AMERICAN THEATRE: “What was it like,” my student asked me from her neat Zoom square, “getting onstage at the end of Fairview?”
Her question gave me a fleeting twinge of remorse, as well as pause. I moved from New York a year prior, right before the pandemic hit, and I missed live theatre every day. I knew there was no way to describe the impact of standing onstage while the character Keisha spoke to people of color in the audience, my eyes trying to blink the bright lights away.
1 comment:
This article really hits at a fundamental difficulty when it comes to teaching theater in class. We can read plays and even watch videos of staging’s but the way a play is intended to be experienced, for the most part, is live and in person as part of an audience. There is no good way to replicate that in a classroom, especially with newer works that can only be seen in one part of the world. However, even if reading the play in class does not offer the intended audience experience, it can offer a lot from the academic perspective that may not be available if you just watched the play. After all, most people who are reading plays in classrooms are not just trying to enjoy it, but they are trying to learn from it. They want to study the craft of the playwright and that is not easy to do from a viewing. As the article points out, when reading a play you can pause, go back over a line, and really ruminate on a stage direction.
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