Day 518…
And just like that, I’m home.
After six weeks of intense, stressful, rewarding, maddening, enjoyable, never-ending, satisfying, and taxing work, I am back on the couch. I’ve slept well these last two nights. I’ve eaten healthily and on a schedule that makes sense. I’ve been able to take a long walk each day and meet up with friends.
The last two weeks of the gig I was working on were particularly challenging. During that time, I put five pounds back on that I had been able to take off this past year. Most days, after arriving early in the morning, our first meal break wasn’t until 3pm. Often there were many hours in a row without so much as a bathroom break, so I subsisted on the packaged cereal bars that were piled up on trays in the green room. During the early days of rehearsals I supplemented the food we were given with fresh vegetables and other things, but during those last crazy days I just ate whatever was there in front of me regardless of what it was. I was getting so little sleep that I was somewhat nauseous most of the time and could never decide whether it felt better to eat or not to eat.
The whole span of the project was only six weeks from beginning to end but going from the self-constructed schedule I had been on for well over a year right back into the demands of an intensive multi-million-dollar production seemingly overnight, was a very jarring sensation. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to be there doing it. Michael and I certainly needed the money and, more than that, I craved being back in the driver’s seat for something that big and that demanding. It’s what I have done for much of my career. Add to that, the fantastic people that I was surrounded with, onstage and off, and there is far more that was genuinely positive about the experience than there was negative. The negative, however, was most certainly there.
A couple of days ago, Simone Biles, a US Olympic gymnast announced that she was going to pull out of the finals for vault and uneven bars at the Tokyo games. She described a feeling called “the twisties” where gymnasts lose track of their orientation while flipping through the air. Biles is already a gold medal-winner from the summer games in Rio in 2016. A gold in this year’s Olympics would have made her the most decorated gymnast in history. She has been working towards that goal for most of her life - training 20-32 hours a week since she was 15. She was homeschooled to allow her more time to practice. When she announced that she was not going to compete, she said that she felt that continuing on while feeling as she did would be dangerous. So, she stopped.
The bible, of course, has an apropos quote for exactly this. There are countless translations of it but essentially it boils down to this: what will it profit a person to gain the whole world, but in the process lose their soul. Or their mental well-being. Or their life.
Yesterday was a beautiful day here in New York. After being away for so long, I walked down Broadway into Times Square and then kept going down into Chelsea.
Times Square is often referred to as the crossroads of the world. It was said that if you stood on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway long enough, you would eventually see everyone you had ever known pass by. Between the theatre district and the movie theatres and the high-rise office towers, it really did seem like the center of the universe.
Walking through it yesterday, there were crowds of people out and about. The bright red Elmos and other costumed characters were out in force competing for space with the topless women in painted clothes and the Naked Cowboy. It was full of life. The buildings all around the Square, though, are still largely empty. The theatres are dark. Walking through there felt like snorkeling over bleached-out coral. There is plenty of activity in the water with kids and their parents swimming around. There are some silver fish, maybe, but the schools of diverse colorful ones are nowhere to be seen. The swimmers may not even remember what the dead white coral below them once was.
Mayor DeBlasio issued a statement this morning strongly recommending that vaccinated New Yorkers wear masks indoors. The rise of the delta variant and the ease with which it spreads through the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike poses a major threat to the continued progress of our re-opening. Big outdoor gatherings in Provincetown over the July 4th weekend prompted a major outbreak of new cases. Nearly three quarters of those people were fully vaccinated. Five of them ended up in the hospital and only one those five people hadn’t gotten the vaccine. The CDC, citing that data, updated its guidelines to say that even fully vaccinated people should continue to wear masks indoors in areas with high infection rates. DeBlasio’s announcement was a result of that but he stopped short of issuing a mandate. He, along with everyone else, is still hoping that we are nearing the end of the crisis.
I don’t think that we’re through this. I don’t really see yet where or how all the different streams come together. As Broadway resolutely pushes forward with its plans to reopen over the next few months, where are those audiences going to come from? To lure ticket buyers in, Disney has announced that there will be no per-ticket service charges on Ticketmaster. Nonetheless, after the initial weeks of performances, there are massive numbers of seats available. Same for Wicked. If you want tickets for Hamilton, there are plenty of those as well. For over $1300 each you can pretty much get as many as you want. That’s not an exaggerated price either, that’s what I found when I chose a random date in October on their website. Take the fears of the delta variant combine them with the astronomical ticket prices and then add the fact that there are no tourists, and it seems like you don’t really have a very good recipe for success.
