How theater weathers wars outlasts empires and survives pandemics Cara Greene Epstein
Transcriber:
“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
the brightest heaven of invention,
a kingdom for a stage, princes to act
and monarchs to behold
the swelling scene!”
Though, to be totally honest,
right now, I’d settle
for a real school day,
a night out
and a hug from a friend.
I do have to admit that Wrigley Field
does make a pretty awesome stage, though.
The words that I spoke at the beginning,
“O for a Muse of fire,” et cetera,
are Shakespeare’s.
He wrote them as the opening
to his play “Henry V,”
and they’re are also quite likely
the first words ever spoken
on the stage of the Globe Theater
in London, when it opened in 1599.
The Globe would go on to become
the home for most of Shakespeare’s work,
and from what I hear,
that Shakespeare guy was pretty popular.
But despite his popularity,
just four years later, in 1603,
The Globe would close
for an extended period of time
in order to prevent the spreading
and resurgence of the bubonic plague.
In fact, from 1603 to 1613,
all of the theaters in London
were closed on and off again
for an astonishing 78 months.
Here in Chicago, in 2016,
new theaters were opening as well.
The Steppenwolf had just
opened its 1,700 theater space.
The Goodman, down in the Loop,
had just opened its new
Center for Education and Engagement.
And the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
had just started construction
on its newest theater space, The Yard.
Today, all of those theaters,
as well as the homes of over 250
other theater companies across Chicago,
are closed due to COVID-19.
From Broadway to LA, theaters are dark,
and we don’t know when or if the lights
are ever going to come on again.
That means that tens of thousands
of theater artists are out of work,
from actors and directors
to stage managers, set builders,
costume designers …
It’s not like it’s an easy time
to go wait tables.
It’s a hard time for the theater,
and it’s a hard time for the world.
But while theaters may be dark,
theater as an art form
has the potential to shine a light
on how we can process and use
this time apart
to build a brighter, more equitable,
healthier future together.
Theater is the oldest
art form we humans have.
We know that the Greeks were writing
plays as early as the fifth century BC,
but theater goes back before that.
It goes back before we learned to write,
to call-and-response around fires.
and – who knows? – maybe
before we learn to build fire itself.
Theater has outlasted empires,
weathered wars and survived plagues.
In the early 1600s, theaters were closed
over 60 percent of the time in London,
and that’s still looked at as
one of the most fertile and innovative
periods of time
in Western theater history.
The plays that were written then are still
performed today over 400 years later.
Unfortunately, in the early 1600s,
a different plague was
making its way across the ocean,
and it hit the shores of what
would be called “America” in 1619,
when the first slave ships
landed in Jamestown, Virginia.
Racism is an ongoing plague in America.
But many of us in the theater
like to think we’re not infected
or that we are at worst asymptomatic.
But the truth is, our symptoms
have been glaring onstage and off.
We have the opportunity to use
this intermission caused by one plague
to work to cure another.
We can champion a theater
that marches, protests, burns, builds.
We can reimagine the way
our theaters and institutions work
to make them more reflective and just.
We can make this one of the most
innovative and transformative
periods of time
in Western theater history,
one that we are still learning about
and celebrating 400 years from now.
What we embody in the theater
can be embodied in the world.
Why?
Because theater is an essential service.
And what I mean by that
is that theater is in service
to that which is essential
about ourselves:
love, anger, rage, joy, despair, hope.
Theater not only shows us the breadth
and depth of human emotions,
it allows us to experience catharsis,
to feel our feelings and rather than
ignore or compartmentalize them,
move through them to discover
what’s on the other side.
Now, many art forms
connect us to our emotions,
but what makes the theater unique
is that it reveals us to ourselves onstage
so that we can see that our lives
are about our relationships
and our connections to others –
to our parents, to our children,
to our teachers, to our tormentors,
to our lovers, to our friends.
What we do when we engage with theater
is we experience
in real time, in real space,
those relationships and connections
changing in the present –
the relationships between
characters onstage, yes,
but also the relationships between
characters and the audience
and the relationships between
audience members themselves.
We go to the theater
because we seek connection.
And when we’re in the theater,
our hearts beat as one.
That’s not a metaphor.
Our hearts race together,
they’re soothed together,
we breathe together.
Ay, there’s the rub.
Who knows when we’re going to be able
to be together again in the same space,
breathing in the same air,
breathing in the same experience?
Who knows when we’re going to want to be?
We are holding our breath.
Luckily, theater doesn’t just
have to happen in theaters.
As theater practitioners,
we know some of the most important
work we do happens offstage,
in rehearsal spaces, garage
spaces, studio apartments.
At the beginning of this talk, I wished
for a kingdom for a stage, princes to act
and monarchs to watch the show.
But the truth is,
none of that is necessary.
In fact, some of the most
important theater I make
happens on Monday mornings
in an empty hospital meeting room
with just a handful of folks,
and only two of us are theater artists.
The Memory Ensemble,
as we call ourselves,
is a collaboration between
the Lookingglass Theatre
and Northwestern’s Center
for Cognitive Neurology
and Alzheimer’s Disease Research.
We begin each session with a mantra:
“I am a creative person.
When I feel anxious or uncertain,
I can stop, breathe, observe
and use my imagination.”
Anyone else feeling anxious
or uncertain right now?
Let’s say it together.
I am a creative person.
When I feel anxious or uncertain,
I can stop,
breathe,
observe
and use my imagination.
Let’s look at the first part
of that statement:
I am a creative person.
Many of us have been taught
that creativity is a talent
only some of us have,
a skill reserved for artists,
inventors, big thinkers,
that it’s not something for regular people
with quote, unquote real jobs.
But that’s not true.
All humans are innately creative.
It’s part of what makes us human.
