I wish that I could say that I am enjoying the “pandemic theatre aesthetic.” There are so many ways in which I love how theatre rises to the surface and challenges the notions of its own false proscenium. Indeed, much of the work that has come out in the past weeks is doing an amazing job of persevering and creating moments of togetherness and joy. However, for me, it feels empty. This may have something to do with the fact that I am scenic designer. As such, I am curious about the environments that surround the words and the connections (or even disconnections.) I am also a professor. This has meant that I have spent my recent days desperately trying to communicate with my students in a whole new way. I am wanting to quantify what it is we have learned together about producing theatre in this new landscape.
What is this new landscape? Well, it is moments when I am teaching postmodern theatre design while video conferencing and suddenly two pictures of me show up on the screen. It is other moments when I am discussing the lights dimming in a scene and my lights dim in my house (seemingly without anyone controlling them), and it is other moments when I am recording a lecture about Suzan-Lori Parks and the insecurities of language, and my recording won’t hold the audio. It is just silence with me moving my mouth. Or even today, as I discussed the design of “Venus” and I chose an image from The Signature Theatre Company’s production in 2017 for my virtual backdrop, but every time I pulled the image up, I was covering the picture of Venus. My white professorial presence obscuring the presence of this character could not sum up the play much better. These, to me, are designable moments. They point to the importance of designers in theatre, and I feel like this conversation has been neglected (and to be honest it may have been neglected before the pandemic.)
In our on-going search for what I have called “live-ness,” my students and I began to add sound design to Zoom video to see what that would provoke. It was astounding how quickly we were able to get in touch with the theatrical just by watching someone hit go on their Qlab through a shared screed. At once, we were united in our various backdrops, staring as the cues played through - wondering what that washing machine sound would add to the scene. These may seem like very small steps in this ever-quickening world of technological change, but it was enough to have me harken back to thoughts of Robert Edmond Jones and his revelations about bringing the moving picture into the theatre. He was so hopeful that the addition of such a thing would allow our theatres to speak to time and memory in a more profound way. This is akin to how I have been feeling in this new landscape. We just might be able to find a new way to tell a theatrical story, but it has to include the element of design.
Gertrude Stein spoke about landscapes, and how a play is a landscape and a landscape is a play. If this is so, how can we encourage the landscape to live in our isolated boxes? What can we learn in this moment about the ways that theatre has been failing, and how it can take a step forward and confront the isolation that can ultimately happen when the proscenium arch becomes a barrier rather than an enveloper? I am still experimenting with all the ways that this pandemic can educate me as a designer and professor. I encourage the rest of us to do that as well. Try not to deny your background. It is telling you something, and what it is saying could make a difference in the message that is received and ultimately carried forth out into the world. The world, where hopefully, we will be moving out into again.