Theater

OBERAMMERGAU, Germany — There is no doubt in the mind of the Rev. Thomas Gröner that what happened in his village was a miracle.He says he has proof, too.The pandemic had ravaged the village. One in four people are believed to have died. “Whole families, gone,” Father Gröner said.Then villagers stood before a cross and pledged to God that if he spared those who remained, they would perform the Passion Play — enacting Jesus’ life, death and resurrection — every 10th year forever after.It was 1633. The bubonic plague was still raging in Bavaria. But legend has it that after the pledge, no one else in the village died from it.Standing in his church underneath the cross where villagers had once made their promise, Father Gröner held out a battered leather-bound book.“Look,” he said, his fingers scanning a faded page with tightly packed handwriting that abruptly stops three quarters down. “They recorded dozens and dozens of deaths and then — none.”For nearly four centuries, the people of Oberammergau (pronounced oh-ber-AH-mer-gow) more or less kept their promise, celebrating their salvation from one pandemic — until another pandemic forced them to break it.ImageFrom left, Frederik Mayet, who was supposed to play Jesus; Christian Stückl, who has directed the Passion Play for three decades; and Eva Reiser, who was to play Mary, on the unfinished stage of the Passion Play. This year’s Passion Play, scheduled to premiere in May and run through the summer, had to be abandoned because of the coronavirus. An epic production, cast with local residents as actors, the play would have brought half a million visitors to the village and 2,500 people, or half of Oberammergau, onto the world’s biggest open air stage.The production would have been the 42nd since the play’s premiere in 1634. Canceled only twice — in 1770 during the enlightenment and in 1940 during World War II — the play has been performed once every decade and sometimes twice, for special anniversaries. It had to be postponed once before — after too many men had died in World War I to field a cast.Now, as Easter weekend approaches, Oberammergau is praying for another miracle.So far, the village does not have a single known case of Covid-19. More

Gerald Freedman, who directed countless plays, operas and musicals, including the original “Hair” in 1967 and more than a dozen Broadway productions, and who influenced generations of actors in 21 years as dean of the drama school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, died on March 17 at his home in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was 92.Robert Beseda, who was assistant dean under Mr. Freedman and had been his caregiver for the past nine years, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Freedman was a pivotal though somewhat under-the-radar figure in New York theater for decades.He was a trusted assistant to Jerome Robbins when Mr. Robbins was directing the Broadway hits “Bells Are Ringing,” “West Side Story,” and “Gypsy” in the 1950s.He worked closely with Joseph Papp for years, serving as artistic director of Mr. Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and inaugurating the performance space now known as the Public Theater with “Hair.” In the 1970s he directed productions by the Acting Company, the influential troupe founded in 1972 by John Houseman and Margot Harley, and from 1966 to 1989 he directed a number of New York City Opera productions.He had dozens of regional opera and theater credits as well, including 28 at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, where he was artistic director from 1985 to 1997.And as both a director and a teacher, he imparted an abiding appreciation of how to approach a text. Among those on whom he made a lasting impression was Debbie Allen, who played Anita in a critically acclaimed Broadway revival of “West Side Story” in 1980 that was jointly directed by Mr. Robbins and Mr. Freedman.“His approach was unique, didn’t even think about blocking or staging until we sat at a table for at least two weeks breaking down the dramatic narrative, the character, the need and the action,” Ms. Allen said by email. “He guided us to find multiple points of view. I have worked with those same principles ever since.”Mr. Freedman brought that approach to the classroom as well. He preached the basics to young students, like be on time for rehearsal, be prepared and take the work seriously. The actor Billy Magnussen was one such student at the School of the Arts, the University of North Carolina system’s arts conservatory in Winston-Salem.