In Defense of “Remote Theatre”
Brian Eugenio Herrera
Princeton University
I am an avid theatregoer. As a theatre scholar, it might be expected that I see a lot of shows. And I do — typically three or four per week, with my annual count of “shows seen” tallying somewhere around or above 120 each year. Not as many shows as some, but certainly far more than most. For me, theatregoing is a practice, immediately relevant to both my vocational and my avocational priorities. Theatregoing is something I do to support my professional research, teaching and writing but it is also something I do for pleasure, engagement and diversion. Some folks crochet, some folks garden, some folks run marathons. I go to the theatre. Theatregoing is just something I do.
I have not gone to the theatre since Saturday, March 7, 2020. The last show I attended was a late matinee presentation of Mud/Drowning — Mabou Mines’ staging of two pieces by María Irene Fornés, with the latter (Drowning) adapted as a chamber opera with music by Phillip Glass. Mud/Drowning was the fourth show of my theatregoing week (which, in my usual count, begins on Sunday). The night before, I had seen an extraordinary on-campus performance of Macbeth, directed by Elena Araoz and featuring a cast of women and non-binary student performers on a glitter pink stage. My theatre-going week began the previous Sunday with two off-Broadway productions — Young Jean Lee’s Everyone’s Gonna Die at Second Stage and C. Julian Jiménez’s Bundle of Sticks at INTAR. The Saturday I attended Mud/Drowning, I also had tickets to catch what was to have been my fifth show of the week — an NYU student staging of María Irene Fornés’s musical Promenade — but, at the last minute, I opted instead to leave those tickets unused, to have a leisurely dinner with my partner and to head home early.
When I made the decision to skip Promenade that Saturday night in early March 2020, I had no inkling that it would be the last time I would have the option to enter a theatre for a very long time. Awareness of the encroaching reality of COVID-19 stirred all around me that Saturday. (Perhaps most conspicuously, folks in every men’s restroom I entered were taking greater time and care to wash their hands than I had ever before witnessed.) Even so, when I sift through my experiential recollections of that afternoon and evening, I note how many details that might have felt routine at the time now feel strange and exotic, even dangerous.
The audience gathered in the smallish lobby. The excited embraces shared with acquaintances unexpectedly encountered. The volunteer selling pre-poured cups of white wine. The close seating inside the sold-out performance. The casually close conversation with the stranger seated next to me. The actors speaking and vocalists singing maybe eight feet away. The tiny table in the cozy Italian restaurant we chose for our post-show dinner, my elbow inches away from the arm of the person seated at the adjacent table. The not unwelcome experience of lots of people speaking and breathing and laughing, all around me.
Each of these flashing recollections stirs an immediate sensation of proximity — my body in proximate relation to the bodies of others. Though sometimes hailed by other critical terms (like “liveness” and “presence”), this presumptive experience of proximity undergirds foundational and often-unspoken definitions of what performance or theatre “is”: an event wherein performers and their audience gather in shared time, shared space and shared air to co-create a transformative experience. Before “quarantimes,” spending time in close proximity with the breathing bodies of others — in the classroom, at the gym, on the street, on the bus, and perhaps especially at the theatre — was routine for me. Moreover, the theatre is among the relatively few cultural spaces (along with the college classroom) that remains dedicated to gathering people who know little about one another but who are nonetheless willing to co-create a shared and potentially transformative experience.
Since March 2020, however, the “shared air” experiences of co-presence once taken for granted as being part of theatre-going (and of being in a college classroom) have become freighted with an emergent sense of danger and uncertainty. Rigorous mechanisms of precaution are now required, if and when such convenings are not prohibited outright. As confirmation that things are different now, a host of strategies — often involving technological mediation through apps, devices and screens — have emerged to bridge the new distances between those who, up until quite recently, would have been gathered together in shared time, shared space and shared air.
