The silence of closed theaters is deafening. The roar of no crowds rattles like empty noise in our heads. Theaters around the country — but especially those 41 playhouses known as Broadway — have been thrust into a catastrophe unlike any in their vital though ever-fragile existence.
When Broadway was shut down for the pandemic on March 12, 16 plays and musicals were stacked up to open before the season’s April 23 cutoff for Tony Award eligibility. Reopening dates were pushed back for weeks, then more weeks, each week losing an average $35 million. Although the Broadway League now speculates a return no earlier than Labor Day, Charlotte McMartin, president of the trade group, sees early 2021 as a more realistic goal.
That means a loss of about $1.5 billion for an industry that boasts a $14.3 billion economic impact on the city — not to mention the buzz of holiday crowds and the incalculable crush of artists’ broken hearts, dreams and income.
James Lapine, the writer and director of 1985 Pulitzer winner “Sunday in the Park with George,” was prepping the first preview of the new musical, “Flying Over Sunset,” on the day of the lockdown. Although Lincoln Center Theater hopes to re-start rehearsals in the fall, Lapine finds himself wondering darkly, “Did I ever really do that show? It took me five years to write and it feels like a distant memory.” While his actors worry, among more cosmic questions, whether they will fit back into their costumes, Lapine says, “I wonder whether people are going to want to get together anymore. This really makes you question your identity.”
It is the very specialness of live theater — its intimacy and scale — that makes its return so risky. Social distancing — audiences sitting at least six feet apart — is not believed by St. Martin to be financially (or, really, esthetically) viable. The most beloved of Broadway’s playhouses were built in the early 20th century, with hard-to-disinfect ornate details and modern capacities stretched to 500 or almost 2000 tiny seats jammed close to one another. Backstage areas and bathrooms are notoriously cramped. Not to be unpleasant about it, but singers, horn players and Al Pacino tend to spray when they perform. Few except for string players can wear masks and do their jobs.
Can Broadway come back without international tourists? And will tourists come back without Broadway? What about theater’s mainstay audience, older people, with their vulnerability to the covid-virus? Even with the promise of disinfecting by drones, UV lights, theatergoers wearing masks, temperature checks, hand sanitizers, digitalized tickets and meticulous traffic control, polls show that people are reluctant to come to theater without a vaccine before early next year.
Most not-for-profit theaters around the country, despite being slightly more flexible with structural changes, are also locked down at least until fall. To make things much more uncertain, Actors’ Equity Association, the national union of 51,000 actors and stage managers, has barred its members from returning until the epidemic is “under control,” with “effective testing,” few new cases in the area and contact tracing.
We might think that Paula Vogel, whose 1998 Pulitzer winner “How I Learned to Drive” was finally in rehearsals for a Broadway showcase with its original cast, would be discouraged that its April 22 opening never happened. In addition, it has been curtains, at least temporarily, for her acclaimed “Indecent” in triumphal runs in London and around North America and for the world premiere in London of her new adaptation of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
Instead, Vogel says she is looking forward to a “radical reset,” a “paradigm shift” for “theater as we have known it.” She imagines the theater season changing to summer, outdoor spaces where the virus hunts less. More, she has already started reinventing the form on Zoom with young playwrights “who couldn’t get through the gates with their projects. This will allow us to dismantle the gates back to the Greeks and Shakespeare by redesigning the notion of the theater space.”
Playwrights stuck at home are being reminded that Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth,” “Lear” and “Antony and Cleopatra” during his plague quarantine. On the other hand, as veteran British playwright Alan Ayckbourn said recently in The Guardian, “People went back to the theater after the plague. But they didn’t have Netflix."
Past Pulitzer Drama juror and longtime critic Linda Winer speaks with Pulitzer-winning playwrights about the path forward for their profession after the COVID-19 pandemic.