“He taught me to focus my life, my time and the precious moments we share with others; not to waste them,” Mr. Magnussen said by email. “And the fact that he gave up some of his time for a wiseass punk kid and demanded I ask more of myself — I am forever grateful to that gentleman.”Gerald Alan Freedman was born on June 25, 1927, in Lorain, Ohio. His father, Barnie, was a dentist, and his mother, Fannie (Sepsenwol) Freedman, was a teacher. Both were Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia. They steeped their home in art and music, he said, a foundation for his love of the arts.After graduating from Lorain High School he attended Northwestern University, earning a bachelor’s degree there in 1949 and a master’s degree the next year. In 1951 he took a train to New York with vague ideas about becoming a painter or singer or actor. An acquaintance told him that, with his high tenor singing voice, he could earn enough money to get by through singing at religious services.“On Friday nights, I could do two Jewish services at different temples,” he said in an interview for “The School of Doing: Lessons From Theater Master Gerald Freedman,” a 2017 book by Isaac Klein. “On Saturday morning, I could do another Jewish service. On Sunday, I could do usually two churches. An early Mass, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, and in late afternoon there would be another Mass. And with five services, I could live off that for the next week.”He was hired to design and paint scenery at a summer stock company in Massachusetts and then, in 1952, to direct “As You Like It” at Equity Library Theater in New York. Someone from Columbia Pictures saw it and gave him a contract that took him to Hollywood, where one of his first assignments was as dialogue director on “It Should Happen to You,” a George Cukor movie whose stars included Judy Holliday.She became a friend. In 1956 when Ms. Holliday was hired for the musical “Bells Are Ringing” on Broadway, Jerome Robbins, the director, who Mr. Freedman said was somewhat intimidated by the star, hired him to assist on the production.“It was either to placate Judy or as insurance,” Mr. Freedman said. “I never knew which.”The partnership was Mr. Freedman’s big break. He was Mr. Robbins’s assistant again the next year on “West Side Story,” and in 1959 on “Gypsy.” He not only played a significant role in directing those productions; he also served as a buffer between the actors and Mr. Robbins, who could be abrasive.“I went around repairing Jerry’s damage with actors,” Mr. Freedman said in an interview quoted in “Dancing With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins” (2001), by Greg Lawrence. “I don’t mean that in a negative way. It was just because he didn’t know how to talk with them.”By 1960 Mr. Freedman was also working with Mr. Papp. He directed “The Taming of the Shrew” that year for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.“The Festival group,” Arthur Gelb wrote in reviewing that show in The New York Times, “poor in funds but rich in everything that makes for stimulating theater, has, in this production, achieved a vitality, authority, clarity, pace and style that can’t be touched.”In 1964 Mr. Papp named Mr. Freedman artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival and announced his intention to broaden the group’s offerings to include contemporary fare. One of the results was “Hair,” the rock musical with a book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado and music by Galt MacDermot. Mr. Freedman got the assignment of directing the premiere, which was to open inMr. Papp’s new space on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. It was a rocky trip to opening night.“We recognized its great energy and exuberance of spirit,” Mr. Freedman said in a 2008 talk at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “The challenge was to give it structure without destroying its energy and originality and to give it a semblance of a beginning, middle and end.”His efforts were at least partly successful.“The director, Gerald Freedman, has not been able to impose any unity on the show — this hair is strictly untrimmed — but he has helped to bring out the natural vitality of both the piece and the very young performers,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The Times. But the birthing process had created rifts with the book writers; when the show went to Broadway the next year, Tom O’Horgan was the director.Mr. Freedman’s opera work included the world premiere of “Beatrix Cenci” by Alberto Ginastera, with a libretto by William Shand, at the Kennedy Center in 1961, part of the opening festivities for that complex. He directed the same work in 1973 at City Opera.Mr. Freedman brought a number of stars to the productions he directed for the Great Lakes Theater Festival, including Piper Laurie, Olympia Dukakis and Hal Holbrook. He continued to direct after taking the North Carolina post, staging more than 30 productions there.He leaves no immediate survivors.For a 2017 podcast for WFDD, a public radio station in Winston-Salem, Mr. Freedman was asked about his legacy.“I’m most proud of the way I’ve opened up so many actors to what acting really is,” he said. “They have talent, they have intelligence, they have imagination, but they have to add a reality. That’s the essence of anything they do. And that’s it, really. Reality.“It sounds very simple, but it’s very difficult.” More

