Why theater will survive the pandemic
When Covid-19 hit and theaters began closing up shop, fear crept in that theater as an art form had met its match. Public bans on large gatherings, regional theaters going dark, and ongoing civil turmoil resulted in Broadway shuttering for an entire season. Many wondered if an already ailing arts infrastructure could withstand the economic and spiritual impact. Today the simple act of sitting in a darkened room for a live show feels like nostalgia. It can all be a little dispiriting, to say the least.
But it’s important at times like this to remember that theater has already survived several pandemics and kept the ghost light burning through some of the darkest days of the human spirit. This is not to say we shouldn’t offer resistance to current conditions, or work ardently on a plan forward to heal the nation as a whole, let alone in the theater biz. But the theater biz has several stories of perseverance in similar scenarios that may ease the mental stress. Sometimes it can be comforting to know that history has your back.
So take a deep breath, relax, and hop into the Way-Back Machine with me for a moment to marvel at how far the art form has come in the face of impossible odds.
Anthropic Origins
Modern theater goes back thousands of years to the times of Ancient Greece, but it’s really been with us since the origin of our species. When we were first making stone tools and getting used to life on the savannah, we were trying in some way to transmit the lessons of our experiences to each other to increase our chances of survival, requiring a rehearsed performance. The desire to simulate reality and transmit the experience to one another is a bedrock human trait.
As agriculture and cooking took hold we became less nomadic, our minds had time to look upwards and contemplate our existence, and religion was born. Rituals and rites became a part of who we are. The “Medicine Man” became a feature of the tribe and was called upon to relate and connect current events with mystic, ancient wisdom. Humankind embarked on a great search for its soul, which still goes on today.
Eventually, tribes became more sophisticated and turned into civilizations, the religious rituals morphed into full-blown heightened representations of reality, and drama as we know it was born. Ever since these rudimentary dirges have evolved and exploded into every form of dramatic performance you see today. Theater and performance art – and by extension, all art – connect us to something primal in our nature, something undeniably human. For that reason alone, we will never be rid of it. But I digress.
Playing During the Plague
Shakespeare himself dealt with theaters going dark during the Bubonic Plague, which wiped out one-third of England’s population. Much like today, 16th-century officials placed restrictions on theater performances out of fear that they would become hotbeds of infection, closing them down once infection rates reached a certain level. Some scholars have suggested that the ensuing downtime forced Shakespeare and his King’s Men to hit up the royal court hard, providing a spark of urgency that resulted in some of his best work, like Macbeth and King Lear, to name a few.
The Plague eventually died out, which experts generally attribute to strict quarantines and people living in greater isolation combined with some evolutionary kinks of the disease itself. Whether it was from private performances with limited audiences, or simply enduring periods of darkness and scraping by, theater artists the world over kept the spirit of performance alive, and the art form only grew richer in variety and perspective as history marched onward.
Spanish Flu Politics
By 1918, at the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic, theater and vaudeville had grown into the predominant forms of entertainment in a pre-television, pre-talking picture world, so much so that shuttering theaters was akin to Netflix or Disney deciding to shut down. It may shock you to find out that here in America, the issue of briefly shutting down the leisure economy to recover from a ravaging, untreatable virus became a political issue.
Major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles took hard stances and shuttered everything, with Hollywood vowing to not make any more films until the pandemic had subsided. In New York and San Francisco, where the theater economy was big business, the issue became more politicized. Less cautious approaches were tried, like keeping Broadway open but staggering curtain times to avoid overcrowding and putting more resources into public health and isolation of infected citizens.
New York’s bold approach netted them a lower death rate than any other Eastern city and may have saved their economy during the crisis, but the death tolls were still staggering. By October 1918, worldwide fatalities had mushroomed to 50-100 million, and the US had seen 670,000 deaths in just 10 months. No matter how you sliced it, the situation looked grim.
Saved by the… Radio?!
It’s no surprise then that at the same time an entirely new form of theater was beginning to take shape, over the newly minted airwaves of radio, one that would take advantage of modern technology and sidestep all the politics of gathering in large groups. Like a bolt from the blue, the newfangled “radio drama” enraptured a stir-crazy nation, and by the 1920s became the new king of entertainment. By the 1940s, we had a flu vaccine and told that virus to hit the bricks, pallie!
Radio dramas remained wildly popular up into the 1960s, and their cultural influence may have peaked in 1938 during Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio drama, which enraptured a paranoid, war-addled populace and caused brief mass hysteria when some Americans took the idea of a Martian invasion quite literally. It’s reassuring to know that we have learned from that mistake and don’t just believe anything we hear anymore, especially about alien invasions.
But that’s not the point. The point is theater not only survived through this troubling age, but gave us one of the most prolific ages of American plays ever seen, giving us Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, to name a few.
Radio plays fell out of favor for a while but experienced a renaissance of sorts at turn of the century thanks to the advent of the podcast. They are now hip-deep in a second renaissance thanks to Covid-19, and many theaters are returning to the old-fashioned fireside drama to sustain their patrons, but of course, this time bringing much more technology to bear.
Online Zoom-style performances have found a growing niche in the pandemic as well, and as we continue to master the format they will provide an effective stopgap. All these developments conspire to show us that the spirit of theater is still alive and kicking. The lights and glamour of performance may have been considerably dimmed, but they haven’t gone out.
Past is Prologue
We as a species will always find a way to tell each other our stories. Theater will burn on like an eternal flame, and although it can’t quite illuminate the entire passage at the moment, it will find its way nonetheless. Nothing can stop our evolutionary urge to transmit experiences and search for the truth behind those experiences. Throughout centuries of strife, when theater has had its back to the wall, it has bounced back even stronger and responded with an unprecedented outpouring of creativity, adaptability, and grace.
Broadway may have gone dark, but as that sandaled weirdo Plato once ruminated, we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light. Everyone stay safe and remember we’re all waiting in the wings together.
Adam Harrell is a playwright, author, librettist, and improviser. He lives and works in Portland, OR, which is not on fire. View his work at NPX (https://newplayexchange.org/users/7560/adam-harrell).