The theater community is reeling from Thursday’s announcement of a shutdown of Broadway theaters through April 12, a public health measure to protect audiences from possible coronavirus transmission. A blow to the heart — and to a vital economic engine of the city — it’s also a fairly unprecedented move, but for two days following the Sept. 11 attacks.
At this moment is it comforting, or not comforting, to think back to the bubonic plague sweeping through London in the early 1590s, and again, catastrophically, in 1603? Then, too, the authorities closed the theaters in order to stem the tide of infection.
The theater, I have always maintained, is composed of language, ether and actor. One commodity the theater has that film and television do not have is air. Air is that wonderful substance that denotes presence. It creates that magical backstage dust we inhale together. It is also the substance through which people cough, sneeze and infect one another.
Though theater artists are now understandably worried about the loss of livelihood for friends and colleagues, there is probably also a collective sigh of relief that our leadership put health over profit. The virus disproportionately affects the demographic over the age of 70; and theater audiences tend to skew older.
How can we be responsible to our audiences, and also go about our business, which involves bodies in proximity to one another? Though playwrights have always dreaded coughing patrons (it generally means we have induced boredom), now the cough is greeted with a different kind of dread. At the moment, most forward-thinking businesses are telling workers to work from home, to cancel all but essential travel and to have meetings by video.
But what if your business is presence?
During the 1590s plague, when the theaters were shut, William Shakespeare apparently chose to write poems instead. From his “Venus and Adonis,” penned while the playhouses were closed and writers were essentially quarantined, came this somewhat strange compliment: “The plague is banished by thy breath.” Should we theater people — writers, players and audiences alike — be staying home now and writing and reading poetry as a curative for the next month? Books, unlike group events, carry no germs.
My own children’s school has closed indefinitely, and I’ve been encouraging them to learn a new poetic form every day they are at home. So far, only my son has written a sonnet, an ode to candy. The final couplet: “Now I must eat you with a splendid grace/Remember how I put you in my solemn face.” But they all just looked at me with raised eyebrows when I mentioned a villanelle.
Thomas Dekker, a not very well-known Elizabethan playwright eclipsed by the competition, wrote an account of the plague year called “The Wonderfull Yeare, 1603” in which a seventh of London’s population died, despite shuttered theaters and quarantines. Dekker writes of the desolation and loneliness of that year, as well as of the triumphant reopening of the theaters, like “a merry epilogue to a dull play.”
“This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it,” he said.
Our theaters need to remain nimble to this public health crisis, and all the calm and extraordinary artistic directors I know are doing just that. Many theaters are, as my fellow playwright Lauren Gunderson has suggested, modifying cancellation and rebooking policies for the month of March in the hopes that sick audience members return to the theater when the crisis has calmed. The Women’s Project Theatre has canceled its performances and closed its office, but is guaranteeing payment to its artists for the duration of the closure.
Some artists and theaters, like the nonprofit Court Theatre in Chicago, have called for audiences who can afford an extra ticket or two to donate canceled tickets back to nonprofit theaters, knowing that the livelihoods of their favorite artists might swing in the balance.
The theater has survived a plague before, not only in the 1600s, but also in the 1980s. And the theater, with its tender heroism, empathy and propensity to help others, will survive again.
As we wait out the reopening of our theaters this spring, we might try amateur theatricals at home, living room readings, podcasts of theater and staying home and writing plays in solitude. In the meantime, I am taking up the mantle of everyone’s worried great-aunt and telling my students at the Yale School of Drama not to kiss on the cheek, not to gather in large groups and, when in doubt, to stay home and write or read love poems. And on April 13, only 10 days before Shakespeare’s birthday, to return to the theater — where we are reminded, in joy and in tragedy, of how interconnected we all are.
Sarah Ruhl, a playwright, is an author, most recently of “44 Poems for You.”