Theater, at its simplest, requires an actor and an audience. And in this strange moment, that’s a very tall order. Scripts are available, of course, and filmed performance, too. But if you are missing not only plays themselves, but the ephemera that surrounds them — the cramped seats and the rustling wrappers, the marquee lights and the scrum at the stage door — you might lose yourself in a novel of the theater, instead.In this period of suspension, novels set in the theater are portals into a realm that in real life has temporarily gone dark. Immersive by nature, staged inside our minds, they can sit us down in a buzzing audience or slip us into a darkened wing, sneak us inside a tense rehearsal room or pop us onto a bar stool at an after-party.In our heads, inside these books, we’re free to do what right now is forbidden — to arrive in Edinburgh, say, and roam the streets in a festival throng where social distancing is not required, or to gather with friends and put on a play of our own.There’s poignancy in that, but it’s soothing, too, a calming act of imagination. And it’s a distraction that can be stretched long past a play’s typical running time, with as many intermissions as you like.We’ve made a chronological list of some of our favorites. The concession stand is all you.‘Mansfield Park,’ by Jane AustenThis 1814 novel has never enjoyed the obsessive fandom other Austen books attract. Blame its inhibited heroine, Fanny Price. But I love “Mansfield Park,” because it makes theater dangerous. In the book’s first half, the estate’s young people decide to stage a private production of August von Kotzebue’s “Lover’s Vows,” a racy romantic drama about illegitimacy and sexual desire. (Because Fanny is no fun, Fanny disapproves.) In fleet scenes, Austen captures the excitement of rehearsal, the frisson of “showmance” and the paradox of theater as both liberating and distorting. ALEXIS SOLOSKI‘Theatre,’ by W. Somerset MaughamElegant and bitchy, this acid Maugham comedy, published in 1937, describes a London diva threatened by a young rival who covets both her young lover and her career. Some will know this story from Istvan Szabo’s 2004 movie, “Being Julia,” starring a splendid Annette Bening, but the novel has its own considerable charms, particularly a late scene in which Julia outclasses her adversary by means of the perfect dress. And then celebrates by eating carbs. Julia’s son complains that his parents have warped him by raising him in a world of make-believe. But make-believe, Julia argues, “is the only reality.” SOLOSKI‘The Swish of the Curtain,’ by Pamela BrownIn 1938, a 14-year-old Pamela Brown began writing this book, the first of the Blue Door series. Three years later, as a wartime evacuee, she published it and used the proceeds to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. One of the loveliest children’s books about young actors (alongside Noel Streatfeild’s Gemma series), it follows a group of seven children in the English town of Fenchester who discover an abandoned theater. After fixing up the place, they begin to invent and rehearse their own theatricals, discovering various talents — writing, costuming, stage design. The adventures are gentle and the children’s personalities — sometimes generous, sometimes bratty — appealingly real. SOLOSKI‘Next Season,’ by Michael BlakemoreThe acting job pays a paltry 16 pounds a week, but Sam Beresford accepts it eagerly, heading north from London to spend the 1959 season in a seaside repertory company, where ambition, duplicity and jealousy are far more plentiful than juicy roles. Blakemore, the director who won Tony Awards for “Copenhagen” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” writes with marvelous insight and delicious ease, chronicling the soaring joys and petty miseries of a little-known actor’s life. But this isn’t an insiders-only book — and the roman à clef gossip it sparked when it came out in 1968 still adds to our pleasure in it. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES‘Wise Children,’ by Angela CarterLike her equally wondrous “Nights at the Circus,” Carter’s 1991 magical realist comedy is both a cracking picaresque and a meditation on what it means when art and life commingle. Narrated by Dora Chance, a twin who has lived 75 years as a trifling theater and film star, it details the adventures of the Chance and Hazard families, clans given to twins, theatricality and convoluted paternity claims. The plot, which tips its hat to Shakespeare’s comedies, is largely impenetrable, but Carter delivers its zany twists and turns with sweet-bitter affection. Dora’s fervent motto: “What a joy it is to dance and sing.” SOLOSKI‘Tipping the Velvet,’ by Sarah WatersA shrewd and sexy work of historical fiction, Waters’s debut novel excavates a forgotten mode of music hall performance, embedded within a queer love story. In