Silent Stages
For someone who loves art, this moment offers unique anxieties. It's true (and wonderful) that people are taking stock of the holes artists fill in our lives as we are separated from everyone else. Streaming music, streaming television and movies have become our security blankets. Studios are finding ways of getting new movies into people's homes (including new art house movies, as mentioned later in this newsletter). Broadway singers are taking to Instagram and other platforms to ply their trade in clever and beautiful ways. Even my beloved opera is finding a role in the new normal as companies as stately as the Metropolitan in New York and as inventive as the Pacific Opera Project (which staged a version of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio on Star Trek's USS Enterprise) are releasing free content daily. Even Des Moines' Noce Jazz Club has been turning our phones into cabarets. These are lovely reminders, in a time when we are deciding which industries are essential, that art is just that.
Still, recorded performances and even new movies at home are approximations, they are shadows of themselves. Performance is inherently public. It's why we go see Hamilton even after having memorized the soundtrack. It's why we go to a concert when the radio and streaming services give the pristine performances away. It's why we flock to stadiums despite sports being easily accessible for free on TV and radio. We want to be there. We want to share something with other people that is bigger than ourselves. Even movies, which can be solitary experiences, are better as community events. That's hard to do at home. Alexandra Schwartz said it perfectly in the New Yorker recently, writing about how Broadway has adapted to the times. She writes, "...one of the things I miss about going to the theatre is the going: leaving home, travelling, with a sense of purpose, to a specific place at an appointed hour."
On my website yesterday, I published a blog I wrote awhile ago about why I love opera so much. The original plan for the website was to be a place I could answer reader questions and discuss how to be decent in an increasingly indecent world and it was going to launch with a dozen or so already written pieces. In fact, I wrote the first edition of this newsletter, which introduced that concept, on March 11, 2020 from a busy coffee shop. Eight hours later, Tom Hanks tested positive for COVID-19, then Rudy Gobert did, the president addressed the nation, things went from casual to holy shit and snarky think-pieces about bullying and marriage didn't seem as relevant as they had even earlier that day. I plan on publishing those blogs when it makes sense but the opera article, while bittersweet because there are no current live performances (and the odds are we will emerge from this with fewer opera companies than we had) is a good reminder of why we like stories in the first place, even if they must exist in memory for awhile.
Businesses that rely on audiences are hurting right now, from the National Football League to the local blues house. The NFL will probably be fine but too many performing arts organizations will not. Worse still, the artists who have given us so much are suffering terribly, with a growing list of cancellations and little comfort in sight. Many organizations are doing what they can to soften the blow but they do so at their long term peril. People are generously donating their already purchased tickets, funds are being set up left and right, including one to sustain America's 150 independent movie houses, an admittedly quixotic pursuit even without a global pandemic. But charitable donations are a hard ask during times of such uncertainty.
The structure of Greek tragedy is that the play starts when things are broken and is resolved when things are fixed (even if fixing them costs our hero's life). This is in stark contrast to later forms of storytelling, the good-to-bad-to-better fairy tale structure. When Elektra starts, she is at her lowest point. The Persians, the oldest play in existence, begins with Xerxes in defeat. In Oedipus, which premiered during an epidemic 2500 years ago, our hero is searching for a killer whose capture will end the plague that is ravaging his city. Since the beginning of civilization, stories have been used to heal what ails us. It's going to take us to make sure they continue to in the future.