The Year of Living Remotely and Un-Certainly

For me, the collateral benefits were learning to bake bread, cooking home made — but not necessarily healthy — dishes on a daily basis while accumulating the pounds, and recording cooking and poetry video clips between burning my food due to inattention. I also participated in Zoom readings and events, learnt to go LIVE on Facebook.

After the first few weeks of the lockdown spent sitting on the couch binging on Netflix, Acorn, HBO and PBS, my schedule started to fill up again, and I started reliving the same busy pre-COVID-19 days only this time virtually.

Unlike many, or maybe much like most, the lockdown was good to me, because during that time I was able to complete my MA degree, graduating with highest honors. With a diploma awarded virtually, I went into full production to move the SR film festival online. New skills were discovered, new boundaries crossed, and a broader international audience base was reached. I started to see the silver lining in all of this. First, without going online the festival would not have reached so many people outside of New York City. Second, almost all the filmmakers were able to participate and meet their audiences, albeit virtually, something which would not have been possible in the case of a physical week-long festival in New York. And finally, instead of a week, the festival lasted 10 days in June, offering all participating filmmakers the opportunity to discuss their films not just during a mere ten-minutes post-screening Q&A, but during a whole hour dedicated to two or three filmmakers with international moderators adding so much to the experience.

One other project I was working on was a play about immigrant women, “iMigrant Woman,” originally written in Italian by Valentina Acava Mmaka in the form of three monologues by immigrant women to be staged in New York.

With the lockdown I immediately saw its potential as a play on the Zoom platform. With an international cast of five women from London, Chicago, Louisville KY, Los Angeles, and Princeton NJ, an author from Kenya, and myself in New York, we were able to peform the play spanning five continents. This would not have been possible, or even imaginable, in a staged version here in New York. The success of these ticketed performances prompted a redux at the end of September.

But is this form really theatre? It certainly is written as a play, and it was presented live with actors for an audience, not as a pre-recorded presentation which would categorize it as a film. The acting was more theatrical than it would have been for film or television. The small adjustments made in the ways the actors addressed the audience, spoke their thoughts as “asides,” and projected may resemble film acting, but not having the luxury of doing many takes emphasizes the live component, certainly tilting the balance towards a theatrical experience. The actors memorize their lines instead of reading them off the screen, as done with Zoom play readings. By memorizing and speaking as the characters with minimal movements within the frame, the final delivery creates a much more fulfilling theatrical experience. This medium is still evolving and every day is bringing in new discoveries for us theatre folk.

Needless to say, nothing comes even close to the feeling of standing on stage in front of an auditorium packed with an eager audience breathing the same air, feeling the collective heartbeat of the audience, listening to their laughter, their sniffles, their occasional coughs, their chatter, and sometimes even that one annoying cell phone ring. But all this is forgotten when the resounding applause rewards us in the end. That is the magic of live theatre. On Zoom, there is no interference as audience mics are muted, but by the same token, the audience applause has to be communicated through silent emoji’s or written comments.

The performing arts, like bars, high-end restaurants and sports events where the live group gathering is an essential component of the experience, are the hardest hit, I think. A painter can still paint, a sculptor can sculpt, a composer can compose music, and a writer can continue to write. Yes, it will be a while until museums reopen, and galleries exhibit again.

Film production in France, in the UK, and in some states in the US such as New York, are slowly resuming activities with new COVID-19 guidelines, involving strict social distancing, frequent testing and the presence of COVID-19 compliance officers on set.

Nothing is planned yet for the performing arts, except virtual online and digital presentations.

Both SOLT (Society of London Theatres) and the The Broadway League along with all their member producers, have decided that opening theatres at 50-percent capacity would make no sense, because the high cost of operating Broadway theatres and shows cannot be sustained with reduced audience numbers.

“The alchemy of 1,000 strangers bonding into a single audience fueling each performer on stage and behind the scenes will be possible again when Broadway theatres can safely host full houses,” said Thomas Schumacher, chairman of the board of The Broadway League, which represents producers.

“The Show Must Go Online” is the title under which the UK-based international publication The Stage covered some of the major productions going online during this closure, echoing the famous show business cry of “The Show Must Go On.” For now, this seems to be the only alternative for the live performing artist. Theatre seems to be the luckiest artform transitioning to this medium, since barring rapid argument scenes when two or more performers must speak at the same time or overlap, all else may successfully be presented on Zoom or other such platforms. In other performance genres such as musicals, operas and concerts where coordination and synchronized music and singing are required between performers, the shortcomings of the medium produce a cacophony.

Sadly, 85-year-old Dame Judy Dench is right when she says she may not see theatre again in her lifetime — at least not indoor theatre on the big West End and Broadway stages as we know it.

One obvious solution would be to stage in open air spaces. But summer is almost running out, and there is frustration at many venues such as the idyllic Minack Theatre in Cornwall and Brighton Open Air Theatres and many others this side of the Atlantic and elsewhere where these locations are not able to come to the rescue. Governments are still reluctant to green light large scale performances in open air spaces.

The great plague of Athens during the late 5th century BCE had social effects that were as important as their biological impact. There have certainly been many plagues throughout recorded human history. In Athens the plague arrived at a pivotal moment in the affairs of this centre of western civilization. Sophocles’ specific vocabulary for plague in “Oedipus the King” shows the deep and dangerously volatile relations between the epidemic and tragic drama.

Likewise, during Shakespeare’s time in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a plague ravaged the city of London and its countryside. Out of that was born the healing poetics of Shakespeare that survived the centuries and came to us, with the universal power of portraying all aspects of human nature. The urgency of the situation made people realize the ephemeral nature of life, and re-evaluate their priorities, just like we are doing, or supposed to be doing today, in the age of COVID-19. Poet playwrights could potentially heal, but only so much as their patient may be willing to listen.

Who knows what the legacy of the age of COVID-19 will be?

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s words in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Fountain Theatre’s artistic director Stephan Sachs spell out this harsh reality: “If we do not learn something valuable out of this, it will be one good pandemic gone to waste.”

What we learn is yet to be seen. One thing is for sure, Theatre, Poetics and live performances are a crucial component of human civilization, and their absence will leave behind a burnt out crater hit by Coronavirus that right now seems to be larger than a big meteor hitting Earth. It will take time to flatten the curve as it will take time to fill out the crater before we can resume a normal existence.

(Nora Armani is an actress, director and producer who has performed in plays, films and television productions in several countries. She is the co-founder of the SR Socially Relevant Film Festival (https://www.ratedsrfilms.org/) in New York.)