs. Warren,

You have undoubtedly impacted my life, and for that I will never be able to thank you enough. But I’m sure you get that all the time.

Right now, I’m speaking from Providence, Rhode Island where I’m two thirds of the way though my masters degree in theatre directing from Brown University and Trinity Rep. I moved here after twelve years directing, clowning, puppeteering, teaching, and producing theatre in Chicago. I moved there after seven years of singing and acting in Briarcliff Manor.

Twenty-one of the thirty-one years I have been alive have been spent doggedly pursuing something that is unreasonable, inconvenient, underfunded, irrelevant, and (as we have recently learned) non-essential: live theatre. Mrs. Warren, you are to blame.

Thank you.

At every juncture in these twenty one years, I have asked myself, for all of the reasons I just listed: why the hell do I do this? And every time, for twenty-one years, the answer has been: I can’t not. The theatre is where my voice and my community live. You helped me find those two very essential things back in Briarcliff, and the theatre is what feeds them now.

Thank you.

Middle school Aileen was a lot of things—awkward, anxious, curious, stubborn—and self-possessed, she was not. Learning algebra and growing boobs at the same time is difficult enough, and then you’re also thrown into the morass of self definition? Impossible. This chubby, biracial, only child didn’t stand a chance. Until. UNTIL! Her curiosity and free time brought her to the backside of an upright piano on the stage of a freshly built auditorium. (Mrs. Warren, you were on the other side.) There, making a piano sandwich with her new favorite teacher, middle school Aileen found Her Voice. 

More specifically, I found one, glorious operatic note that could resonate from my pubescent body and fill the room. I felt like I had discovered a super power and immediately committed to adding more pitches to my repertoire. Who knew that my voice could be bigger than me? You did. I don’t sing any more (though Ali convinced me to come out of retirement for this event) but that knowledge has never left me. My voice is bigger than me and it is mine to use. You taught me that. 

Thank you.

When I got to high school, armed with my big voice, I did every singing and acting thing I could: the plays, the musicals, chorus, drama club, drama class, singing lessons, NYSSMA, NYSTEA, NYSSSA, All County, All State, all of the things, all in. High school Aileen was a little less awkward, but she was still a work in progress. (And remains so.) The algebra became calculus, the boobs became real, and I became a part of a team. I had been on teams before, of course, but I would say that I was “on” those teams. Singing and acting and doing stage makeup and playing zip zap zop and finding your keys, Mrs. Warren—I was a part of that team and it was thrilling.

Mrs. Warren, your musicals at Briarcliff High School were good. I’m sure many people here know what I’m talking about, but just to say it: they were really good! I think a major reason is that these shows would slice across the social ecology of the school and all kinds of people would take part. Yes, there were hopeless theatre nerds (hello) but there were athletes, musicians, geeks, skaters, class clowns, introverts, overachievers—EVERYONE. Everyone, doing something ridiculous and beautiful and impossible, focusing their passions on a common goal. Holding that vision, that complicated machinery, that drive was you, Mrs. Warren. Making a space for all of us to exceed even our own expectations, breathlessly hurtling to opening night.  

That sense of possibility in community has continued to drive me, feed me, and seduce me back into to the rehearsal room. The theatre is a world that we get to make up, and yours was welcoming and rigorous. When I am directing now, I channel those same values.

Thank you.

Congratulations, Mrs. Warren, on your retirement. You have made an indelible mark on the lives of your students, their voices, and the values they bring to their communities long after graduating. This was truly essential work.

With love and gratitude,

Aileen McGroddy

Pestilence, War and Poets: Theatrical Scene Changes in 17th Century England

Note: This is a historical research paper that I wrote in the spring of 2020 as the final for a class at Brown called Theory and History of Listening taught by Michael Steinberg.

                  I am writing this paper from my home. This would be unremarkable for most academic work, but it bears mention because of the circumstances that are keeping me in my apartment and out of the libraries, rehearsal studios, and theatres where I would usually generate the material that will become an MFA from Brown University in about a year’s time. I am writing this paper from my home because we are amidst the global pandemic of COVID-19, which is forcing people from their places of work and play in the name of social distancing to avoid transmission. Social distancing, according to the United States Center for Disease Control, is defined as “remaining out of congregate settings, avoiding mass gatherings, and maintaining distance (approximately 6 feet or 2 meters) from others when possible.” In this vein, on March 12, 2020, Mayor Jorge O. Elorza revoked entertainment licenses in Providence, shuttering theatres across the city in an effort to contain the disease. In the short term, these life-saving measures have left workers in the performing arts, like myself, with cancelled projects, lost income, and stalled development. In the long term, this global event has raised anxious questions about the future of the performing arts. When prohibitions against congregating are lifted, will people want to go to the theatre? Will the rows of seats in an auditorium feel too close for comfort? Will the risks of being in an audience outweigh a good night out?

                  As a theatre artist, worker, and scholar, my hunch is that there is change on the horizon. In an effort to shed some light onto the future, I will be looking to the past: theatre as it evolved through the 17th century in England. William Shakespeare will be our Virgil through this tumultuous journey, and his play Hamlet will be our plumb line. These hundred years saw deadly disease, civil war, and related paradigmatic shifts in the artistry and architecture of the theatre. Leading up to and throughout the century, the bubonic plague felled large swaths of the population and bred widespread fear through communities worried about contracting the disease. Government authorities periodically suspended public performances in an effort to contain the plague—a move that sounds awfully familiar. The first decades of the century also saw a major regime change with the death of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch and the succession of King James I, the beginning of the Stuart monarchy. Theatre began a shift as well, from large, outdoor Elizabethan playhouses to smaller, indoor Jacobean theatres. The middle of the 17th century saw twenty years of civil war, suspending and subsequently re-seating the monarchy in 1660. As a result, theatres were shuttered for the eighteen years that Britain was under Puritan rule, reopening with the restoration of Charles II to the throne. I will be tracing this period of sociopolitical upheaval via the shift from Elizabethan theatre through Jacobean theatre, the dark interregna period, and reemergence in Restoration theatre. Theatrical writing changed, acting changed, the theatre buildings changed, and encompassing it all, the experience of the audience member changed. That is where my main curiosity lies. I hope that this reading of the transformations of the English theatre through the tumultuous 17th century will be an illuminating study for a theatre artist in social isolation today. Confined to my home in the spring of 2020, I am reminded to invest in theatre’s inherent capacity to change by Peter Handke, reflecting on Brecht:

