The Remembered Act of Assembly (Opinion)

It’s 11 AM. At my desk, my laptop fan whirs disturbingly loud. It’s already stressed by all the tasks I’ve set myself up to today. Still, a feeling of relief shoots through my body as I finally finish reading the byzantine essay by Nicholas Berger imploring theatre makers to stop making remote work over platforms like Zoom and Facebook Live. Finishing this essay is a triumph so sizable I now feel like I should do…nothing? Because that’s what I’ve been told to do.

Berger, a theatre artist (who writes under an alias, so I won’t claim to know their gender), has penned a much-discussed essay amongst other theatre artists and makers all over the nation — at least, that’s what it looks like on my social media feeds. I, too, am a theatre artist. I’ve been touring and performing my immersive-solo-show-in-a-bathtub, in bathrooms in peoples’ homes, for an audience of however many people can fit, for five years. I am not sure what Berger’s specifics are as a theatre artist, but it’s safe to say that they are a colleague of mine.

In their essay, Berger dives into many concerns, some of which I agree with: that our fellow colleagues are rushing to make their shows happen over Zoom. That our social media feeds are clogged by people singing tunes from broadway shows at their pianos, on their ukuleles, giving boring readings of Shakespeare plays. That the phrase “now, more than ever” is just as annoying as the constant barrage of invitations to random digital performances that we all know are just not good performances.

Let me be clear: I get invited to “not good performances” all the time. I attend them regularly. Bad theatre, bad performance art, and cringe-worthy live events have always existed (I guess Berger has never been invited to those). But Berger is concerned because they’ve been told that these remote performances offered in this moment are healing, and they disagree. They wonder who these shows are for, and they are worried, deeply worried, that our special skill as theatre makers to assemble has been sincerely compromised. Taking no prisoners, Berger writes with a biting snark that when we post Zoom screenshots of our performances, we, the theatre community, are “grasping at some sense of togetherness only underlining our deep isolation.”

We are not in the room together, that’s for sure. I agree completely that theatre artists work in this field because we understand the significance of togetherness. We know it as storytellers, as truth seekers, and, yes — as healers. The immersive world, in particular, requires the audience to do *more* than be in the room with the performers; the audience must directly engage, through personal interaction, shared stories, and even physical touch. It’s the immersive community that Berger erases when they say that “There’s a reason that theatre makers weren’t staging readings of plays over Zoom two months ago,” as if remote interactive experiences didn’t exist at all before COVID-19. I’d love to introduce Berger to my friends at Candle House Collective, who perform shows entirely over the phone, or to PopUp Theatrics, whose work has long involved folks gathering around private screens to take in a performance.

I posit that these artists are making significant contributions to the theatre community, but I understand that a show over the phone may not be Mx. Berger’s favorite style of theatre. I, too, love the feeling of being comfortably settled in my seat as an audience member, the rush I get when the lights go up on stage and the performance is about to begin. I love it just as much as gathering in a room with a few other participants, awaiting instructions from a performer before an immersive experience begins. I think we all miss being together in our various creative spaces. “The singular transcendence of human congregation is irreplaceable,” Berger writes, “So why are we trying so hard to make theatre without it?”

There are several reasons why we’re trying so hard. First: we have to. Without a social safety net, and with one in three Americans currently not paying their rent, it is instinctual for human beings to try to find other ways to survive. I don’t know what Berger’s occupation is, but my solo tour got canceled. I lost not only my income from upcoming performances, but I lost my sense of relevancy as an artist. I lost the notion that my name would still be mentioned at festivals, that I’d be speaking at events, that my performance would be witnessed by brand new people who would get to know me and learn about me every night. Countless colleagues of mine are experiencing the exact same thing: our loss of income, our loss of all-important name recognition, and suddenly, the inability to hustle. These three things together are not something I’m proud of going hand in hand with what I do, but then, that’s the industry.

That’s the system. There’s another reason why we’re trying so hard: we always have been. We have always been scrambling, rerouting, piecing together whatever we can to make a little bit of money, to get a few more followers, and even, by some stroke of luck, a review or feature in print. Theatre artists are creating remote experiences because we have always had to adjust to the times so that we can not only afford to live, but so that we can continue to work as artists. I think that many of us would rather take long months of gazing out of our windows to write the perfect play, but I know very few artists who have had that luxury. Mx. Berger speaks eloquently to the frustrations they’re feeling in the current moment, but they take aim at the wrong target: the problem here is not the artists, it’s Capitalism. It’s a broken, hollow system that has never paid us what we’re worth, never valued our contributions as storytellers and community providers, and it never was going to, certainly not before the pandemic hit, and absolutely not after.

This is why it is important to “try so hard.” The modern remote performances of our times are often imperfect. They don’t claim to be perfect. From what I can tell, theatre artists aren’t attempting to recreate or replace the experience we’d all much rather be having in the room together. We’re just doing what we do best: working with what we’ve got, right here, right now.

What would Berger rather have us do? They write, and rightly so! That “The burden shouldn’t be on the artists to keep dancing like court jesters trying to earn enough money to scrape by when their stage has been stolen from them.” Hear hear! So, whose responsibility is it? What should be done? Berger claims that we now “have time to consider how we build a system that prioritizes people.” They argue that “we again have a say in what the next hundred years will look like.”