Victorian England, Nan, a teenage oyster slinger, falls for the glamorous Kitty, a “masher” who performs popular songs dressed as man. Nan follows Kitty, first to London and then onto the stage. Through disguise and performance and adventures in the sex trade, Nan comes to understand who she is and what she wants. The characterizations are rich and the evocation of the limelit music halls dazzling. SOLOSKI‘Remainder,’ by Tom McCarthyThis mindbender, originally published in France in 2005, has nothing to do with the theater proper, but its action is consumed with a bizarre theatrical immersion; when I first read it, I couldn’t wait to urge it on a bookish actor friend. In the aftermath of an accident, the central character receives a hefty settlement — then uses it to surround himself with people hired to re-enact real-world events for him. The novel was McCarthy’s debut, and it shares some DNA with Charlie Kaufman’s grimly obsessive 2008 movie, “Synecdoche, New York,” as well as with every drama student who has ever insisted that life itself is a performance. COLLINS-HUGHES‘One Good Turn,’ by Kate AtkinsonLined up outside, waiting to get into a fringe festival performance in Edinburgh, the spectators aren’t sure at first whether the clash they witness between two passing drivers is entertainment or genuine combat. But characters often question their own sense of reality in this fast-paced 2006 detective novel, which uses the festival-frenzied city as the backdrop to its many-layered intrigue. For Atkinson’s restlessly retired investigator, Jackson Brodie, the dangerous case proves more consistent company than his actress girlfriend, who surely is cheating on him even as he finances the obscure existentialist play that brought them both to town. COLLINS-HUGHES‘At Night We Walk in Circles,’ by Daniel AlarcónThough most of my favorite theater novels provide an abundance of comfort, the literary equivalent of family-size concessions candy, Alarcón’s 2013 book, set in a nameless South American country, offers a less reassuring read. Its entwined stories, narrated by a journalist, follow Nelson, a young actor cast in “The Idiot President,” a guerrilla theater company’s touring show, and Henry, the company’s leader and a former political prisoner. If the form sometimes falters, the novel searchingly explores how life demands its own performance and its own peculiar participation. SOLOSKI‘Hag-Seed,’ by Margaret AtwoodFelix Phillips, an esteemed artistic director abruptly exiled from his Canadian theater company in a cunning coup, is the stand-in for the magical Prospero in Atwood’s delightfully inspired, wonderfully wrought 2016 retelling of “The Tempest,” part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of adaptations by contemporary novelists. As Felix broods in wounded solitude, the ghost of his dead daughter, Miranda, keeps him company. Only when he is coaxed into teaching drama at a correctional center does he get a chance at retribution — by way of an interactive “Tempest” and a cast of inmates who feel deep sympathy for Caliban and his witchy mother, too. COLLINS-HUGHES‘Trust Exercise,’ by Susan ChoiThe drawback to literary laurels, like the National Book Award that this stunner rightly won last fall, is that they can make honorees seem less like must-reads than should-reads. But Choi’s shrewd, funny, wholly absorbing #MeToo theater takedown — set in the 1980s in an arts high school’s drama program, and later among its alumni as damaged adults — is the farthest thing from an intellectual chore. A gasp-making achievement of construction, observation and emotional synthesis, it takes exquisite aim at what Choi calls “the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts,” and at a toxic system of training and practice that worships gurus as gods. COLLINS-HUGHES‘Temper,’ by Layne FargoAdventurous provocation that bruises actors’ bodies and minds is the theatrical brand at Indifferent Honest, a scruffy-chic Chicago storefront theater whose sadistic artistic director, Malcolm, is its much deferred-to perennial star. He’s the kind of charismatic drama-world tough guy who wants real violence, not fight choreography, on his non-Equity stage. A tightly plotted, enjoyably pulpy psychological thriller from 2019, this is a portrait of an artist as a malevolent force. Told by dueling female narrators, it is also as much a fantasy of violent revenge as the new play that Malcolm is readying, perhaps unwisely, for production. COLLINS-HUGHES More