The state of the world, which hitherto had been taken as intrinsic and natural, was seen to be manufactured—and precisely manufacturable and alterable. Not natural, not non-historical, but artificial, capable of alteration, possible of alteration, and under certain circumstances needful of alteration. (7)

In the seismic shifts that England experienced from 1600 to 1700, how did the ‘artificial’ theatre, which daily proposes new worlds for its audience to inhabit, evolve with and for its audience? How might practitioners of that same art evolve to face a changing world more than 400 years later?

The beginning of the 17th century saw a lively theatre scene in urban and suburban England. The English Renaissance theatre was in full swing, with multiple venues presenting matinees for audiences that numbered in the thousands (Nagler 4).  William Shakespeare was producing his plays at the Globe Theatre, newly opened in 1599. (It would burn down in 1613, getting rebuilt the following year. Perhaps a harbinger for more incendiary times and a rebirth to come?) The Globe Theatre was a prime example of an Elizabethan public theatre, which stood in contrast to court halls, inn yards, and other spaces where plays (Shakespearean and otherwise) were performed in the Elizabethan era (1558-1603).

            Nagler’s analysis of the “ideal” Elizabethan playhouse combines incomplete evidence from multiple examples (in particular, a 1596 sketch of The Swan made by a Dutch traveller, reproduced below) so a summary will prove useful. The Elizabethan public theatre was a large, mostly outdoor venue. Symmetrically square or polygonal in shape, high walls would commonly house three levels of galleries that wrapped around the stage area outfitted with seating. Audience members in these seats would look down at the action on stage, as well as the action in the audience below and around. The rectangular thrust stage jutted out from one side, raised between four and six feet off the ground. Standing audience members were free to mill about the ‘yard’ at ground level around the stage (hence their name, “groundlings”) with a view looking up at the performance. Actors would enter and exit from upstage through a curtain that may have been painted with scenery. The stage was kept largely bare of scenery, save key elements such as thrones. The uppermost gallery was roofed, as was the stage, but the yard was open to the elements. This segmented architecture divided the audience economically: the ticket price for a groundling was a single penny, to sit in the highest gallery cost two pennies, and to sit on cushions in the first or second galleries (where a viewer could best see and be seen) cost a total of three pennies.

Figure 1: 1596 sketch by Johaness DeWitt of a rehearsal in progress at The Swan. This is the only known contemporary drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan playhouse.

                  Divided into distinct spaces, but partaking in the same event, audience members of different classes had different and specific experiences of going the theatre. Imagine that it is 1601 and you’ve paid for a groundling ticket at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames, across the river from the center of London. You’ve finished your morning’s work and arrived here in the early afternoon to see a new tragedy about some Scandinavian prince performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It’s a cool, sunny day, and you are reminded of last night’s rain by the mud sucking at your shoes as you navigate the growing crowd. You squint upwards—the circle of the sky above is a replica of the idyllic sky painted underneath the roof of the stage. It bodes well for a play watched unsheltered. You imagine that you’re in the center of a humming beehive as thousands of people take their seats in the galleries and others nudge past you in the yard, searching for a friend or a better view. You mill in the mix, pleasantly warming in the proximity of other groundlings, a benefit that offsets the unpleasant smells of your compatriots: garlic, brewers yeast, and labor (Gurr 16). Deliberate footsteps rumble through the boards and two sentinels appear—you’re standing so close to the stage that you can’t see the entrances on the back wall.

                  “WHo’s there?” Two words ring out from above, calling out to the imagined world above and behind. The energy of the beehive shifts—suddenly attentive and attuned. You and your comrades pressed around you are at the base of Elsinore’s wall, close and unnoticed, with a full earful but a partial view. You ask yourself what these guards are so afraid of. What might be lurking beyond the castle wall? There’s a hiss in your ear: care to buy a snack? Yes. Negotiating payment and food, you hear a new voice: “By Heauen I charge thee speake.” You look up. He is talking to a ghost[1]. The audience hushes itself, but the ghost offers no answer. “It is offended.” A chuckle rumbles the beehive back to life, the inconstant underscore to The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke by William Shakespeare.

                  The period of social stability, solidification of national identity, and cultural flourishing that marked the reign of Elizabeth I might be seen reflected in the large-capacity, open-air, neatly-segregated playhouses of her time. A thrust stage set up in a round house lit uniformly by the sky above ensures that the audience experiences itself in addition to the fictional world of the play. There are almost no positions in the house where the stage is the only thing in the audience member’s field of view. The players kept one wall of mysteries hidden from the audience: the upstage wall, obscurer of the tiring house, where actors would make entrances and costume changes. The raised and roofed stage is the clear focal point of the space. This architecture could be seen as a model of centralized power embraced by all classes of the public. It is not as didactic as the proscenium nor as communal as theatre-in-the-round—the Elizabethan playhouse, similar to the Elizabethan government was moderate, centralized, and tolerant. This stability would shift course, however, with the death of Elizabeth I in March of 1603. Though she died childless and never named an heir, the succession of James VI of Scotland happened smoothly, marking the new regime of King James I of England and Ireland. That same year, a particularly deadly outbreak of the Bubonic plague raged through London. The effects of both the plague and the beginning of the Jacobean era rippled through the theatre. 

