Friday, January 07, 2022
How the Pandemic Changed Theater
yalereview.org: In 2019, Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop was the first musical by a Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play dramatizes the inner life of a queer Black musical-theater writer named Usher, who works as an usher at a Broadway theater and is struggling to write his own metafictional musical. The other cast members personify his “Thoughts” as he wrestles with his dismal job, his creative ambitions, and his alternatingly loving and homophobic family.
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I think the changes to the theater industry are more nuanced than this article claims, especially looking back on the complete arc of the pandemic. In many ways, the highest budget theater in this country created by rich Broadway producers faced absolutely no pressure to change or adapt. They closed their doors and waited until they were able to open them again unchanged because they had the ability to wait, despite the financial hardship put on designers and performers lying lower on the pyramid than producers. However, as the article outlined there have been massive changes to theater at the regional and community/educational levels. Since Broadway sets the standard of American theater, all the adaptations made feel temporary until shows can return to the classic, classist structure that Broadway perpetrates. I hope that smaller theaters keep the accessible changes they've made in an effort to get more people interested because the system we had before shouldn’t be the goal that we aim to return to.
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