PARIS — The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote: “The sole cause of people’s unhappiness is that they do not know how to stay quietly in their rooms.” Yet at a time when much of the world has been forced to hunker down, French theater-makers are fighting to fill the void by making noise online.They’re producing so much alternative content, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to keep up. Since France imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 17, each day has brought new announcements from prominent theaters. In addition to releasing archive recordings, some are making podcasts and videos; others are offering direct interaction with performers through one-on-one phone calls. The country’s oldest troupe, the Comédie-Française, has even started an online channel, “The Comédie Continues,” offering several hours of programming each day beginning at 4 p.m.Under the circumstances, it would be churlish to complain about artists’ desire to connect with audiences in some fashion. Theater, which depends on crowds gathering to watch performers at close quarters, is experiencing significant loss and upheaval, with many stagings either delayed indefinitely or canceled outright. But a sampling of stopgap offerings often left me underwhelmed.Many institutions are going beyond stepping out of their comfort zone by experimenting with formats that are firmly outside their area of expertise. Standards are high for audio and video productions these days, and onscreen improvising requires a different skill set than performing existing plays onstage, as the Comédie-Française’s first day of streaming suggested.The company has a busy schedule, offering new content from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and then two archive recordings — a mix of talks and house productions. A different actor serves as host every day: Serge Bagdassarian opened the run by lifting a tiny red curtain in front of the camera to start, mimicking a stage performance. His colleagues then presented scheduled segments like poetry readings, literary commentary for high school students and interviews. More

They took their new jobs less than two years ago: a diverse group of ambitious arts administrators eager to see how their ideas and dreams might influence theaters around the country.Now they find themselves confronting a situation they never could have imagined: leading their theaters through a global pandemic.On Wednesday, the new arts administrators from four important American regional theaters, joined by the Public Theater in New York, said they would commission a set of short plays from writers whose financial lives have been upended by the shutdown of arts organizations as people stay home to contain the coronavirus. The theaters said they had two major goals: to steer a bit of money to struggling artists and to inspire new work at a tough time.“As soon as the writing was on the wall, and everybody was canceling and going to streaming, it seemed important to not just share our content virtually, but to engage people in the act of making theater and participating in the art form in a different way,” said Stephanie Ybarra, the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage. Ybarra has a running group text with three other new artistic directors — Jacob G. Padrón at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Hana Sharif at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, and Maria Manuela Goyanes at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington — and they jumped on the phone.“We were all in various states of organizational crisis,” Ybarra said. “But we got buy-in on a general, ‘Let’s do something together.’”The result, which is being called “Play at Home,” is a website (playathome.org) featuring new plays, intended to take no more than 10 minutes to read, that are free so that anyone can read or perform them at home or by video conferencing. The commissioning theaters are providing a $500 stipend to the playwrights they select to write the works.The four regional theaters and the Public have been joined by Playwrights Realm in New York and the Old Globe in San Diego, and are hoping other theaters will join, too. Each theater is separately choosing playwrights and paying commissions.Among the first group of writers participating are Jaclyn Backhaus, Jordan E. Cooper, Aleshea Harris, Michael R. Jackson and Lauren Yee. Many are less well known, and were chosen because they had productions that were canceled and for whom the money might be meaningful.Ybarra noted that, because the plays are not intended to be professionally produced, the writers do not need to worry about the cast size (often a limiting factor at regional theaters with tight budgets) or practicality (no need to figure out how a special effect or magic trick could actually be accomplished onstage). “We’ve been able to unleash quite a bit of imagination within these considerations,” she said.“We’re asking playwrights to consider writing something incredibly joyful, something that can be read intergenerationally, something that could be fun for young people to read with families,” Ybarra said. “The subject is decidedly not the pandemic.” More