In the early 17th century, the Bubonic plague was still making its deadly rounds through Europe, and would intermittently continue to do so for another 200 years. In London, as Munro writes, “the plague was less cataclysm than context (242).” The persistent presence of pestilence in the city colored urban life with death, challenging the viability of the theatre business for theatre owners, actors, and playwrights. “In 1603 plague killed one in five Londoners in the space of a few months. Over thirty thousand died and thousands more fled the city, causing London virtually to stop. (Munro 241).” After this outbreak, “the privy council decreed that public playing should cease once the number of those who died every week of plague rose ‘above the number of 30’ (Shapiro).” The plague was especially deadly in the summer months, peak season for the public playhouses, where thousands of people would gather in close proximity daily to watch plays and other entertainments. Halting these crowded performances was just one of many measures the new government under James I took to enforce social distancing guidelines in response to deadly disease. In these shut-down summer months, Nagler observes that Shakespeare’s company, renamed the King’s Men in honor of James I, took their show on the road, running tours out to the provinces. However, the more significant shift for theatre as a whole arose when these companies of actors moved indoors to the Jacobean private theatres.

Shakespeare and his company acquired the lease on Blackfriars Theatre in 1608, after the children’s performing company that had been in residence there vacated it. This was during a period of frequent plague closures, and some scholars argue that Blackfriars Theatre, just outside the city limits, offered a performance venue that was not subject to the Privy Council’s closure orders. There is evidence that the King’s Men were putting on private performances for nobility during these plague closures, due to payment records in 1608-9. However, Barroll attests that there is no clear evidence as to the location of these performances: they could have been in a shuttered Globe, Blackfriars, or any other hall used for performance. Nonetheless, performances by the King’s Men at Blackfriars were in full swing by 1611, allowing the company to perform through the winter season, excepting Lent, indoors (Barroll). This significantly helped the company’s bottom line: performances at The Globe would be subject to unpredictable summer plague closures in addition to the weather, and increased ticket prices at the indoor Blackfriars brought in comparable or better sums than performances at the much bigger Globe (Gurr 22). In fact, The King’s Men were able to keep one venue vacant while they were performing in the other, an unusual move, as other companies found tenants for their unused spaces. As the reign of King James I continued, the outdoor Elizabethan playhouse declined in prominence, and Blackfriars Theatre became the most “famous and most fashionable theatre in London (Gurr 4).”

The Blackfriars audience was a decidedly more elite, affluent, and homogeneous crowd than one would find at The Globe for a number of reasons. Firstly, tickets started at 6 pence at Blackfriars (the top price for a seat at The Globe) which supported the decreased capacity, estimated at 500-600 people. Blackfriars was located on the north side of the Thames, in an affluent neighborhood just outside of the city of London (later incorporated) surrounded by the homes of affluent citizens. Lawyers, landed gentry, and the court would operate on a similar calendar as the Blackfriars season, leaving London for the countryside in the summertime. Therefore, the cool-weather performance period of Blackfriars Theatre was uniquely suited to the schedule of London elites (Gurr 27). Even in the beginning this audience was described by contemporaries as “’gentle’: that is to say not only more refined and considerate in manners but of a social rank above the common ruck, with money in inherited landholdings, one step short of the nobility (Gurr 16).” At Blackfriars, audience members did not encounter the working class, unwashed and unchanged from their labors. The attendees used the occasion of seeing a play to display the latest fashions, to see and be seen in an exclusive and intimate setting. For a premium price, seating was offered on stage, offering both a close up of the action and a prime location from which to display one’s finery. Strikingly, though the audiences at Blackfriars were on the whole more educated than the audiences at the Globe, Shakespeare continued to show his more complex plays, such as Measure for Measure, at The Globe, along with, and perhaps instead of at Blackfriars—suggesting that the playwright may have eschewed the homogeneity of the elite audience in favor of communicating with the public at large (Gurr 25).

To understand the Jacobean audience experience is to imagine the hall itself: candlelit, fitted with seating for all audience members on, around, and above a narrow thrust stage. Of the four operating indoor playhouses in Jacobean London, we have the most evidence surrounding Blackfriars, including a set of drawings found at Worcester College believed to be accurate architectural representations of the theatre, pictured at right. Since their discovery, the interpretation, authorship, and accuracy of the drawings have come under “forensic” scrutiny, but they are widely held as the earliest representation of the interior of a Jacobean theatre and an important source for replicating the Jacobean playhouse. As with Nagel’s analysis of the Elizabethan playhouse, Jones makes an estimation of the architecture of the ‘ideal’ Jacobean theatre, modeled on Blackfriars. The inside of the hall measured 66 by 46 feet. There were two galleries of steeply sloped seating arranged along the long sides of the hall, creating a faceted “U” shape as they meet in the back.  These were the lowest priced seats, at sixpence. There was bench seating in the pit on the floor directly in front of the raised stage, for which the ticket price was one shilling, six pence. There was also stool seating on the stage for two shillings, and off to the sides of the stage there were boxes, which cost a half crown. The stage was smaller and much narrower than that of The Globe, requiring significant adjustments to staging for plays that were performed in both venues. On the upstage wall was a frons scenae, or hall screen, which contained doors to the “rear stage” through which actors could make entrances. There was another playing area above the doors, used by musicians accompanying the play as well as actors. The degree of decoration in the space is under speculation, as Jacobean aesthetics favored lush and ornate carving and painting, but theatre companies have notably less to spend on décor than the crown, so the decoration could have been focused on a few key areas such as the frons scenae.

