THEATRE SEASONS IN THE AGE OF COVID-19 BY RUTH PE PALILEO, COLLEGE OF SOUTHERN NEVADA
Greetings from Las Vegas where, up until the protests of George Floyd’s death began on May 30, the Strip has been shut down. No scantily clad street performers, no spectacular jets of water dancing to Pavarotti, and no theatre. Faced with this and other similar scenarios, directors are probably wondering what in our directing toolkits could possibly handle a pandemic. How about: (1) the ability to make lists, to organize ideas around a theme; (2) a sense of humor; and (3) hearts that seek to open up a text and share it with an audience. With these tools I came up with nearly thirty plays that we and our students could creatively engage with in the age of COVID-19: Plays about washing hands • Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Enough said. • Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar with the song “Trial Before Pilate” being disrupted by the singing of the ABC song to show how long Pilate should wash his hands. • Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful, which (spoiler alert) ends with a scene of hand washing. Plays that are already masked • Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, naturally. • Japanese Noh Theatre. Any Japanese Noh Theatre. • Commedia dell’arte. Any commedia dell’arte. Plays in which socially distant staging is built-in • Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs has Old Man and Old Woman sheltering in place together for about 100 years, but the play’s absurdist staging makes it easy for a director to keep the other 30 characters apart from each other. • Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Obvious, really. • Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The lovers and the faeries can easily run around after each other with six feet between them. Plays set in cars Think about it. You can put a windshield in front of the characters without breaking any theatrical illusion, and the audience will feel safer. • Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy. • Will Kern’s Hellcab. • Alas, if only Andrew Lloyd Webber had written Cars instead of Cats, he would’ve won the trifecta. Perhaps each individual engine in Starlight Express could wear its own face shield. Now that would be really safe and look really cool. Plays about nostalgia for non-essential businesses • Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias because it’s set in a beauty parlor. • Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile because it’s set in a cafe. • Roy Williams’s Sucker Punch because it’s set in a gym. Puppet plays The audience is more than six feet from the puppets. The puppets are more than six feet below the puppeteers. Puppets don’t breathe. Everybody can be wearing facemasks and gloves. Sometimes, the gloves are the puppets.
Plays about sheltering in place Post-quarantine, it will be cathartic to laugh or cry about the problems other people had being confined with those they love. These plays evoke both laughter and tears sometimes at the same moment. • Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, in which Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are confined to Hamm’s home. • Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, in which four people are trapped together in a Belfast working-class parlor-house while a workers’ strike ignites the city. • Vegas playwright Erica Griffin’s Kizzy in a Tizzy, in which Kizzy, imprisoned in her home by illness, enlists her girlfriend’s help in kidnapping the guy delivering their sandwiches. Plays that might be “too soon” • Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare, about the Bubonic plague. • Sarah Yuen and Jack Gilliat’s Echoes of Ebola. • Kevin Kerr’s In Unity, about the Spanish flu. Risky theatre in the age of COVID-19! • Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: An entire town’s water supply is contaminated with a microorganism and nobody listens to the doctor who proves it. I couldn’t sit through rehearsals or performances of that without squirming right now. • Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys: The racially charged scene in which one character spits into another’s face would already be shocking to those with heightened droplet awareness (HDA). But after George Floyd? No way. • David Mamet’s Romance with the judge sneezing every few minutes. See previous entry re: HDA. Re-imagined Beckett (pending permission from the Beckett estate) • Not I : Lisa Dwan revisits her signature role as Mouth but wearing a medical mask designed by Ford Motor Company. • Come & Go : Three women sit close together on a park bench and whisper in each other’s ears. What director would dare put actors at such risk? But what if we put Flo, Vi, and Ru on three separate benches? • Breath : With pre-show assurances that no-one will be in danger of contracting a respiratory disease from the performance because the breath is a pre-recorded sound, the audience looks at the stage one person at a time. As we might remind our students and ourselves, there have always been plagues and there have always been plays. In the critical time when Ebola cases were diminishing in Sierra Leone, UNICEF turned to theatre to help stop resurgence of the disease. Susan Glaspell and her Provincetown Players survived the Spanish flu to premiere awardwinning plays by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Eugene O’Neill, and Glaspell herself. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in the year after the Bubonic plague shut down London for fourteen months. Hence the line, “A plague on both your houses.” Though these lists are tongue-in-cheek, I intend the idea to be a little contagious and perhaps a creative exercise for students. Go on—jot down a few seasons of your own!
FALL 2020 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION
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