LONDON — The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for the best of world theater, dance and music that has been held in the Scottish city every year since 1947, has been canceled because of the coronavirus.So has the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a scrappier event devoted to comedy and theater, which bills itself as the world’s largest arts event.The Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Art Festival and the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an event involving armed forces bands from around the world, won’t take place this year either.The cancellations, announced on Wednesday in a news release, are the latest sign that the pandemic’s impact on the world’s cultural calendar will last at least into summer.The International Festival was first held in 1947, with the aim of uniting people through culture in the aftermath of World War II. The other festivals and events sprung up around it, establishing Edinburgh as a popular August tourist destination.“Since their inception in 1947, the Edinburgh festivals have existed to champion the flowering of the human spirit, and in the face of their truly unprecedented global emergency, we believe that this spirit is needed now more than ever,” Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said in a statement.“Having taken advice and considered all the options,” she said, “we collectively believe this is the only appropriate response.”According to the release, the 2019 Fringe involved over 30,000 performers, from school groups to star comedians, who took part in 3,841 shows. Ms. McCarthy said the festival’s organizers would do all they could to support “the thousands of artists and participants directly affected by today’s decisions.”The Edinburgh International Book Festival’s organizers said they would “program a series of online events” to run in place of this year’s events.Since mid-March, the coronavirus has been bringing the shutters down on Britain’s cultural life. On Mar. 23, the country was put on a virtual lockdown, with people urged to go outside only for essential trips, such as for buying food or for one session of exercise a day. The police have been using drones to enforce the measures and shaming some transgressors on social media.Some major summer cultural events, including the Glastonbury music festival, held each June, had already announced they would not go ahead, but the Edinburgh cancellations will come as a major blow to people who had hoped that later events would be unaffected.Their cancellation was not the only sign this week that cultural events in Britain will feel the virus’s impact later than many hoped. The Barbican arts center in London said on Wednesday it would remain closed until at least July.“Looking at how long social distancing measures are likely to be in place, we feel we’re very unlikely to be open until at least the end of June,” Nicholas Kenyon, the venue’s managing director, said in a news release.“We therefore felt the best approach,” he said, “was to inform audiences, as well as the artists and organizations we work with, as soon as we could.” More

In many cities, the threat of the novel coronavirus and the efforts to slow its spread have altered daily life dramatically. Ordinary objects (doorknobs, soap) seem transformed, banal activities — biting a nail, buying milk — freighted with danger. New vocabulary has emerged, as have new habits and new ways of navigating a narrowed landscape.Still, if you see enough theater and you have, like me, a fascination with onstage dystopias, certain elements may feel familiar — restrictions on movement and behavior, distrust of the environment and each other. “King Lear” and “Endgame,” “Far Away” and “Blasted” are classics of the genre. But you could fill a shelf with plays of the past several decades that have dreamed bleak outcomes for humanity. And then, in a pinch, you could burn that shelf and those plays for warmth.Recently, I spoke with several playwrights — via telephone and email — about what it is like to first imagine a cataclysm and then live through one. Because playwriting is a solitary art, many of the men and women described routines that felt both somewhat typical and wholly changed. “Friends have suggested that I must be coming up with so many stories during this time,” Robert O’Hara said. “I’m simply hoping we all make it through this alive.” These are excerpts from the conversations.José Rivera, “Marisol”The Public Theater, 1993Apocalyptic event A young copy editor navigates a despoiled New York City. The moon has disappeared, and food has turned to salt.Your circumstances “I live alone, on the Upper West Side. My routine hasn’t changed very much. I get up every morning, and I write for four to six hours a day. Generally, I’m as isolated as I always was.”Your play “I lived a lot of those experiences. I was burnt out of my Bronx apartment. I was attacked by a guy with a golf club on the subway. Crack was beginning to explode, as well as AIDS. I didn’t set out to write a piece of prophecy. I was responding to my daily existence.”How to live now “I resist writing about a crisis when I’m in the middle of