Figure 2: Worcester College drawing 7c, attributed to John Webb, early 1660s

“It’s a little crowded here,” you might be thinking if you were one of the audience members seated onstage at Blackfriars Theatre. It seems most of the actors in the company are filing in—this must be a big scene and you are keen to not get your shoe trampled in the action. In the glowing candlelight, the rich colors of your new doublet are setting off the glint of the gold chain on your chest quite nicely. You shift slightly on your stool so that the pit can get a better view of your shapely, stockinged calf. “Do you thinke I meant Country matters?” Your ear perks up: did the lovely boy actor made up to be Ophelia just say what I thought I heard? “I thinke nothing, my Lord.” “That's a faire thought to ly between Maids legs” Yes, they are saying what you think they are saying. “You are merrie, my Lord?” You’d say you were having a fine night out at the theatre, as, it seems, are the characters not six inches from you. Behind you in the box, you can hear a woman’s voice murmuring, and you sit up taller just in case it was a powerful murmuring about you. One can never be too vigilant about how one is seen. Music begins to drift from above, invisible to you, as some of the candles are snuffed. “Perhaps Hamlet’s ghost father is playing the recorder,” you think, but you can barely smirk at your own joke before the dumb show begins. Perfumed by music and darkness, the players in dazzling costume and mask love, deceive, and murder each other. It is a mesmerizing spectacle—you are in the garden with them, you are an accomplice as you watch the poison tip into the ear. When you look to King Claudius’s face, you can feel the heat building underneath his skin, his lips twitch, his eyes waver, he stands, he looks like he is about to erupt--“Giue me some Light. Away.” You wipe a droplet of the actor’s spit off of your cheek. As the courtiers call for light as they file offstage, you catch a glimpse of Prince Hamlet’s satisfaction—his eyes catch yours and you could swear that the candles spontaneously relit at that very moment.   

The sturdy authority of the Elizabethan era had been replaced with a decidedly more indulgent monarch. Though the rule of James I was relatively peaceful, the groundwork for the English Civil War was being laid by his mistrust of Parliament, court favoritism, lavish spending, and deep belief in divine right to rule. Over the 22 years of his reign, the theatre evolved towards elitism, intimacy, spectacle, a “‘loosening of …power’ and a new theatrical freedom: this was a moment at which playwrights were able to challenge older systems of hierarchy, authority, and institutional allegiance (Wray 544).” Shakespeare died in 1616, but the King’ Men continued performing at Blackfriars and The Globe under the patronage of James I, and after his death in 1625, Charles I. Other playwrights took up the mantle of interrogating systems of power, in particular, the role of women in society. Strong female roles (still played by men) emerged on the Carolinian stage, the indoor playhouse asserted itself as the theatre de rigeur, and lavish spectacles seen in Court Masques find their way onto the theatrical stage (Gurr 218). The King’s Men continued to play at Blackfriars, an indoor enclave where the in-crowd could get up close and personal with the glittering artifice of theatre. In contrast to the wide open “O” of The Globe, Blackfriars set the public in a rectangular audience where the most valuable seats threatened to usurp the stage. This could be seen as a model that exposes the weaknesses of a regime that would explode into civil war in 1642.

Whereas Public Sports do not well agree with Public Calamities, nor Public Stage-plays with the Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of sad and pious Solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity: It is therefore thought fit, and Ordained, by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled, That, while these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease and be forborn, instead of which are recommended to the People of this Land the profitable and seasonable considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God.

                  On September 2, 1642 the Long Parliament closed the theatres. They would remain closed through 1660, with the restoration of Charles II to the throne at the end of the Civil War. This dark period was far longer than any plague closure. Rising Puritan factions had long decried theatre as pagan ritual, related to the worship of ancient gods. “The Puritan case in this was an easy one; the origin of the drama in the worship of Dionysos-Bacchus and the introduction of plays into Rome to assuage a pestilence by order of the ‘Devill-God Iupiter Capitolinus’ were well known (Hewitt 13).” However, Parliament was more concerned with pressing political issues than religious purity. According to Staines, they were motivated by “a fear of the instability that might result when large numbers of people gathered to watch politically charged material and left the building debating the implications.” Staines goes on to argue that the discourse that had been happening inside of theatres funneled into pamphleteering, the contained spoken word exchanged for the dispersed written word.  Theatricality didn’t disappear completely, however, “many pamphleteers even borrowed techniques from drama, creating play-pamphlets and using forms like dialogue and tragedy (Staines).” The free press and proliferation of pamphlets also opened up space for female writers, often publishing under pseudonyms, paving the way for women’s participation in the theatre that would follow. Imagine this wartime audience: chaotically dispersed, inundated with many points of view from obscured authors, stripped of the social, auditory, and visual pleasures of gathering. Bringing our consciousness back to the 21st century, there is a sense of resonant familiarity: gatherings outlawed, a country hotly divided, discourse taking place through the wild and powerful free press of Twitter.

            As the interregnum came to an end in 1660, Charles II blinked the house lights, sounded the chimes, and ushered England’s theatregoers from the lobby back to their seats. Solidifying a royalist sentiment and inspired by continental opera, the new monarch issued two exclusive licenses to publicly perform plays for profit to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. Killigrew founded The King’s Company, Davenant, the Duke’s Company. At this point, the Jacobean playhouses were defunct and ill-suited to the newest fashion in theatre, imported from the continent: the proscenium arch. Following the French trend, each company leased and renovated indoor tennis courts to house the reincarnated theatre. Davenant’s theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the later to open, but dazzled audiences with the innovation of moveable scenery.

When the Duke’s Company opened its doors on 28 1660 June, the audience was greeted with a scenic stage that offered a range of scene changes via screens and shutters moved across the stage space behind the proscenium arch. A set of grooves running across the stage from a series of wing positions carried shutters that could be opened or closed on the action behind, or create a new vista further up the scenic stage. (Bush-Bailey 27)

Figure 3: 1809 Engraving of the interior of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre

Depth of field, quickly shifting locations, and special effects framed Restoration era drama, which included performances of Renaissance repertoire along with new plays. However, many patrons and critics found old plays unsuited to new tastes. Fretz notes that Shakespeare’s plays were subject to heavy rewrites “not just in the light of the new political situation, but also because of new tastes and expectations that demanded clearer and more intelligible language, tragicomic plots, increased sentimentalism, and poetic justice.” Nevertheless, the plays were performed by both The King’s and The Duke’s companies, with changes in both the text and performance.

                  One of the most significant changes to the English theatre of the Restoration was the inclusion of women as playwrights as well as performers. Actresses appearing on the public stage for the first time were a scandalous curiosity, particularly when they played male characters, revealing their shapely legs in “pants roles.” New plays written by female playwrights interrogated social norms while titillating audiences with convoluted sex plots. This period also saw the first female manager of a theatre, Lady Mary Davenant, who took control of The Duke’s Company after her husband’s death in 1668. After a crisis of almost twenty years of darkness, the new English theatre returned as a place of public dialogue, entertainment, and social experimentation.

