Post 63 - May 13, 2020
Day 63…
On Tuesday, the Broadway League announced that the general shut down of theatres would continue into September.
That’s four months from now.
The Broadway League is the national trade association made up of producers, presenters, general managers as well as suppliers of theatrical goods and services throughout North America.
This doesn’t mean that Broadway and Touring theatre is necessarily coming back in September, it just means that the date for which people can get refunds for tickets already bought has been extended from June to September.
Honestly, none of the producers I have talked with these few weeks from all over the world really feel that theatre will be able to resume until social distancing is over.
The League is extending the dates in a way that allows everybody to deal with the refunding and rescheduling of tickets in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them.
Even without the possibility of this extending beyond September, four months is already a rough number to process.
Will theatre ever recover?
Will we ever see a show again?
Please.
Theatre, especially Broadway has always been on the verge of total annihilation.
In 1938, Kaufman and Hart wrote a play about the rise and decline of a theatre in NY entitled the Fabulous Invalid.
Broadway has been nicknamed that ever since.
Broadway was never going to survive the movies.
Broadway was never going to survive the depression.
Broadway was never going to survive the decline of the Times Square area in the 60’s and ‘70’s.
Broadway was never going to survive 9/11.
Again, Please.
Apparently, a plague struck Athens, Greece in about 430 BCE.
There is not a lot of agreement among scholars as to what actually happened or, in fact, if it even happened. The only direct account of that plague that has survived the millennia comes from Thucydides.
According to him, it arrived at the same time that the long war between Athens and Sparta that many of us dimly remember studying in school, started.
The Greeks believed in the healing power of theatre.
Their poetry was sung or chanted.
During the years of this plague, a sanctuary to the healing god Asclepius was built next to the Theatre of Dionysus on the Acropolis - the remains of which are still there.
There are countless references to plague and contagion throughout the Greek plays that remain from that period.
Bernard Knox, a classicist and author, makes the case that the broad setting of the Theban plague and details in the text of OEDIPUS THE KING do not make sense unless you take into account that Sophocles composed it in light of or in response to the Athenian plague.
There doesn’t appear anything that says whether or not theatres closed during that time but interestingly, Thucydides says that “nothing afflicted the Athenians or impaired their strength more” (than the plague). He describes panic, defiance, desperation and fatalism setting in. Many of the city’s inhabitants resisted quarantine and succumbed to lawlessness, indiscriminate spending and a loss of faith in their gods. “Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection; dying like sheep if they attended on one another; and this was the principal cause of mortality…”
Imagine that.
Stephen Greenblatt has a wonderful piece in the May 7 issue of the New Yorker about the bubonic plague and how it affected William Shakespeare.
Parish records indicate that Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford on April 26, 1564.
The first death from the plague that ultimately took a full fifth of the town’s population was recorded a few months later in the same register.
Throughout his life, the plague was a regular part of Shakespeare’s life.
The plague would come and go.
When it came, the government would track data from parishes and when those deaths reached a certain level, they would institute shut-down orders that sound a lot like what we are experiencing now.
All forms of mass assembly except for church going was banned.
They believed that it was impossible to get infected during the act of worship.
Imagine that.
Archery contests, feasts, and theatres were halted and closed.
Sometimes this lasted for months until the death rate came down to an acceptable level.
When it did, they were allowed to reopen.
A fresh outbreak of the plague in 1603-04 happened just as Elizabeth I died.
Her successor, James I of Scotland postponed the celebrations surrounding is coronation and delayed his entry into London until it passed.
A theatre historian named J. Leeds Barroll III, concludes that in the years between 1606 and 1610, because of contagion, theatres in London were probably not open for more than a combined total of nine months in total.
During those years Shakespeare wrote and produced, among others, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest…
References to plague occur throughout his work.
“A plague on both your houses.” Says Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.
“O Lord! He will hang upon him like a disease. He is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad.” Says Beatrice of Benedict in Much Ado.
People living in London during these times accepted the plague as a fact of life that they couldn’t do anything about.
When it came, people paused.
When it went, they started up again.
Theatres closed in the US in 1918 during the Spanish Flu.
Cases occurred largely among soldiers during the spring of that year.
As the soldiers returned to their homes from World War I, the contagion spread and by October of that year it had become bad enough that theatres and other venues that encouraged gatherings were closed.
Some theatres held out.
The Marx Brothers opened a new show called The Cinderella Girls in Grand Rapids, Michigan that October and the audience wore masks.
Whatever meager laughter there was, was muffled by the masks.
Local health regulations allowed theatre owners to sell only every other seat and to keep every other row empty.
There was no way, under those conditions, for the theatre to break even let alone turn a profit.
After a miserable week, the show moved to Benton Harbor, Michigan for an equally terrible week before possibly going to New York.
Whether or not it actually did a performance in New York, it closed almost immediately, and everyone went home.
Producers reported huge losses which made headlines across the country.
How would theatre survive?
Then the Flu passed and theatres, along with everything else, reopened.
And everybody forgot all about it.
Theatre will survive this.
Barrington Stage in the Berkshires plans on trying to do performances following the exact same sort of guidelines that the Marx Brothers’ theatre in Grand Rapids, Michigan tried to do in 1918.
They have released a very clear, very detailed explanation of how they plan to keep the audience safe.
I would be interested in seeing how they plan on keeping the performers, musicians and the crew safe.
Will it work? Who knows?
If they do, in fact, have a way for everyone behind the curtain to stay as safe as the audience, then I applaud the effort.
Broadway will be back.
September is more than twice as far away in our future as the beginning of the stay-at-home order is, in our past.
Meaning, we have what seems like a lot of time ahead of us.
Shakespeare used his down time during the plague in London to write some of the greatest plays ever written.
Look around and you will see that artists are finding countless new ways to create and tell their stories.
These new ways won’t ever replace theatre, but once theatre is back, they will add to the ways in which we communicate with each other.
Books didn’t replace theatre.
Film didn’t replace theatre.
TV didn’t replace theatre.
Virtual performances won’t replace theatre.
All of these ways of telling stories only add to the glorious library of stories that we as human beings have created.
We will always need to gather together and experience these stories.
Until we can do that in person, we are all tasked with figuring out how to make the best of what we have now.
In the broad timeline that is our lives, this is just a short pause.
The Fabulous Invalid isn’t doomed by a longshot.
As much as theatre has faced over the last several thousand years, it has ALWAYS come back.
And it will again.