In May 2020, I got a cold email from an Off-Broadway theater. It was an offer to assistant direct a new play that I was really excited about. The play was scheduled to go up in October 2020 — which, at the time, was when the optimists among us expected things in the theater industry to get better. I jumped on board, participating in a flurry of conceptual discussions and design meetings. As hard as the summer of 2020 was, at least I had something to look forward to. And then of course, October came and went. Radio silence. By then I’d had so many artistic opportunities promised to me and then retracted it felt impossible to trust anyone’s word.
I remember a call with my 18-year-old cousin from around this time. She was coming to terms with the reality that her college experience would not be what she had dreamed of. “I too believed that college would be the best four years of my life,” I told her. “And then suddenly, my dad died four months into my freshman year. College turned out to be the most difficult time of my life.” What I meant was, her experience was not unique to the pandemic. No one is promised anything, and the universe owes us nothing. To believe that we are entitled to the things we expect is hubris. This has always been true; the pandemic just threw it in our faces. The collective anguish I saw all around me in 2020 bore an unsettling resemblance to the private grief with which I was all too familiar.
A full year and a half after that first cold email, the new play had its first rehearsal. We hadn’t even finished table work when Omicron cases skyrocketed in New York. To show up to work was to knowingly risk exposure, and to risk exposure was to endanger your loved ones. My roommate was immunocompromised and I felt selfish for continuing to work when doing so heightened her risk, but I also couldn’t bear to quit the project after waiting so long to do it. I was prepared to move out of my apartment the second someone tested positive and, when someone eventually did, a staff member from the theater let me camp out in her home.
On top of living out of a duffel bag and not knowing where I would sleep from one night to the next, there was the ever-present possibility that the show could get canceled at any moment. It costs a lot emotionally to work on a play. You have to put your heart on the line, first in front of your colleagues and then in a public forum. Normally, this toll is one we’re happy to pay because we expect to be rewarded with artistic and personal fulfillment. But to put your heart on the line and know it could all be for nothing? To face in a very real and immediate way that you’ve given your whole self to something that could suddenly be taken away from you? This is too much to bear.
No one is promised anything. The universe owes us nothing.
Before I had experienced my first post-Covid in-person rehearsal process, I was bewildered to see shows get canceled, institutions shut down, and leaders resign because of unresolvable conflict. How could near-identical stories unfold all across the country at theaters of all sizes? My own process luckily had no interpersonal conflict, but it did bring up intense anxiety and vulnerability. I came to understand the anger that erupts in theatrical processes nationwide as a symptom of grief. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when each of us will lose a project we love — or some precious part of the process — to Covid. To make theater post-reopening is to brace yourself for inevitable loss. Anger is the second phase of grief.
The distrust that emerges between artists and institutions stems from the many promises that theaters made and retracted, over and over again. Promises of opportunity, but also commitments to understand and address their legacies of racism, classism, ableism, and inequity. That the world can be systemically unjust on top of being so cosmically unjust feels like a cruel joke. (In the months after my father died, I flew into uncontrollable rage at microaggressions that I had previously grown desensitized to. I was not capable of suffering quotidian racism and sexism on top of my sadness.) But an institution is nothing more than a collection of individuals, all of whom are exhausted, overworked, underpaid, and have bought into the fallacy that their dedication to serving artists justifies the unacceptable working conditions they endure. And as they struggle to deliver on their promises, most of these individuals are buckling under their sense of coming short.
Even as Covid itself becomes easier to contain and work around, I feel the same grief I felt in the winter of Omicron. Ticket sales are down industry-wide, and there is no more pandemic emergency funding to help us make up the deficit. Theaters will be forced to prioritize short-term survival over long-term sustainability. Precarity will breed fear, and fear will breed resistance to change. Many individuals who are working toward institutional progress will be laid off before they can make any headway. We will all have to learn to live with the inevitability of unexpected sudden loss.
When my dad died, the father of the aforementioned cousin said to me, “It’s going to be a long year. Cut yourself a lot of slack.” I held onto that advice for dear life. It felt so good to resist the urge to put pressure on myself. I wonder what it might look like for all of us to collectively decide to show ourselves grace. To permit ourselves to make mistakes, and to be gentle when we do. Another piece of advice that’s stayed with me came from a college classmate: “Grief doesn’t get easier, but you do get better at managing it.” Nine years after my dad’s death, I know the pain of grief never subsides, but I have learned how to take care of myself when it crests: what music soothes me, when to be alone or reach for a loved one. I know how to cope with all that anger in ways that don’t cause harm. My wish for all of us is that, even if our collective grief never lessens, we learn in time how to manage it.
The work of the next few years is that of healing. I hope we rise to the challenge.
Author's Bio: The author can be found roller skating around Prospect Park, fermenting homemade kimchi, or singing Renaissance madrigals in their local community choir.