                  The audiences of Restoration theatre retained the elitism of the Jacobean crowd, though there is debate as to whether two theatres that needed to fill at least 200 seats per night, six nights a week to support themselves could afford an insular clientele (Scouten 47). We have a delightfully detailed account of a regular theatregoer of the era: Samuel Pepys. In his diaries, he not only recorded his opinions of the productions he saw in the latter half of the 17th century but also made note of the many people he would meet on his cultural outings. His accounts have given scholars the sense of coterie amongst the urban bourgeois attending the theatre (Scouten 47). Samuel Pepys was a notable fan of Hamlet, attending multiple productions and going so far as to commission a musical setting of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy (Bevington 91).

                  Imagine that you are an audience member at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields playhouse on November 27, 1661 attending a performance of Hamlet by the Duke’s Company. Coincidentally, well-known man-about-town Samuel Pepys is also in the audience.  You are seated in one of the high, steep side galleries in the long and narrow hall. You can imagine watching a tennis match below, but now it is filled with a seated audience. Directly ahead, you see somewhat of a mirror image: a steep, wooden gallery filled with people, including a young woman with a concerned expression gazing at the stage. Is she that worried about the fate of the Prince of Denmark? Turning your head, it looks like staring down a narrow laneway from the street. The proscenium frames the realistic setting of a castle yard, Laertes, center, listening to something in the wings. “Hey non nony, nony, hey nony:” Ophelia enters singing, flowers in her hair and in her arms. She looks like a nymph, sad and beautiful. “And on his graue raines many a teare,” Laertes sees his sister and melts, hearing her sad song. “Fare you well my Doue.” She’s mad, you think as she gives stalks of greenery to her brother. She is wild, freewheeling, and disheveled. You wonder if she should have gone to the nunnery, but she is so beautiful, you couldn’t imagine her locked up by the Catholics. “And of all Christian Soules, I pray God. God buy ye.” She disappears into the wing, and you wonder if you will get to see that sad, lovely woman again. You look across the hall at your gallery’s mirror again: the young woman is craned in her seat, twisting towards the stage, eyes brimmed with tears—is she looking into a mirror of her own?

                  Through plague, through war, through puritanical protest, the English public theatre made and re-made itself though the 17th century. This is, of course, not unique to English theatre nor that particular stretch of time. This is true of theatre as an organism, as States writes: “it feeds on the world as its nourishment, it adapts to cultural climate and conditions that necessitates periodic shifts in direction and speed, and finally it exhausts itself and dies—one of its traditions, like generations, replacing another (13).”

                  What feeds this organism of theatre? Looking back at the examples cited above, state power is undeniably influential in the viability and the very form of theatre. The public theatre most closely resembles our contemporary theatre industry with its dependence on large crowds, ticket sales revenue, and supplemental government support. At each turn, the government’s valuation (or lack thereof) of the theatre is a large determinant in its fate. This pattern is not very heartening to a theatre artist in America in 2020.

                  However, there is also a more optimistic interpretation from today’s vantage point. Though the government was a huge determining factor in the fate of the theatre, artists never lost the will to create theatre and audiences continued to show up for each new playhouse’s offerings. Even during the intermission of the interregna, the desire for public discourse remained, shifting to the written word, and companies of actors began re-forming at the first sign of peace. Public space and public conversation are endemic to a society, and when either is threatened, the society suffers immeasurably. The theatre is “a place for seeing” but it is also a place for conversation, a place for multiple points of view to be heard. As long as people can hear and be heard safely, human innovation will provide a space for that conversation to happen. The show, after all, must go on. Or, in the poignant words of Horatio at the end of Hamlet:

Of that I shall haue alwayes cause to speake,

And from his mouth

Whose voyce will draw on more:

But let this same be presently perform'd,

Euen whiles mens mindes are wilde,

Lest more mischance

On plots, and errors happen.

Works Cited

[1] The Ghost was likely played by Shakespeare himself, haunting his own play. (Bevington)

Pandemic As Paradigm Shift

Layne Manzier, center, in TUTA Theatre’s The Jewels, adapted and directed by Kirk Anderson, movement directed by Aileen Wen McGroddy. Photo: Anthony La Penna

I’m sure I’m asking the same questions as anyone who has a Facebook account and a live performance practice: will we survive this? I can’t say that we will or we won’t, but I have to say this: we must.

Those of us addicted to the social pheromone produced by strangers gathering in the same room to play pretend have been deflated by fear, loss, and loneliness in the past two weeks or so, and for good reason: physical togetherness has been deemed too high a risk. We can no longer trust the bodies of strangers. Perhaps, in this time of anti-capitalist quietude, we will learn to (or be forced to) trust the goodwill of strangers, but their bodies? A government mandated restraining order. We collectively turn our gaze to our multimillion-dollar performance palaces, hundreds (or thousands) of seats, neatly wedged in together, well within the danger zone of six feet. This audience architecture suddenly becomes a dangerous health risk: how can we force our precious, precious subscribers, single ticket buyers, and their patient dates to encounter their own mortality when all they want is a good night out?

My two cents: maybe we don’t. Force them, that is.

Audience architecture has changed before, and it can change again. Did you know that our predominant multi-level proscenium audience setup is a relic of a revolutionary change in Parisian opera at the turn of the 19th century? (I didn’t, until this semester.) I am not arguing that we return to curtained-off compartments for nobles, seating boxes on the stage, or full food and beverage service during the show—ok maybe that last one—BUT I am arguing that the social experience of live performance has evolved along with architecture, and both of those things have the capacity to change.

