Wednesday, April 29, 2020
If You Build It, Will They Come?
AMERICAN THEATRE: Clutching our phones containing our e-tickets and travel affidavits, we join the outdoor queue of face-masked theatregoers. We no longer bunch up in a jumbled line/mob and push toward the door. We wait distantly and impatiently six feet behind the preceding patron until we approach the motion-sensor door. We place our clear plastic purses on the security table, pass through the metal detector, smile at the thermal camera, and step up to the hand sanitizer.
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I may be wrong, but a lot of articles and perspectives like this seem overblown. Will the coronavirus change how we think, how we live, and how we interact with eachother? Of course it will. Will those changes last in more than a marginal form for more than ten years? I find that notion kind of doubtful. When people say that the world is forever changed, that it will never go back to the way it was before, I'm always a little baffled. There is nothing new about a pandemic. The world has experienced pandemics and epidemics repeatedly for thousands of years. Epidemics happen frequently, and the last pandemic was only 100 years ago. Yes, it changed a lot of things. As noted in the article, new ventilation measures became commonplace in theaters and elsewhere. But people returned to theatres after the pandemic was over. People sat in chairs right next to each other, just like they did before, and they kept doing so for 100 years, until the onset of this pandemic. I've yet to be convinced that this is any different. There will be changes, regulations for better ventilation and more easily cleaned materials. Hand sanitizer will proliferate. But people say that conventions, movies, sports, events, theatre will never be the way they were before, that it will destroy whole industries, and I just don't see it. Human beings are social creatures, and gathering is what we do. Crises can put a hold on those gatherings, necessitate a pause. I think the assumptiont that we won't gather again, as we have before, however, is absurd.
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