Read on Twitter
Hey, so I spent part of the weekend thinking abut theater and if there are even any semi okay takeaways from this disaster year. (Short thread.)
One is that I've felt pushed to rethink questions of medium and genre in ways I think are productive. (And just for the record, me thinking productively is a really crap silver lining for unemployment and devastating loss.)
The primacy of streaming, the integration of prerecorded and live and the presence of live actors in VR environments are all interventions that really challenge our notion of what we think of as theater and that's mostly really good. Theater doesn't benefit from getting calcified
Theater used to be at the forefront of technological change and we've completely ceded that, which is in some ways okay. We all get enough screens. But poor theater isn't the only kind of theater and it's great to see experimentation with new tools.
And I don't know if this relates to formal change, but a lot of what I see seems to embrace hybridity in terms of genre, like work that's at the intersection of drama and game or comedy or lecture or spectacle or pageant or be-in etc. We're not asking shows to be just one thing.
Also, it sucks that theaters can't responsibly be theaters right now, but it's exciting to see some of them repurposed as food banks or service centers for protestors or what have you.
Maybe going forth we can rethink how these spaces as spaces can be open and available to the community, even the community that can't or won't necessarily want to come to a show.
I'm not especially Pollyanna about any of this. It's been unrelievedly awful for entertainment workers. But it is also time to rethink some of the ways theater has become stuck and hope that going forward we take some of this innovation and accessibility with us. Fin.
