NPR: Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater in New York, knows firsthand about the coronavirus. Eustis was hospitalized with COVID on March 10, and by the time he was released five days later, everything was shut down. "I came out into a world that had no theater, and it's a different world," he says.
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The past few months have changed the world. The pandemic has rewritten the ways in which people have been living their lives, and for the most part, it has not been a welcoming change. Having to be socially distanced from friends and family, working and studying remotely are amongst the few things that have been changed and they have all been difficult to incorporate.
With this new reality, theater, as an industry in particular, has been hit the hardest. Being an industry that thrives on human connections and social interactions, the industry has had to find different ways to continue their work and keep their employees employed. That is why it does not seem like a surprise to me that once this pandemic stops to exits, theater life will go back to the way it was pre- pandemic.
I think that the changes that have been incorporated are here to say, just because of the effort they require to be created in the first place.
Theater has been transformed because of COVID 19. People have had to find new ways to make theater whether online on zoom, radio shows, outside and distanced or other ways. However, I fundamentally think that nothing can replace or replicate live theater. I do think that zoom, audio, and other online formats have worth especially in reaching a more diverse global audience which is good especially as theater is so inaccessible to so many people because of cost. I think people are desperate for in-person theater. The lengths people go to in an attempt to create socially distanced safe performance are intense. While I think that online theater will stay in some format, once it is safe real in-person theater will re-emerge strongly. This will take a great deal of time, primarily waiting for the vaccine but I believe that audience members will wait patiently until it is safe. Until this time theater people are going to have to be innovative to both create their art and make money and right now doing theater online is one of the only options.
I think that theater closed at the right time. We were looking at a pretty white broadway season, and diversity in theater was at sort of a standstill. So this movement, this hiatus, it all came at the right time for big theaters like the Public and theater makers like us to re-evaluate why we do this and what we're trying to get across when we put on a show. One of my biggest fears when theater opens up again is that gatekeeping will be at an all time high and it will be harder for minorities, people who can't afford to live in cities like NYC full time, and for newcomers in the industries. I say this because I don't think that theater will come back in full force, and the people that will get hired first are the people who have been there for a while- and a majority of those people are white.
It is without a doubt that theater going forward is going to be reshaped and have to exist in a different sphere. Agreeing with Shahzad, I think theaters did close at the right time, but I also am a little skeptical as to what the future is going to look like because of how long our break has been. I also don’t know if I completely agree with the shift that Ybarra is anticipating (but that also might be for selfish reasons because I don’t want to think of theatre existing without all the design elements we utilize today), but I do like her concept of “experiencing a story together” instead of going to go see this story unfold in stage. I think that this NPR statement brings up a lot of strong points about how that the pandemic alone is not going to be the only thing shaping our theatrical experiences going forward, but we also have to think about what else has occurred during this theatrical hiatus that is going to take form when we get back to creating in the future. We are making strides towards knowing what inclusive theatre looks like, but we have not put it in practice, and it will be interesting to see if our conversations regarding anti-racist theatre will be able to take full form when we do get back to the stages again.
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