Stage directors know that it is “easier” to stage proscenium. Essentially, there is one point of view and one viewpoint to care take—a single window into the world, which changes before our very eyes. This is the architecture of film, of vaudeville, of Western Christianity: for many of us, this is our heritage. As we experiment with audience architectures and invite people into the thrust, the alley, the round, there is often a sense of scarcity: “In this composition these three seats get only butts, but I’ll change it up in the next beat to give them some of that sweet, sweet actor crotch—I mean, face—I mean crotch.” There is a paternalism to this mode of problem solving: the assumption that audience is unable to help themselves. The way that we set up most performance spaces, this is absolutely true. We train audiences to shut their bodies off, to entrust control of their senses to us. I would guess that most (certainly not all) audience members would say that the benefit has been, by and large, worth the risk incurred by entrusting their physical safety to those of us who invite them into our houses.

Enter COVID-19. The Plague.

The systems that we have in place to ensure the bodily well-being of our audience are suddenly inadequate. A causal match of armrest-jockeying becomes a life-or-death duel, a doorknob becomes a grenade, a public bathroom, a nuclear war zone. The terms of engagement have changed, and we don’t have the buildings, staff, or supplies to change with it. Thus, the audience contract itself must change, and with it, the flow of trust. We must entrust the audience to manage their own bodies, and then they’ll tell us how to build the performance venues of the future.

Like everything in theatre, this is, of course, not a new idea. Imagine a busker who has defined their performance space on the street with a few props and a rope. Think of the oh-so-trendy world of immersive theatre, where the audience may be masked and set loose in a fictional world. There’s the outdoor concert, families picnicking hundreds of feet away from the performers, pleased to talk amongst themselves as they listen to the music. Bleacher seating at the minor league game. People laying out their yoga mats in the studio. College students choosing their seats around a seminar table. Attendees at a shadow puppet show in Bali, welcome to come and go, get a snack, have a conversation, and watch from either side of the screen. People know how to arrange themselves, given the opportunity to figure it out. Unfortunately, most theatres don’t have the tools to allow them to do so, or the space has been tread over time into deep, rutted paths that make it impossible to climb out of the ditch. Our European-legacy, proscenium, seats-packed-side-by-side-in-rows-in-the-dark-theatre is a theatre where the audience has placed their trust in us to arrange the world in front of them to see from the best (or the least bad) angle. It’s a world where actors’ bodies, psychologies, and one wall of living rooms are opened up to an anonymous mass of witnesses whose bodies are erased by the discipline and punishments of silence, stillness, and darkness. This model breaks down in a world where people must take greater care for themselves. They may no longer trust us, the theater makers, so me must learn to trust them.

What if we handed people a chair and let them move it wherever they liked, whenever they liked? What if it was a big room, and people could choose to sit or stand? What if there was just a big ol’ bench? Yes, people will move during the pivotal scene. People might start talking to each other during the show. These are all bylaws in the audience contract that are, at most, 200 years old. That is a drop in the bucket for an art form that is thousands of years old. We can take it. I don’t know what brilliant solutions the collective imagination will come up with, but this is your friendly reminder that social distancing is really physical distancing, and we have all been negotiating that since a single-celled organism scooched away from the primordial ooze.

The Theatre Is Not a Safe Space

Andrew Gombas in On The Y-Axis by Lucas Baisch

Content warning: profanity

            The theatre is not a safe space. Consider: above, heavy, hard, and hot instruments cling to their mounts for dear life. Below, freshly painted reconstituted wood temporarily assembled by underpaid laborers in the dead of night. Around, clouds of vapor ranging from a foggy mist to a misty fog, punctuated by bouts of blinding light or pitch darkness, in which people and objects move at lightening speed. Out there, the honorable General Public and his seven colonels: Grumpy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy, Obliged, Latecomer, and Critic. With you on stage, professional liars in pursuit of The Truth. On your body, someone else’s clothes. In your mouth, someone else’s words. In your brain, free fall. In your heart, the most pure and sweet little song that could ever be sung.

               The theatre is not a safe space, and for some unlucky lucky people, it is the best place in the world. I am not just talking about actors, but about all of us—about me—who choose and re-choose to do this unreasonable thing at inconvenient times for little to no tangible reward. Some people, after a while, stop re-choosing the theatre and instead spend their time doing things like project management or marketing or podcasts or parenting or teaching or nothing. Or maybe they choose the theatre some of the time and some of the time they don’t. These choices should be applauded because it is very difficult to leave a dangerous lover.

            But for those that are in the theatre, which is not a safe space, I have a sincere wish that they leave in a better state than they entered. That the theatre not only does not injure them (which really feels like a low bar, but the world is still working on “Only have sex with people who want to have sex with you,” which is a bar that should be within everyone’s grasp, but alas…) but that the theatre can help people be better.

          The best protective tool against injury is awareness. If you see the crack in the sidewalk, you’re much less likely to trip on it. Also, if you are the crack in the sidewalk, you have to be aware of that. With awareness comes responsibility, and as a director, I think that one of my primary responsibilities is sculpting awareness in my collaborators, my audience, and myself. Maybe the alchemical combination of awareness and responsibility with the addition of action is care.

            This is easy to say from my place of relative privilege. But I also think that it is easy to say that you care from a place of privilege while lacking its component parts: awareness, responsibility, and action. 

            When I think of the wrongs that have been done in the theatre, wrongs that have injured people that I know, wrongs that I have wrought, I think of these things. I wonder why someone wasn’t aware that it would come off that way, why someone else didn’t take responsibility for their own impulses, why another person chose not to act when it was needed. I wonder these same things about myself. Often, when encountering a moment in performance that sits somewhere on the continuum between poor taste and violently offensive, I think to myself: they didn’t care enough.

            Caring is good dramaturgy. You must have awareness of the systems of meaning that you build into your made-up world, stand behind them as a creator of said world, and put the whole ecosystem into motion. One a practical level: care where the chair goes, and you by extension care where the person goes. Care that the work (the people!) can be seen and heard (and felt, smelled, and tasted, if you’re working in those media.) Care that people can come to your work by removing physical, economic, and informational barriers. Caring will make you a better artist. You don’t have to like it to care about it. You don’t have to like them to care about them. Care harder, care better, care faster, care stronger, care more about the people than you do about the things. In Taylor Mac’s words, care more about the verbs than you do about the nouns. In my riff on those words: care more about the doing than you care about the done.

