Theatre Is Dead. Long Live the Theatre.

4 min readJul 29, 2020

July 29, 2020, 12:02 am
Filed under: American, theatre | Tags: American, American theatre, Beef and Boards, coronavirus, Covid 19, Epidaurus, Greece, New Zealand, the death of theatre, The Persians, theater, theatre, United States of Covid, zombification

For the last few months, I have been trying to grapple with the loss of my primary art form. When theatres shut down back in March, it was painful but we all hoped it was temporary — just a little disruption in our theatre lives. As time has worn on, and the virus has gotten worse here in the US than it was when they shut the theatres down (Florida reported 12,000 cases this week, which is twice what New York had back in April at the height of things.) it has become increasingly clear that theatre won’t be back any time soon. The art and business that we knew and loved is dead. There’s a small chance of zombification but theatre as we knew it is probably over.

The actually real theatre folks over at Beef and Boards may be giving their dystopic socially distanced dinner theatre a shot there in Indiana, but not many are clamoring to follow their very disturbing example. Institutions are crumbling ( maybe this is good?) smaller venues are closing and many a former New York theatre maker has moved back to the place they came from. As unemployment benefits expire, the small inner tube that was keeping many a theatre person afloat is floating away with their future, hopes and dreams. Without some support, the American Theatre, which was already struggling, will start to lose its limbs and then fall apart entirely.

Maybe it will reassemble into something more equitable and beautiful but it is falling apart, no question. And despite much more substantive support, I wondered, too, if the UK theatre was also in decline. I wondered if theatre was dying all over the world.

And then, I tuned in to the live-streamed production of The Persians at the Epidaurus Theatre in Greece. I assumed we’d be watching performers in an empty theatre, doing their work for the cameras — but when I opened the link, half an hour before the show, the camera revealed an audience settling in, making their way to their seats, the way an audience does. I found myself weeping at the sight. An audience! There’s an audience! I had convinced myself we’d never see their like again and there was a giant crowd assembling to watch a play. There went the President of Greece and her entourage to go and sit in the front rows! They’ve brought the country together for this!

And here was the world, on the internet, gathering to watch an ancient play in an ancient theatre — and there, in the seats, were the people who lived there. (I’m assuming the majority of the people in the audience were Greek, since no one’s really traveling these days.) It was all very moving, even before the play began.

It was the sight of Theatre, alive and well and vibrant in a place where it has thrived for over two thousand years. Theatre may be dead here in the United States (along with over 140,000 people who might still be with us if we’d handled this crisis with anything like the skill of the people of Greece — or New Zealand where they are currently resuming live performances again) but in other parts of the world, theatre is bringing people together and demonstrating its extraordinary power.

Theatre may be dead for us here but it lives elsewhere and I have to hope it will live for us again one day. It won’t be any time soon, except for at, the actually real and not a satire, Beef and Boards, but one day we might all sit in a room together and cheer at an expression of our national pride the way the Greeks did during The Persians. I don’t know what will make us feel proud in that far away future — but I have to hope we will be proud of something, If only our survival of this moment, this administration, this mess. We will have theatre in the future and we might feel pride again, too.

Not now. We’ve let our theatres die alongside so many humans — but theatre will rise, I hope. It lives and thrives elsewhere. We can look to those places for inspiration. Long live the Theatre.