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We…do? That’s great news that I honestly didn’t know about. Is this a call to action? Is this very popular medium article actually going to advocate for Democratic Socialism and Medicare For All, which would undoubtedly liberate the artist? How shall we remotely assemble to rebuild our system? According to Berger, we should watch Tiger King and listen to Dua Lipa. Let’s numb our pain with saccharine pop tunes and poverty porn in the form of reality television. Our pathetic attempts at remote performances are actually open wounds, revealing that we all have something to prove because we feel so painfully inadequate in our jobs that are so very non-essential. Mx. Berger feels that we have yet to acknowledge our non-essentialness, and by performing and producing remote work, we are making a cheap imitation of theatre, and therefore damaging the art form in the long term. Through the prism of the free market, Berger scoffs at the products we are pumping out as inadequate, and therefore, harmful. So, stop producing, they implore. Stop producing, and sit still and imagine a very indistinct but definitely much fairer future.

And also: be sad, please. The pull quote, most-medium-highlighted bit from this whole essay, reads:

“We must lean into this pain. We must feel the grief. We must mourn. Mourn the loss of work, the loss of jobs, the loss of money, the loss of life. Mourn the temporary loss of an art form that demands assembly. Lean into the grief. Lean in. Lean in. Lean in. We must remind ourselves that mourning is a human act, not a digital one. It is only in this acknowledgment that we will survive. The internet isn’t going to save us, we are.”

Lean in, my people. This slogan rings shallow, empty, devoid of all meaning, and garners zero action and zero analysis. Somehow, after multiple paragraphs from a clearly cultured and intelligent person, I am left here, at the end of this essay, being told to literally do nothing but mourn and grieve.

Berger speaks with heightened language about how we will gather “when the world rebounds.” Rebounds to what? To our American Empire that has always hated artists anyway? To a Capitalist society that puts profit over people? In what context should we sit idly by as our democracy crumbles due to a broken system that has always only ever benefited the 1%? Lean in to your grief, my fellow artists, and watch netflix! DON’T BRING PEOPLE TO HEAR YOU OVER ZOOM. Don’t do it! We will assemble AFTER THIS, when things are BACK TO NORMAL, after we’ve had fuzzy daydreams about some kind of make-believe system that actually pays people, and then we get to go back to the actual world of not really being paid.

I’d like to be frank here and say that yes, I absolutely have been mounting remote performances twice a week since shelter-in-place began. I was nervous about these shows, but I put them up because at first, I was afraid of being forgotten. I wanted to maintain my fragile sense of relevancy. Now, five weeks in, I’ve discovered that I actually am having genuine connections with audience members from around the world, many of whom have disabilities that would make attending my shows in person nearly impossible. The conversations I solicit from my audience members are still sincere, they still advocate for the sharing of ideas, stories, and community. Zoom performances are not my preferred way of doing things. I’m actually very interested in the conversation about what our society would look like if we had a completely different system that might support artists during times of crisis.

This is where my friend Mx. Berger utterly fails in their truly demoralizing piece, encouraging us to feel sad and not only not make theatre, but not engage in any activism whatsoever. Berger punches down and attacks their fellow artists, who are scrambling to fight not only for their industry’s relevance, but their chance at having any opportunity at all to be a part of this industry in the aftermath of COVID-19. I’ve been fighting against Berger during this entire rebuttal. But because I find their ultimate problem to be with the system and not fellow artists, I genuinely believe that we could be allies.

And so, I’d like to welcome Berger to the hustle. It’s scrappy. It’s often DIY and last minute. But we’ve all been here, for a long time, making work and supporting each others’ work, celebrating its imperfections and the drive it took the creators to make. We understand the problem here. We’ve got to solve it, together. How do we do that? I don’t have the answers. But I do know that a solution is going to require an assembly. We must come together to connect if we’re going to create a better future. Surely Berger would agree that theatre has the power to create an even playing field for all involved; a more welcome space for ideas and discussion. In a remote theatre performance over Zoom, in our tiny, imperfect squares, we find togetherness. We are not together in the way I’d most prefer to be. But, to be fair, that didn’t exist before the pandemic, either.

The United States’ history of slavery and colonization has resulted in segregation that leaves most theater spaces starved for the diversity that reflects our country. Our income inequality and hatred of the working class means that only upper middle class and wealthy folks can even afford to attend traditional theatre. Our ableist society doesn’t accommodate folks who need accessible environments. I’ve never lived in the world I want to live in. I hope to approximate it, I hope to work towards it. If we, as a community, intend to continue to work against oppressive systems, we must come together. We must be vigilant in our efforts to come together.

So, let’s assemble. Let’s use what tools we have. Let’s gather as best as we can to make some art and figure some shit out. Let’s HEAL. Maybe we’ll fail miserably, but I’ve always believed that I’d be a person who goes down swinging, if I have no other choice. I hope that my colleagues will join me, because together — not alone, leaning into isolation and mourning in solitude, but together — we are unstoppable. Another world is possible.

When we look at each other, tomorrow on Zoom, and are reminded of what is worth fighting for, the weight of the injustice that dropped us here in the first place, when the raven haired hottie laughs at your joke but you can’t hear him because his Zoom mic is muted and we think: what an astonishing thing it is to strive for more, or when we cut our own hair for the first time and share a photo of it for ten of our friends to say “you got this,” we will be reminded of our very visible, indispensable need for each other, and we will return to our notebooks, our blank pages, our blank canvases, to create, organize, to heal, and to assemble.

Learn more about Siobhan O’Loughlin.

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