Alone together, here in the dark
I was a theater kid all through high school and college. For a long time, a career in theater was the end goal, though the role I imagined for myself changed constantly; playwright, director, performer, light board operator, stage manager. I wanted to do everything, and so I did: acted, danced, worked as a puppeteer, wrote and directed plays, aimed spotlights, ran sound and light boards, constructed scenery and props, ushered people to their seats, ordered people around over headsets that were older than I was.
Once I was out of school, the reality of working in the industry quickly outpaced my love for it: low pay and bad conditions for non-unionized theaters, high competition, rampant sexism (especially on the tech side), and all the interpersonal drama that theater people are known for. I realized that the jobs I could get with my experience and limited network paid worse than a job as a barista, so I did that instead and never really looked back.
But I never stopped loving live performance. I dropped a one-week grocery budget on tickets to Hadestown and twice that to see Sleep No More. I’ve seen The Diary of Anne Frank in a tiny grange hall in rural Vermont, puppet troupes in barns and elementary school gyms, one-woman shows in drag bars, revivals of Grand Guignol one-act horrorshows in haunted forests. I once watched the actual worst-ever one-act with a drunken crowd at the Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins Festival in Chicago. It included a bisexual love triangle, a hip-hop peptalk from a Black homeless character, and a recorder solo. I think it was supposed to be a musical homage to Midsummer Night’s Dream? It was a lot.
Nothing can replaces sitting in the dark amid a sea of strangers, watching a performance. Games, films, and books do not fill the void. I miss theater like I miss café writing dates and roadtrips and sci-fi cons and art museums: not enough to risk my life for it, but its absence renders my life a little less colorful and a lot less pleasurable.
I had the pleasure to watch two performances this past month, both from theater artists I’m lucky to call friends: Siobhan O’Loughlin’s interactive Please Don’t Touch and Darren Canady, playing Langston Hughes in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, by Carlyle Brown.
Darren Canady is a brilliant playwright, who I’m lucky to have had as a teacher while at the University of Kansas. (I wrote the first iteration of FINNA in his screenplay workshop.) There’s a particular reverence for Langston Hughes in Lawrence, KS, where the play was performed, because Hughes spent part of his youth here, and Darren plays Hughes with the gravitas due to him. The first half of the play really sings, when it’s just a writer holding court on the stage as he jumps from topic to topic— beefs with other writers, the anxieties of a Black poet being called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, reminiscences of Harlem in the twenties. Every so often, Hughes trails off mid-sentence to rush back to his typewriter, writing and re-writing the opening stanza of a single poem. It was a beautiful depiction of artist’s work as equal parts emotional alchemy and intellectual labor.
It was odd to feel the emptiness of the performance space, odder than any of the other adaptions. Without an audience to perform to, or to sit next to, something is noticeably missing. And I found the second half of the play didn’t hold my attention nearly so well, when Hughes faces down relentless interrogation by Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. His testimony is recursive and meandering by turns, as Hughes evades direct answers about the role of politics in creating art, and his politics in particular; those of a marginalized artist writing about the violence of a hostile world. Good writing, amazing and moving performances—but it was difficult to get through, and when it ended, I felt guiltily relieved to have my attention back. Being the sole witness to a grueling fight was more tiring that I would have imagined.
This is what, in my opinion, works so well with Siobhan O’Loughlin’s performances over Zoom. There IS an audience, and it’s an active one. Between the lively chat and seeing others’ reactions in real-time, it feels like being in the peanut gallery of a raucous show—a Saturday late-night showing of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, maybe. Pre-pandemic, Siobhan spent years touring Broken Bone Bathtub, an immersive interactive play performed solely in bathrooms (or rooms that had a bathtub in them, at least). Her style is marked by intimate encounters that erase the fourth wall, and she invites audience members to participate in Please Don’t Touch, building intimacy in spite of social distance.
I watched one of Siobhan’s newer shows, “Bathrobe Ritual,” a meditation on nostalgia about the past through the medium of a childhood bedroom, in all its cringey, emo glory. I got to talk a little bit about the beloved pajamas I was wearing (flannel pants with skulls, a gift from my mom for my mastectomy) on camera, hear about others’ inherited sweaters and childhood obsessions, and participate in a defiant new year’s ritual set to a pop-punk ballad.
It felt unbelievably good, tearing up a piece of paper inscribed with something I hoped would be destroyed in 2021 alongside a few dozen other people. Because while I love being immersed in a book or film or game, following characters or exploring the world, I don’t get to do it as part of an audience — being alone but in others’ presence, anonymous and united in silence. I miss that as much as I miss getting dinner with friends. It was a huge part of my life; not just live performances, but sitting in movie theaters and cafés and museums, watching a sunset over the river alongside a handful of strangers, all of us pausing long enough to take it in.
If you’d like to support Theatre Lawrence, their next show will also be available to watch online: Almost, Maine, written by John Cariani and directed by Doug Weaver. Siobhan O’Loughlin performs regularly, with sliding-scale ticket prices available here. Seriously, I can’t recommend her shows enough. You can also support her on Patreon.
A quick reminder that my book FINNA is eligible for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, so please vote for it if you can! You can also pre-order its sequel, DEFEKT.