In response to the new modes of theatrical convening that proliferated in 2020, a cluster of vaguely synonymous modifiers emerged to describe what was going on. Such terms included (but were not limited to) digital, streaming, virtual and — perhaps most notoriously — “zoom” theatre. All of these terms (aside, perhaps, from “zoom theatre”) predated the pandemic as descriptors for particular techniques of both creation and presentation of performance, media, and pedagogy. However, the uncertainties of the 2020 shutdown effaced whatever descriptive precision these terms might have previously offered as each became casually interchangeable with the other in the confused rush to announce, describe and promote the wide array of theatre-performances suddenly blooming everywhere.
Theatres might have been empty. But, almost immediately, theatre-makers were busy innovating new ways for audiences to engage the possibilities of live performance. Some moved quickly to create recorded performances of interrupted productions that could be available for ticketed streaming. Others maneuvered the thicket of contractual regulations to make archival recordings of past performances available for streaming. Many more began exploring the possibilities of using existing techniques, technologies and platforms to develop soon-to-be familiar modes of performance presentation. Indeed, within weeks of the March shutdown, a host of “new” performance genres was emerging: video-compilation benefits like Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration, the DIY-performance prompts like those offered by the Play at Home initiative, community conversations like Seth Rudetsky’s Stars in the House; and, yes, lots of “zoom readings” of new and established play scripts. The creative resilience of socially-distanced performance-makers during the first few months of the pandemic was truly remarkable to behold.
Indeed, it didn’t take me long to realize that, even though I wasn’t “going to the theatre” at all in April or May of 2020, I was engaging at least as many (if not many more) ostensibly live performance events during “quarantimes” as in the “before times.” Even more, my students were engaging performances presented by companies across the country, in addition to those more local to our campus in central New Jersey. As I maneuvered this different manner of theatre-engagement, negotiating disparate time zones and divergent technological platforms, I found myself increasingly using the term “remote theatre” to describe whatever it was I was engaging.
“Remote” is a spatial modifier, rather than a technological descriptor. Just as I would rarely categorize a work of performance solely by its venue (“I’m seeing some proscenium theatre tonight”), it made little sense to me to codify this proliferation of diverse performance offerings solely according to the technologies enabling my access to them. Indeed, almost immediately, whenever I thought or spoke about the 2020 performances I found most compelling or captivating, I was rarely more than glancingly concerned with the platform the performance co-creators used but was instead much more interested in how these “remote” performances activated my awareness of the dynamic experience of closeness and distance among the performance’s co-creators and their assembled audiences. Remote performance activates our awareness of relational proximity — defined not only as nearness in space and time, but also as distance — between ourselves and the performers, between the performance’s co-creators, and between ourselves and others gathered as audience.
These remote performances activated this particular mode of spatial awareness — an alert cognizance of the reality of the “social distance” between not only the performers and their audiences but also among the performance’s co-creators (performers, directors, technicians). In contradistinction to the other ostensibly synonymic modifiers we have become accustomed to, “remote performance” describes what I believe to be an emerging theatrical modality that seems to be coming into focus — a modality invested in wrangling the often uninterrogated questions and presumptions at play in idealized invocations of “shared air” and “shared space.” This alertness to relational proximity is, I suspect, why “remote theatre” so quickly became my preferred term and why my dedication to it has only deepened. For me, “remote theatre” describes a particular modality of theatre-making that, while not unique to 2020, has been refined by the pressures of this historical moment to become what I believe will be an enduring, relevant and transformative mode of theatrical encounter well into the foreseeable future.
