The Pittsburgh Tatler: How do you move from tragedy to work? Saturday was also the closing night of the limited-run engagement of the Tel-Aviv theater company Hanut31’s co-production of Larger than Life with our own Bricolage Production Company. I had tickets to the show; I anticipated that they would cancel in light of the massacre in Squirrel Hill. But following the long tradition of theater companies since time immemorial, the show went on.
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I think it is so incredibly important that Bricolage did not cancel the final performance of this Israeli theater company’s engagement here in Pittsburgh, despite it being the same day tragedy struck Pittsburgh and the Jewish community. I wholeheartedly stand with the company’s director. It is only in lifting our voices and living our lives that we show we refuse to be silenced. There is nothing wrong with taking a break, taking a breath, taking whatever time you need before you can stand up and do this. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with standing up again before you are fully healed. Continuing on is not pretending this did not happen, it is not forgetting this has happened. It is a way of purposefully pushing back with dignity. Art brings us together, it shares viewpoints and culture that may lie divided between us without artistic media as a platform for creative cross pollination. Cancelling this final production would have also removed these voices from Pittsburgh, on a day where voices like these needed to be heard.
There were many immediate responses to this past weekend within the theatre community, even here at CMU. Work that was supposed to take place needed to stop, and the call to do so was the right one. In this circumstance, however, I agree that cancelling this final performance of this particular show would have caused the silencing of voices that needed to be heard, especially in that moment. I do hope, however, that in choosing to go on that night, they took into consideration the health and safety of the people not only in the show, but necessary in order to make the show happen: the Stage Manager, the crew, front of house, the building manager, etc. Everyone processes grief in different ways, and I hope that they allowed for anyone who needed to to say "I'm not okay and can't do this right now." In tandem with another article up this week (The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "A moment of silence after horrific tragedy"), I think that now more than ever it is important to understand how healing the arts can be in times of crisis. Nothing can ever make it go away, but the arts, and theatre especially, can comfort people and provide a safe space for catharsis to occur.
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