Zoom Theatre May Have Left Us Some Important Gifts. Don’t Miss the Rare Opportunity That’s Arriving.
We can hardly contain ourselves with the glee that stems from the idea that our current way of life may possibly be coming to an end… or at least a kind of optimistic pause
In the meantime, those of us who make plays. films, musicals, operas, ballets, etc. etc. find ourselves stuck in the same boat: not 100% seaworthy, overcrowded, and possibly not even sailing in one discernable direction.
The Most Basic Questions:
Will Zoom Theatre continue even after we’ve all stopped needing to construct approximated lives via our laptops?
When will theatre lovers, for example, not hesitate for one moment when lining up to purchase tickets for shows that pack us into houses with the cool efficiency of one of our major commercial airlines?
Will the type of work that audiences clamor for have changed in any fundamental way as a direct result of a steady diet of talking heads in screens?
And has more than a year of making theatre happen within the narrow confines of the Zoom Box somehow helped us all to see some of the ways in which the traditional rules of how theatre gets made and who gets to make it don’t necessarily need to be renewed without question?
What Have We Learned? Surely a lot. No?
Let’s be sure there’s nothing we’d like to carry with us into the future, a future that’s anything but certain for the performing arts.
Here’s the thing. If you were paying close attention over this past year or so, you probably noticed some important changes to the type of work being done as well as the balance of power among the collaborators These shifts may eventually prove to have been tectonic but they’ve so far kept a low profile.
Things seem to have shifted, in most cases, in order to accomodate Zoom meetings as a replacement for live theatre.
Audiences everywhere have spent the past 12 months at least activating and engaging their own powers of imagination to take in new plays that ordinarily would have been staged but instead were presented exclusively through the reading aloud of the dialogue. Full stop.
The Economics of Theatre Reverberate Through Every Aspect of the Ways We Engage with New Work.
I used to rant and rave about how readings — as a kind of currency running running through the circulatory system of the American Theatre body politic — threatened to ruin an entire generation of playwrights. How so? (So dramatic, Roland.)
Long before CoViD, I noticed more and more of our playwrights spending more and more of their time chasing down reading upon reading upon reading and hardly ever spending time in rehearsal. Writers whose experience of writing a new play would almost always consist largely of many many public readings of that work could be observed to be subtly and no-doubt unconsciously writing more and more work that would come across strongly in a reading. Those would be plays where 99% of the interesting stuff is conveyed through dialogue and you’re going to have to look long and hard to find one example of deep character insight conveyed through stage direction.
Think about it. If I am sitting down to revise my play in anticipation of a somewhat fancy public reading with fabulous actors and an elite audience of intellectual theatre-lovers, chances are I’m going to devote my obsessive powers of revision to the thrilling flourishes of dialogue over compelling physical storytelling.
Some Stories Just Need to Be Sung.
Now, think about what sorts of stories lend themselves to presentation in a bunch of Zoom boxes on your computer screen. Let’s consider a few characteristics we might expect to see in these scripts:
Moments of great dramatic tension and resolution are more likely to be expressed in dialogue and theatrical invention in the realm of physical space and visual storytelling will be more muted.
Complex webs of dialogue involving a relatively large group of characters (more than 6) would be avoided. (Imagine a production of Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead on Zoom.)
Monologue would be favored because it’s really the only kind of speech in a play for which Zoom demands no compromise in the performance. It’s impossible for two actors to have eye contact in a scene performed via Zoom and so any eye contact we “see” in a Zoom-staged scene has been faked by the actors.
Anything with a choral effect of any kind — be it musical or play — will not work in a Zoom presentation due to the unavoidable delay built into the architecture of WiFi and headphones and one cast member reading in Seattle to another in Jersey City.
So, things must have shifted without anyone really acknowledging or seeing it. We spent a year or more putting certain types of plays, certain styles of theatrical discourse on the back burner.
And finally, with so many monologues being performed, in so many cases, by the writers themselves, we’ve started to view playwrights as having a bit more currency than they used to.
Christine Toy Johnson performs her own piece LIVING WHILE ASIAN at last month’s Some1Speaking, a program of Hear Me Out Monologues.
In fact, I am happy to report that in our monthly monologue showcase called Some1Speaking, I slowly but surely began to notice more and more authors willing to unselfconsciously offer up their performance of characters they understood better than anyone. And that gave me great joy.
Present a reading in a black box and you have all the fixed costs usually associated with real estate.
Present a reading on Zoom and all those physical costs of doing business evaporate.
This doesn’t necessarily simply mean that now, with life still largely taking place on our screens, we’re enjoying more and more readings of intimate shows.
Nor does it necessarily mean that audiences are going to slowly begin to accept a reading and a production as interchangeable and of no significant qualitative difference. (Still I do hear such arguments on a regular basis.)
The ascent of Zoom as our de facto platform for new work has made it much easier for the producer with bold vision and not a lot of money to attract artists and their audiences to the work and has relegated the more traditional brick and mortar producer somewhat to the sidelines.
In fact, there are whole tributaries in our American Theatre landscape of professionals who have spent these entire 12 months telling themselves this story: Reading plays online in videoconference boxes is not (nor will it ever be) real theatre.
Therefore all the folks who’ve been experimenting with shared screens and muted performers and filters and echoes and a dead silent audience, well in some people’s eyes, we who stoop to drama in Zoom, we’re just killing time. Having some fun until real theatre with hundreds of humans packed into houses like sardines makes its definitive comeback and we can all pretend none of this ever happened.
That is a sentiment more common than you might imagine. But if I know one thing I know this: It is built of straw and spit and furious wishful thinking and the first CoViD wind to come along will blow this house down down down.
Our job as dramatists now, it seems to me, will be to scan the horizon for any “place” (actual or virtual) where our particular drama might possibly flourish and thrive. In doing this, once again, the people who write the plays will be in the position of pioneers, something we haven’t really seen in this world in a very very long time.
I hope we’re able to milk this historical moment for all it’s worth!
Join me at: Some1Speaking, Wednesday Gathering or in any one of my Spring/Summer 2021 workshops for creatives.
Originally published at https://www.extracriticum.com.