Of course, this kind of theatrical encounter — this “theatre of proximity” wherein the performance event demarcates not only the spatial relationships among the performers but also with the theatrical apparatus and the audience itself — is by no means new to this moment. Indeed, some of the most evocative (and often provocative) recent, pre-pandemic theatrical events have toyed with such questions of relational proximity. A handful of acclaimed plays, including Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Aleshia Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down, prompted the audience to physically rearrange itself in ways that brought the social and cultural distances between members of the “same” audience into view. Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (in both its durational “marathon” presentations and its more abbreviated multi-hour excerpts) staged cycles of audience movement and interaction to underscore disparate experience of time, space and community. The dramatic momentum of Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me — whether staged in a tiny downtown venue, on Broadway or on AmazonPrime — tracked how the experience of personal embodiment was always already embedded in the social relations of the body politic — a notion amplified when the assembled audiences become a voting body, if only for a moment. And this is but a small sampling of the many performance-makers, perhaps especially since 2015, who have intentionally exploited the peculiar physical intimacies of the theatre apparatus to reckon with the experience and implications of our societal — or “social” — distance from one another.
Even so, suspicions about 2020’s abrupt, non-voluntary turn to “remote” performance strategies has persisted, often invoking familiar notions of “liveness” and “presence” to insist that theatre isn’t theatre unless the audience and the performers are sharing time and space to create the event. As example, pathbreaking theatre deviser John C. Collins questioned a theatre journalist’s twitter query about worthwhile “takeaways” from 2020, responding, “I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that something streaming on video, live or prerecorded, could constitute theater.” Collins continued, “If you’re not breathing the same air as the actors, it’s not theater.” This thrumming refrain — that, whatever it calls it itself, “remote” performance is not theatre because we’re not in the room together — stands as an intriguing and notably consistent counterargument to those, like myself, affirming the value in work emerging in this historical moment. Indeed, my own adoption of “remote theatre” as a preferred term was, in part, inspired by such resistance. I found the emphatic expressions of resistance — whether borne of weariness or wariness — fascinatingly reminiscent of the genre disavowals that routinely dismiss musical theatre in theatre scholarship, criticism and general conversation. Sure, it’s valid I guess but it’s not the kind of thing I look to theatre for. I know plenty of people like them but I really hate them. Why are there so many all of a sudden — I just can’t with another one. Such sentiments are expressions of taste, certainly, but they are also formal critiques — the rejection of a particular genre as less artistically legitimate for its failure to adhere to presumptively fundamental features of the form. Moreover, similar expressions of critical sentiment have been deployed to dismiss political theatre, immersive theatre, and even devised theatre. “Remote Theatre” describes what I see to be an evolving form of theatre that (not unlike musical or devised theatre) deploys specialized theatrical techniques within a necessarily different division of theatrical labor — a legitimate and emerging form of theatrical presentation which may not be to the taste of every audience, critic or theatre-maker.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as this emerging theatrical sub-genre of “remote theatre” discovers its form, collisions with theatrical convention are inevitable. Productions built to both accommodate and engage the constraints, obligations and possibilities of the particular spatial relations afforded to the performance’s audience and its co-creators will almost inevitably confound traditional expectations of what theatre is. A striking example might be found in Miami New Drama’s presentation 7 Deadly Sins, a series of seven short plays staged in storefronts in December 2020. In the production, each play was performed behind the glass of separate storefront windows before small groups of masked and socially-distant audience members, who were seated outside and who moved as a group between each window’s performance. With a cast of fourteen, 7 Deadly Sins was acknowledged as the largest “pandemic-safe” professional production to be staged “live” in 2020 since the March shutdown. Yet Miami New Drama encountered difficulties explaining to Actor’s Equity how their production — crafted with meticulous attention to the safe, socially-distant spatial relation among the performers, between the performers and the production apparatus, and amidst the production crew and assembled audience — was in compliance with the union’s regulations for COVID-safe working conditions. Artistic Director Michael Haussman observed, “Equity’s whole system was set up with the idea that theatre is what you and I know as traditional theatre, with the audience and actors sharing air”; general manager Julie Kaschube elaborated, “All the guidelines assume the cast is on a singular stage. There were no guidelines to address the specifics of what we were doing.”