And if there was ever a time for us
to exercise our creativity, it’s now –
not to solve or fix
our anxiety and uncertainty,
but to learn from it
and to move through it.
So the first step is to stop.
That’s harder than it sounds;
busy is a coping mechanism that we use
to deal with our anxiety and uncertainty,
and our society is addicted to it.
So we find ourselves
making all the TikToks,
baking all the bread,
taking all the Zoom meetings.
Maybe you’ve even seen that meme
about how Shakespeare wrote
“King Lear” during his pandemic,
which I think is supposed to inspire us,
but instead just makes us feel guilty
that we’re not creating our own
masterpieces right now,
you know, in addition
to taking care of our children
or our parents or our students,
our patients, our clients,
our customers, our friends,
ourselves.
So A, screw that guilt;
and B, that’s, like, the opposite
of what “King Lear” is actually about.
Towards the end of Lear, one
of the main characters, Edgar, says,
“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
speak what we feel,
not what we ought to say.”
The lesson of Lear is not
about pushing or producing
or doing what you think you should do.
The lesson of Lear is about stopping
and taking the time to appreciate
who and what you have in your life
and discover who you want to be
while you have it.
We’re at an intermission,
and intermissions are important,
because they give ourselves
the opportunity to take care of ourselves
physically and emotionally:
go to the bathroom,
get a snack, get a drink
and also take a moment to feel
the weight of what just happened onstage,
maybe begin to process
any emotions that that brought up.
I reached out to my community of artists,
and I asked them what plays
were speaking to them
and helping them process this time.
Many of the characters
in the plays they sent
don’t share my lived experience.
And I think their words
are important to hear.
My friend Jeremy sent me a monologue
by Sarah Ruhl from her “Melancholy Play.”
In it, the character is talking about
how she’s feeling, and she says,
“It’s this feeling that you
want to love strangers,
that you want to kiss
the man at the post office
or the woman at the dry cleaners.
You want to wrap your arms
around life, life itself, but you can’t.
And so this feeling wells up in you,
and there’s nowhere
to put this great happiness,
and you’re floating, and then you fall.
And you,
you feel unbearably sad,
and you have to go lie down on the couch.”
I’ve felt that monologue a lot
during this pandemic.
Sometimes I feel this great happiness,
and sometimes I have to
go lie down on the couch.
My theater practice teaches me
that both are OK.
We stop so that we can feel our feelings
instead of covering them.
Next, we breathe.
When we inhale,
we give ourselves the opportunity
to breathe in the present moment
and be aware of what’s happening right now
inside of us, as well as outside of us.
When we exhale,
we allow ourselves to release the moment
so that we can be present
for the next one and the next one
and the next one.
When we feel anxious or uncertain,
we tend to hold our breath.
We’re scared about what’s
going to happen next,
and so we hold onto what’s
happening right now,
which prevents movement,
which keeps us stuck.
Far from helping us,
holding our breath holds us back.
So we stop.
We breathe.
And then we observe:
What’s happening around us?
How do we feel about that?
My friends Greg and Kanisha
told me that I should watch the play
“Pipeline” by Dominique Morisseau.
At the beginning of the play,
maybe the character has
been onstage for a minute.
Omari turns to his girlfriend, and
he says that he’s just, like modestly,
without intentions, just observing.
And his girlfriend says,
“What you gotta be observing for?”
And Omari says, “To take in
my surroundings, learn the world,
not be just tied up in my own
existence and nothing else.”
That observation is the key
to unlocking our empathy
and our curiosity about the world
and igniting our imagination
about how we can make it even better.
My friend Jazmin introduced me to
the play “Marisol” by José Rivera.
And in it, the guardian angel is
talking to Marisol, and she says,
“I don’t expect you to understand
the political ins and outs
of what’s going on.
But you have eyes.
You’ve asked me questions
about children and water
and war and the moon,
questions I’ve been asking myself
for a thousand years.
The universal body is sick, Marisol.
The constellations are wasting away.
The nauseous stars are
full of blisters and sores.
The infected earth
is running a temperature
and everywhere, the universal mind
is wracked with amnesia, boredom
and neurotic obsessions.”
Sound familiar?
We stop.
We breathe.
We observe.
And we use our observations to imagine
a world that is fiercer, braver,
more beautiful.
We use our imaginations
to create something new
based on our connections
to the world and ourselves.
One of the things that I know is this:
there’s always been a certain amount
of uncertainty in the theater,
but this is the most anxious and uncertain
we’ve ever been in my lifetime.
In order to move forward, there’s
going to have to be a lot of change.
Luckily, all great theater provides
the opportunity for transformation.
We can use this intermission
to stop, breathe, observe,
and use our imaginations to create
a more beautiful world onstage and off,
one that is more equitable,
more reflective
and more just.
As Prior says at the end of Tony Kushner’s
masterpiece about the AIDS epidemic,
“Angels in America,”
“I’m almost done.
The fountain’s not flowing now,
they turn it off in the winter,
ice in the pipes.
But in the summer, it is a sight
to see. I want to be here to see it.
I plan to be.
I hope to be.
This disease will be
the end of many of us,
but not nearly all,
and the dead will be commemorated,
and they will struggle on with the living,
and we are not going away.
We won’t die secret deaths anymore.
The world only spins forward.
We will be citizens.
The time has come. Bye, now.
You are fabulous creatures,
each and every one.
And I bless you:
more life.
The great work begins.”
The theater has weathered wars,
outlasted empires
and survived plagues.
It’ll continue.
I don’t know how or when
or what it’ll look like,
but it will.
And so will we,
as long as we do the essential work
of staying connected
to that which is essential
about ourselves,
our communities
and our world.
The great work begins.
Thank you.