Every once in a while, a 3Views Co-Editor will write a missive. When January’s latest Omicron-induced theater shutdown happened, we decided to pause alongside oh so many shows. The year prior (2021), we hit the ground running when we re-launched in October, and we gratefully used the pause to fundraise (donate here or here!), make a strategic plan, and took a look at the moment in which we found ourselves.
Back in November of last year, I watched a show at the theater I used to work at — the one I also grew up in because I’m from this town, where I first secretly held hands with a boy, where I directed for the first time — and felt instantly at home, so comfortable and happy that I had to remind myself that I didn’t work there anymore and no staff is a family. My body wouldn’t listen, very comfy in the seats, nestled next to my old work wife. We watched a play for which I advocated, relieved to finally live inside of it. We went the night after opening--knowing we wouldn’t see anyone we knew—and happily snuck up to the cast and crew afterward to surprise them. I returned again in mid-January of this year (2022) to watch another show chosen back in 2019, one I couldn’t find my own connection with, and my work wife and I watched what beyond-fantastic talent does with money and time. Afterward, we talked about how decisions might have gotten made, how we might make similar or different decisions, entering ourselves into the endless pinwheel of pandemic producing. We met a new starry-eyed staff member whom we caught falling in love with the place and smiled the (hidden, masked) smiles of those living inside the worn, warm, damaged body of a home, our (our?) theater.
Again and again as I return to the theater these days I feel (or know) I’m inside of decisions made in another time. I don’t know what decisions are best at this moment. I don’t think anyone does. We humans are slow to change and scared to change. My experience in that theater was that I lost time. It was simultaneously the year I was on staff, and we were going to produce those shows. And I was sixteen watching Eurydice next to my high school boyfriend. And I was twenty-seven watching Head of Passes, recently arrived for my new job from NYC. And I was thirty-four, relieved to not be recognized behind a mask.
Weeks earlier, I watched a preview of a play I dramaturged, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As sciatic pain ripped through my thigh, probably due to sitting too long during this pandemic, I listened to the audience laugh at jokes we had pumped full of life because honey they were DEAD. We--smart, talented, hard-working theater people--lovingly placed the jokes in their context and added painstaking rhythmic timing to create this much-hoped-for laughter. I respect this play: the craft, history, legend, themes, and talent it takes to rip into it. I’m proud of the work we made. I admire many staff members working through systemic challenges at the producing theater. I’m glad audiences seem to enjoy the show. But I was living inside someone’s decision made in 2019 perhaps based on brand recognition. Why sit through three hours of verbal abuse after all we’ve been through, as Omicron is statistically definitely spreading through these old people over the course of these three hours? At the top of our second preview, the director and I were basking in the high of the night before: we experienced that once-in-a-blue-moon theater HIGH on our first preview. Everything we devoted our expensive educations and child-bearing years to WAS WORTH IT FOR THIS FEELING. Then, during our second preview, right when the yelling onstage reached its pitch, the woman sitting next to us started crying and couldn’t stop. She was clearly having a PTSD reaction. I stopped typing notes. The director and I exchanged silent glances, simultaneously wondering if we should get up so she could leave. But it’s the theater, the actors are artfully screaming onstage in front of us, we can’t leave, but oh god she needs to leave, how do we allow for leaving in the theater. She left as soon as intermission began.
In that moment, it was 1962, Virginia Woolf shocking audiences all over again and causing a sensation. It was 2022, women in fancy dresses in the bathroom during intermission saying they didn’t remember the movie being this cruel. It was 2019, someone innocently choosing a play they like, and not dreaming of that woman crying or of the person cheering as the actress gets choked or of the person roaring with laughter, sickness, or trauma (or all three) shaking off their body with relief.
Despite this raw, blind, earnest, bambi-legged theater moment, I love making theater, and I love theater people, and I can’t fall out of love with any of it, though I wish I could. My grandma, who introduced me to theater when I was five, just became eligible for hospice. Lately, the only thing that guarantees a good time for us is singing show tunes or watching old musicals. I haven’t revisited The Sound of Music or My Fair Lady as anything other than references to other works since I was a kid. The joy and innocence with which she watches these films allow me to remove my critical brain and enjoy it with her. Or cry. Depending on how I’m doing that day. Time gets super blurry. Yesterday she said, “isn’t it funny that we both like these songs? You and me?” I remind her that it’s really her fault that I like these songs, that she opened the door to my life for me.
I’m in one long goodbye to my life as I knew it. I know I’m not alone in this. When the pandemic started, I talked to dramaturgs I admired who left the field. I wanted to know if they missed theater. None of them did. But all of them said yes to their theater friends’ projects or stayed connected to their people in some way. 3Views is a blessing because it keeps me talking to artists who make life crackle and spark. At some point, this run may also end due to systemic underfunding. And yet on we rage. I wonder what my last project will be--if I already made it. I don’t know who I am without theater, but I can’t participate in it as is. So many of us can’t. And I’m proud of us for leaving, as sad as we are, as terrible as it is to weather this loss of identity. Theater is the practice of dying and creating again and again. On my good days, I remember this and recommit to practicing. 3Views is my small attempt to create a field that I want to work in.
The first party I went to in the glorious pre-Delta moment was in a friend’s apartment in the East Village that he’d been making theater out of during the whole pandemic. I texted excessively, annoyingly, inquiring about the vaccination status of the guests on my walk over. Then once inside, everything felt bizarrely and delightfully normal. On the way home, my skin on fire with sexy NYC summer energy; I knew exactly where I was as I walked east to west across various street parties exploding out of each building en route to my best friend’s apartment that she won through a grant for artists who were forced to leave NYC due to financial instability. I was also time traveling through my nine years in the city, my second home, but firmly rooted in summer 2021, “hot vax summer.” Time continued to move forward, tangy with much-desired specificity: shows went up, work kicked into full gear, this website relaunched, I had theater work. It became too much, exhaustion returned. Omicron arrived, and terror mixed with relief with another slow down. Now I send a lot of snail emojis. I am a high-performing drag. It’s February, but I lose track of what month it is since I live in California and it’s always about 60 degrees. I imagine time will cleave again when my grandma dies. Sometimes I get dramatic and imagine I’ll officially leave theater when she dies.
She told me how easy it was to take the train from Brooklyn to see a show when she was a teenager, how cheap and fun.
What will these spaces that represent homes to so many of us become after our institutions change or fall? One of my favorite sensations I experience as I sit in theater is how time overlaps: you now, intermingling with the world of the play, clocking the flick of hair of the person next to you, dreaming of what you will eat as a late-night snack. A song cue plays, bringing you a memory or sensation. A phrase makes you laugh or cry, igniting another part of your brain. Recently, sitting in those plush collapsing chairs, I felt stuck. Sitting backward in time, lodged, feeling almost the opposite of the sensation I love most as a theater maker/audience member: that of letting go. The theater is one of the only places I release my running thoughts, none of it matters, I’m here for now. Or rather, if all goes well, I’m escaping.