            And,

It is not a sin to fail.

We are constantly failing.

I’m probably failing myself this very instant in three to five ways.

I’m certainly failing other people this very instant in more than five ways.

I fail our planetary future every time I use a plastic fork or drive to school because I’m running a little late or I’m tired or it’s cold outside or I just don’t feel like biking.  

So what do we do?

What do we do when we fail to care well enough?

If each person, over the course of becoming an adult person, grows a certain number of fucks, and we dedicate each fuck to a certain cause or task or person until we have no fucks left, it would not be wrong to say, when said person was confronted with a certain cause or task or person that had no fucks dedicated to it, that they didn’t give a fuck.  

Recommit your fucks to the theatre.

If you’re going to do theatre, you might as well give a fuck. I think you should give several. We have all seen a lot of theatre made without enough fucks given, or the fucks have been poorly distributed. It is bad. Theatre without enough fucks is way worse than theatre without enough money. If you’re feeling pessimistic about the state of The Theatre and don’t feel like donating your fucks to it when it calls, give your fucks to the people that make the theatre. They’ll know what to do with them.

Maybe making theatre without injury is really making theatre worth giving a fuck. Because accidents, missteps, microaggressions, macroagressions, misrepresentations, bad days, and injuries happen. But, wouldn’t it be better if it was a noun that injured you and not a verb?

Helping people to get better:

That doesn’t mean happier.

Or more comfortable.

Or nicer.

Or richer.

Or whiter.

“Better” is a great word because it is inherently subjective and relative. It’s slippery and personal. Delicious.

If “giving a fuck” is about craft, and I think it is, “better” is about art.

“Better” is what I get to say in the rehearsal room as a scene coalesces in front of me. “Better” is the collection of small dreams I get to have when I read a play. “Better” is the breath I want the audience to breathe in the blackout before curtain call. “Better” is my gift, from the people that made me to the people that I meet.

 What I love about art and artists is that my “better” is different from yours. And yours. And yours. And yours. And yours. And yours. What a buffet of “betters” we have around this table. Lucky us.

My personal “better” looks something like this:

I want people to be together, better. The never-ending task of togethering is the pilot light of my artistic practice. Something greater than the sum of its parts is produced when people come together, when people are present with one another. This substance can take the form of a cum-by-yah nude maypole moment, but it can just as easily look like a sit-in as it can a lynch mob. This is a powerful chemical, this meaning—oop! I named it! Meaning making happens between people, and though they don’t have to be in the same room to produce it, being physically together can certainly concentrate meaning.

We live in a world with simultaneously unimaginable abundance and unthinkable scarcity. Our cultural systems teach us in many ways that other people are not invested in our individual survival, and that might be true. So we burrow into ourselves while projecting another self into the public space. We are lonely. I am lonely. I want to make theatre that gives a person a chance to do something in the company of other people that requires complicity on many levels, a balm on the persistent rash of loneliness.

There are really very few public health problems that I think I could have a significant positive impact on. In most cases, I draw the line at washing my hands and getting a flu shot. However, loneliness has been identified as a looming epidemic, under the more DSM-friendly sounding, “social isolation.” I believe that theatre is a treatment for loneliness, but not in its predominant current form.

To get theatre FDA-approved as a treatment for loneliness, two main things must happen: theatre must give audiences access and it must acknowledge them once they are present.

No performance is going to be 100% accessible, but more performances can more accessible. Working on accessibility is to remove barriers to the performance, both for the people making the show as well as the people attending it. Generally, accessibility is seen in converse relationship to disability: ramps for wheelchair users, for example. (Just a moment to note that many “accessibility” features are useful to people of all abilities. Everybody can use a ramp!) However, there is a plethora of logistical, social, economic, geographic, linguistic barriers that are in place at most American Theatre Institutions that must be reckoned with. This is not to mention a notion of artistic accessibility: is this show made for someone who already knows theatre? Who already knows this play? We really have to ask, over and over, who is this for? Because inside of that question lies who it is not for.

Acknowledging the audience has two layers. One of them is easy. THE FOURTH WALL IS PRETEND. IT IS NOT THERE. Punch a hole in it. Build a window. Shit, install some French doors. If the very foundation of your play rests on the conceit that the audience doesn’t exist, then why is it a play and why should they show up? I wouldn’t show up to a party if everyone pretended I didn’t exist once I got there. You don’t even have to have an Our Town­­-style meta-theatrical Stage Manager in your play, just like, have the actors look at us, not through us. They can talk to us, not past us. You’re already having everyone stand in ¾ position so that we get a nice view of all the actors crotches and you’ve choreographed the reveal of the prop so that we can see it—the step is so, so, so, little and it’s right there. The second layer of this is harder, because American culture (and also most other cultures) has taught us that some people don’t get to be people. That translates to people not getting to be people in a theatre audience—that is, given time and space to see a show that helps them understand their personhood. As theatre makers, this is our responsibility, and we need to take it seriously, because there is an EPIDEMIC. 

My theatre is not a safe space, but with all the fucks I can muster, it is a place where every person gets to be a person, and every person leaves a better person. It is a place of tender togethering, of surprises that feel like plunging into a cold lake, it is welcoming and demanding, and it is care-full and failing. My theatre sees you, and then winks. My theatre wants you to wink back.

The Cruelty of Theatre

Sheridan Singleton, Ashley Fox, David Fink, Isaac Samuelson, Christopher Donaldson Cardenas, Charlotte Long, and James Snyder in Ulysses

In a culture where the arts are seen as a decoration that we put in the spare corners of life, going to the theatre is a great conversation piece. Attending a play requires precious time, money, effort, and attention. This frames the experience as a transactional one: for the $100 of this ticket, you will receive $23 of laughs, $14 of tears, $18 of cool things to look at, $23 of self righteousness, $10 of feeling smart, and $12 of sitting down.