Over the course of the pandemic, many of us received unemployment plus a federal weekly stimulus check. Between Michael and I, we could just pay our living expenses from that each month. Why couldn’t that continue? The concept of Universal Basic Income is one that has floated around for some time. There are instances of it happening in ancient Rome under the emperor Trajan. Sir Thomas Moore wrote about it in his Utopia in 1516. Bertrand Russell argued for it in the 50’s and 60’s. Why not? We are already heading towards an automated society. Every time an invention comes along like driverless cars, tens of thousands of people potentially lose their jobs. We are eventually not going to need to work.
I think that we were heading towards a seismic change in our society before COVID struck. Now that it’s here, I think that we may see some of those changes much sooner than we would have otherwise. What is going to draw all those workers back into midtown Manhattan? Most of the highly paid white-collar jobs will continue remotely because it has been demonstrated that they can. The commercial real estate market in Manhattan, along with those in every other major city, are going to find themselves in the same position as Kodak and Royal Typewriters did - obsolete. Those buildings are going to need to be repurposed.
Between one or two giant empty skyscrapers and universal income, New York City’s homeless population could be taken care of. Some jobs would continue but eventually, if you follow the stream here, there would be very few of them left. Robotic farming already exists. A driverless truck doesn’t seem that far off. Another robot could unload the truck and stock the shelves of the supermarket. We already have self-checkout, or we can order from home. There are delivery robots being tested in cities around the planet. Amazon is working to fill our skies with delivery drones. It all sounds like science fiction, but the basis for a fully automated lifestyle is already there.
We are, according to many economic theorists, in late-stage Capitalism. It can only go so far until the survival of the fittest ends up with a single winner. What follows? Do we collapse and start over again?
Simone Biles chose to step out of the game to take care of herself. Whatever it was that she thought her goal was, was not as important to her as her mental health and continued physical well-being is. Very few of us are asked to make the kind of sacrifices and put in the amount of work that she has done over the span of her short life. None of us, as a result, are really in any position to judge her actions. Did she let down her team or did she help them by recognizing that she could very well be a liability to them given how she was feeling. At the end of the day, it is just a competition. What do you gain by having the most medals or the most money, if you’ve lost everything else? How much physical discomfort or actual danger is too much?
The theatrical actors and stage managers union allows its workers to work ten out of twelve-hour days during the weeks of technical rehearsal leading up to a production’s first performance. They also allow the single day off to be waived prior to that performance. It’s a brutal slog to get through. As far as I know, we are the only country that does that. When I have worked overseas, there is always a day off and the days stay the same length - seven hours out of an eight-hour workday. They schedule in an extra day or two of tech rehearsals to compensate for not being able to work those absurdly long days. The show still gets done, people haven’t killed themselves and profit is made.
I used to wonder whether I should have gone into film and television production instead of theatre, but after this recent experience, I feel like I chose wisely. Film crews work like animals although, granted, they get paid far more than theatre people do and they usually have their weekends off. They work in short intense explosions of time and then move on to the next gig. They never get a run of anything, once it’s shot, it’s time to move on.
Having had these last many months of not feeling the toll of all that hard work, I wasn’t necessarily prepared for just what a price gets paid physically and mentally for working under those conditions. Several decades in a row of working that way and I had just gotten used to it. I recognized the feeling by the end, and I was incredulous that I had allowed myself to spend so much of my working life feel that way. Twisties, indeed.
I honestly cannot see what the future is going to bring. Just when I think I know what I want and what I’m going to do, something happens, and all my opinions and plans change. I don’t want to work a certain way, but then I get offered something and I think, why not it’s only a couple of weeks? There doesn’t seem to be enough information or rational thought out there yet, to really know what’s going to happen to our industry or what any of our parts in it are going to be. For the moment, I’m going to take things as they come and watch it all unfold.
It’s nice to be back on the couch. Michael is at the table working on something and the cat is curled up on the floor with his olive wood bowl.
For now, that will more than do.
Oh Richard you are just amazing at telling it like it is! And you size up so much of what I’m musing about in my life here, weighing what sacrifice is, what it can give us even if it looks like loss. Life is wildly dizzying if you just give yourself to the mad, fierce heady ride, and deeply profound if you stand back and can watch the flow for whatever time we can allow the dance to proceed without us. So grateful for your very inciteful musings❤️❤️❤️
Great post Richard on so many fronts. I learnt a lot! Twisties and late-capitalism are two things I’ve never heard of. The way you have woven these concepts into the fabric on your post is powerful and thought-provoking. Enjoy your well-earned rest.
You’ve probably heard that Australia has been taken over by the army! Not quite! But social and sensational media claims the vulnerable minds. Interesting times indeed. We are in week 6 of lockdown though not too bad given we can still do many things we enjoy safely.
Jx