As I reflect on my year of pandemic-safe “remote” theatre-going, I am struck by the broader truth of Kaschube’s statement: there are indeed few existing guidelines to address the particulars of the many forms and formats of this emerging mode of theatrical encounter. Performance-makers in 2020 have been obliged to wrangle both the constraints and possibilities activated by the year’s shuddering uncertainties even as they have explored how our constant calibrations of nearness and distance might activate creativity, connection and community. In so doing, they have contributed to evolving aesthetic vocabulary and repertoire of practice that exceeds extant guidelines for what theatre is or might be. What of the participatory intimacies activated by Tricklock Company’s presentation of Katie Farmin’s Package Play, wherein the audience signed up to receive a small box in the mail containing the necessary props to join in the activities cued by an accompanying audio play? And how about that startling moment when the actor caught and held my gaze through our video connection in Theatre for One’s production of Here We Are? Or the surreally immersive experiment of WhiteSnake Projects’ Alice in the Pandemic (in which the voices of live singers in different locations animated digital avatars moving through a virtual landscape) and how the experience tapped into the jarring, nonsensical sensation of powerless grief that has so defined 2020? Or the crackling wonder triggered by dramaturgically sophisticated live-film experiments as disparate as FakeFriends’s CircleJerk, Virginia Grise’s farm for meme, and SplitBritches’s Last Gasp WFH? Indeed, for a year with “no theatre,” I was somehow able to maintain my practice of avid theatregoing and have more than my fair share of peak experiences to show for it.
Such experiences remind me that our current moment of mandated “social distance” arrives as we approach the end of the second decade of so-called “social media” — a constellation of digital communication practices that have shifted our sense of relational proximity. There is no “shared air” in social media, even though there can be shared experience of time, space and community. Moreover, this nearly two decades of experience with the peculiar “social distance” rehearsed in social media has created a host of emotional, conceptual and experiential realities that have little to do with “sharing air.” The social media era has also acquainted audiences and performance-makers alike with the peculiar yet always dynamic tension between immediacy and asynchronicity, which stirs some perhaps unanswerable questions: did remote theatre practice emerge in response to the “social distance” protocols necessitated by the pandemic of 2020? Or were the historical disruptions of 2020 the context for the emergence of a theatrical mode necessary to evince the emotional, experiential and intellectual dimensions of relational proximity in the socially-distant era of social media?
We cannot predict what the practices and processes of theatrical engagement of “remote theatre” will become. But I would submit that remote theatre is not simply a set of emergency measures, undertaken to sustain creative spirits or financial solvency during an unprecedented constellation of crises. Nor is remote theatre the performance equivalent of “turkey bacon” or “Near Beer.” Remote theatre is no substitute for “real” theatre, but is instead a dynamic emerging subgenre of theatrical practice and presentation. Not every theatregoer is going to like remote theatre and not every theatre-maker is going to possess the particular constellation of instincts, inclinations or passions most suited to the practice of remote theatre. Yet, as an emerging repertoire of practice, as a rapidly evolving mode of both theatremaking and theatregoing, I have every confidence that “remote theatre” is here to stay and that it will continue to shape the theatrical horizon for the foreseeable future.
John Collins, Twitter Post, December 14, 2020, 4:35pm. https://twitter.com/johnccollins/status/1338598604299247616.
My account of Miami New Drama’s production is based on Christine Dolen’s reporting for AmericanTheatre.org. See Christine Dolen, “How to Stage ‘7 Deadly Sins’ in a Way That’s Not Actually Deadly,” December 17. 2020. Accessed January 4, 2021. https://www.americantheatre.org/2020/12/17/how-to-stage-7-deadly-sins-in-a-way-thats-not-actually-deadly/
BIO
Brian Eugenio Herrera is, by turns, a writer, teacher, and scholar – presently based in New Jersey, but forever rooted in New Mexico. Brian’s work, whether academic or artistic, examines the history of gender, sexuality, and race within and through U.S. popular performance. He is the author of The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound, 2015). His book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Michigan, 2015) was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and received an Honorable Mention for the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. Brian is an Associate Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.