The experience of watching a “traditional” play is cruel. Audience members are expected to behave a certain way, dress a certain way, make certain noises at certain times, BUT NOT AT THE WRONG TIME, YOU PHILISTINE. The institutional theatre sets up a performance event that requires participants to have attended a previous performance event of similar kinds, and rewards those that do with a sense of erudition and belonging. Things that require that you already have experienced the thing before you experience the thing are broken things.

I am as bad an offender as anyone of theatrical tribalism. I shoot dirty looks when people unwrap their hard candies and get on the highest of horses when I hear a phone go off. I will sit in the dark, snot running down my face, bladder ready to explode, mouth gone dry of thirst, farting silently and deadly, counting the minutes until intermission rather than stand up in front of everyone and leave the theatre during a scene… of a play I don’t even like. As an audience member, you bet I reinforce the cruelty of the space.  But of course I do: I was trained to from an early age and I’m good at it now.

            But.

            And.

I want to wrap my knuckles in old playbills and gaff tape and square off with the institution of the American Theater. In the secret basement fight club we would stand under the one hanging light fixture, perspiring with anticipation, surrounded by people waving philanthropic dollars as bets. I know I wouldn’t—couldn’t—kill him (we’ve got too much history) but maybe I could stop him from picking on people who don’t deserve it. Maybe I could knock him off balance just enough so that the people who hide behind him stopped feeling quite so secure. Maybe I could maim him so that the underdogs could become the new champions for a while. Maybe I could look deep into his eyes and he understand, dropping his fists and I would nod the tiniest nod and we would run to each other and hug. Later, at the corner bar, he would tell me that he doesn’t know how he got so stuck, how he hadn’t seen himself fading from the culture. Or not.

Theatre does not have to be for everyone, but everyone should have a full opportunity to decide if theatre is for them.

Every time a play is in a language, it is excluding people. Every time a play happens in a place at a time, it is excluding people. The exercise of trying to make “universal” art is a futile one. However, that does not let us off the hook. It is our prerogative as artists to communicate. We ask the world: are you seeing what I’m seeing? What are we going to do about it? Each artistic impulse leaves a mark on the world, from the microscopic shifting of fibers to the exploding of a crater. Knowing that, artists have to hold responsibility for those marks and their consequences.

To talk more specifically about theatre making, here are some of the things we are responsible for:

-       The human beings that come together to make a piece

-       The bodies of those human beings

-       The histories of those bodies

-       The words that are said

-       The words that are unsaid

-       What happens in a story

-       What doesn’t happen in a story

-       Where the audience looks

-       Where the audience doesn’t look

-       Whom the audience listens to

-       Whom the audience doesn’t listen to

-       The materials we use

-       The space we choose

-       The experiences we impose

And we should be held accountable for these things. There are always elements that are out of our control. We still cannot abdicate responsibility for them if we continue insisting that the show must go on.

Why, then, would I choose this art form, deeply mired in capitalism, struggling to free itself from racism, sexism, and ableism, inconvenient and elitist, when we are in the Golden Age of Television?

Because theatre is magic.

I believe that. (Which you know because I wrote it, but I want to say it again:)

Theatre is magic.

There is a concept in LARPing called The Magic Circle. It describes the boundaries within which the rules of the game are active. Inside the magic circle, you are an elfin lord with an army chanting incantations at your back. Outside the magic circle, you are Greg from accounting who has the weird hobby. The theatre creates a magic circle, and that’s why we shouldn’t throw away this container—let’s wash it out and reuse it.

Theatre, unlike a game, uses pre-planned happenings to give an audience an experience. This allows theatre artists to, within the Magic Circle, build a world that is distinct from the world outside. A world with different rules. Maybe the rules are that I am the prince of Denmark and I am PISSED at my mom. Maybe the rules are that when I have a lot of feelings, I burst into song supported by a full orchestra and company of dancers. Maybe the rules are that this cinder block is my baby. Maybe the rules are that I am me and you are you and we are together. By inviting the uninitiated into the Magic Circle and teaching them the rules, we are not asking them to suspend their disbelief, we are making belief.

At its best, theatre is a multi-sensory experience of togetherness. I don’t mean that the audience all leaves and goes to the same bar and they all become best friends and a few of them get married to each other. It’s the experience of ‘not alone.’ You see this and I see it too. You see this and I see it differently. You say this and I hear it. You breathe the same air as me. You beat the same heart as me. If the play is long enough, you smell like me.

Theatre is a salve for loneliness.

Here we are, trapped inside of our own skins, which we dragged to some dark room on the other side of town, hoping it was worth it. Worth the memory space that this experience will occupy. Worth the trust that I put in these artists. Worth the vulnerability of sharing space. Worth it in that it mattered that I showed up. That it would be different if I wasn’t here. It mattered that I was here and that we were together.

Theatre is a salve for loneliness.

And some of us can’t wait for the next show to come to town, or find ourselves curious enough about the show to want to see how it’s made. If we’re lucky, we find that it is made with joy and curiosity and bravery and integrity. If we’re really lucky, we find that it is made with people that we like to spend time with. And if we’re really unlucky, we find that we can’t do anything else.

(Well, we hit my secret reason for being a director: pathological loneliness.)

(Theatre is a salve for my loneliness.)

(So I make it.)

(And share it.)

(Because maybe someone else needs it too.)

 In the rehearsal room and the auditorium, it matters that we show up. That constellation of accountability and vulnerability—those are the ingredients for relationships between people. They are also the ingredients for a society.

In our industry, we learn to forge relationships quickly and intensely, and sometimes we treat them carelessly. We build micro-communities in rehearsal rooms, fully autonomous and just as ephemeral. We build macro-communities and play the politics like it was a Medieval monarchy. We practice ritual and belief systems that are based on the supernatural. We fuck, marry, and almost kill each other. We chase theatre as it moves through time like a shape-shifter, the only constant being change.

But

Theatre is fundamentally made of people, for people; form and content reflecting each other in an endless search for moments of together.  Of not alone. So, how do we make theatre that creates an “us” without also creating a “them?”