the crisis, because I can’t see clearly.”Anne Washburn, “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play”Playwrights Horizons, 2013Apocalyptic event Following a pandemic and technological destruction, surviving humans shelter together, exchanging remembered song, stories and episodes of “The Simpsons.”Your environment “I speak to you from our bedroom in Brooklyn. I’m with my husband, Gordon. The apartment is a sty. So that’s very occupying. My goal is usually to spend all my time at home, but since I never get to realize that goal, it’s hard to say what this will be like.”Your play “I was thinking about a pandemic, a fantastically quick-moving, incredibly mortal, sweeping humanity off the face of the earth pandemic. This is not that.”How to live now “Dystopias are soothing because the worst has already happened. What’s awful about right now is that we’re before whatever is next. We can’t start to cope because we’re all still being slung around by the future. Either this is the worst time, or it’s the easiest time and it gets much worse.”Jennifer Haley, “The Nether”MCC, 2015Apocalyptic event In the wake of an ecological collapse, humans spend most of their waking hours in elaborate online worlds. A detective investigates a potentially dangerous site.Your environment “I’m in Los Angeles, sheltering in my cottage. I’m pretty used to it. I’m naturally a hermit and I have a cat — there’s actually a whole community of cats around here. I’ve been talking more regularly to close family and friends.”Your play “I was thinking about climate change, working with the idea that nature had become so compromised, it was actually far more pleasant to spend time in virtual realms. I was trying to say that the internet as a piece of technology is not all bad. I’m so grateful that we have the internet right now.”How to live now “We’ve been living under the illusion that we can reliably predict what our lives might look like a week, a month, year or two from where we are. All of a sudden, we don’t know.”Mac Rogers, “The Honeycomb Trilogy,”The Gym at Judson, 2015Apocalyptic event Returning astronauts seed earth with apian life-forms who enslave humanity. A generation later, humanity rebels.Your environment “I’m in my apartment in Long Island City with my wife, Sandy. She just popped in to say that she’s saving me from the apocalypse. She went through the various canned stuff and figured out how many meals we have left.”Your play “In my plays, collapse is specifically motivated by human actions. A big difference between that and the coronavirus situation is that viruses don’t think like a human enemy. They’re just doing their thing.”How to live now “Jumping into apocalyptic science fiction was a way of getting away from myself. I was like, I want to force my drama into a world that I couldn’t possibly survive in. Now I’m actually looking down the barrel of a world where, if there were total societal breakdown, I would be one of the first to go. I can’t fight. I can’t forage. My wife would outlive me by quite a bit.”Penelope Skinner, “The Ruins of Civilization”Manhattan Theater Club, 2016Apocalyptic event In an ecologically imperiled future, the British government has placed profound limits on childbearing. One woman tries to flout the system.Your environment “We are in London: me, my partner, our toddler and our dog. In some ways, my life isn’t so radically different — I work from home, we hardly ever went out in the evenings. But our routine has shrunk, and anxiety for the people we love and the world and the vulnerable is huge.”Your play “It was inspired by research I did about the climate crisis — a year of research followed by five years of living with the anxiety resulting from that research.”How to live now “Just over two years ago, our child was born with a serious long-term medical condition, and I’ve learned a lot about being in the moment, not projecting too far into the future and trying to manage overwhelming feelings of anxiety. I have also developed a profound respect and gratitude for people working at every level of the health-care profession. We are in their hands now.”Zoe Kazan, “After the Blast”LCT3, 2017Apocalyptic event An unnamed catastrophe has damaged the earth’s surface, perhaps irreparably. Underground, a woman bonds with a robot.Your environment “I had a job in Australia; my parents came with me. Paul, my partner, was in London working on the ‘Batman’ movie. Paul’s production shut down, and then my production shut down. And as of yesterday morning at 6 a.m., we’re staying in my parents’ basement. I’m grateful to not be totally alone.”Your play “I thought about it for like five years. It seemed really important to me that it be ecological, but that it not be an accident, like a meteor or something that had no causality. My friends who are introverted who saw my play, were like, that seems like a very hopeful future — where people are safe and spend their days reading and doing science.”How to live now “I wouldn’t say I feel prepared in any way. But I am like, ‘Oh, all of the Oregon Trail skills that I have may come in handy.’ ”Robert O’Hara, “Mankind”Playwrights Horizons, 2018Apocalyptic event In this fierce satire, women have gone extinct, and abortion is illegal. Somehow two men have and lose a baby.Your environment “I’m sheltering with my partner at our home upstate. We are adjusting to being around each other so much. We have to find the time to settle down and quiet our minds. The challenge of sitting inside the unknowable is something I usually manufacture in my art. But this is not a 90 minute one-act.”Your play “I imagined a world where half the population disappeared. I hope we are not living through that right now.”How to live now “The thrill of being an artist is to imagine the unimaginable. There is no thrill in sitting inside of a real pandemic. This is not fiction.”Andrew R. Butler, “Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future”Ars Nova, 2018Apocalyptic event Climate change and resource scarcity have created profound political upheaval. In the 23rd century, government cracks down on cyborg life as a ragtag band plays on.Your environment “I’m in my apartment in Brooklyn, in an old building on Ocean Avenue. I live with my partner — and our two cats — and we’re both here doodling away, getting in each other’s hair.”Your play “I was thinking of climate shift and the resulting political divisions. I truly hadn’t imagined a giant plague scenario.”How to live now “I so desperately want this to be temporary. I’m intrigued by the creativity that is emerging in this new social-spatial arrangement. And I’m curious about what will stick.”Duncan Macmillan, “Lungs”Postponed from the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2020 spring seasonApocalyptic event A couple decides whether or not to bring a baby into a world that seems much like ours, but devolves into ecological catastrophe and extreme inequality.Your environment “I’m at home in North West London. My son is having his last day at school. Things are eerie. The shops are empty. My phone is lighting up with people either panicking or sending funny videos.”Your play “‘Lungs’ touches on political unrest, climate change, economic uncertainty. When I wrote it, people seemed to find the characters’ global concerns absurd. Now it seems less satirical.”How to live now “We’re experiencing the sort of disruption that people elsewhere in the world have been experiencing for a long time. I’m choosing to see this as a collective act of compassion that we’re choosing to undertake as a way to protect those who are less privileged and more vulnerable than we are.” More

In the hours after Broadway shut down for 30 days to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Off Broadway closures followed in a wave — show upon show postponed or suspended or prematurely ended.Ars Nova was one of those companies, going dark the same night that Broadway did, and for the same length of time. On March 12, after just two previews, it paused production of the music-theater piece on its Greenwich Village stage, Heather Christian’s “Oratorio for Living Things,” and halted all activity at its headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen, an incubator for emerging artists and their work.Then, on March 23, Ars Nova — which has been a launching pad for artists including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annie Baker and Billy Eichner — took what its managing director, Renee Blinkwolt, called a “calculated leap of faith.” While much of Off Broadway has adopted a wait-and-see posture toward productions slated for late spring, or postponed them without announcing new dates, Ars Nova took the concrete step of canceling the remainder of its season, which was to have ended June 30.In doing so, it promised to pay in full each person who had been scheduled to work during that time: staffers, artists, independent contractors. The opening night photographer for “Oratorio,” or an usher for an April 10 performance? On the list. It adds up to an estimated 223 people, for a total of about $685,000 — such a hefty price tag for a company with a $3.7 million budget that Blinkwolt chuckled wryly when she spoke it aloud.“Pardon the laugh,” she said by phone from her home in Astoria, Queens. “I take it very seriously. It’s just a big number to make a commitment to right now.”But a commitment it is, and it comes at a time when some major regional companies — including California Shakespeare Theater, which nixed its entire 2020 season; Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which will be dark through Sept. 6; and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., which canceled the rest of its season — have announced layoffs or furloughs with their closures. Broadway, under an emergency agreement, will pay its unionized workers for only two and a half weeks of its shutdown, most of that at the minimum rate.This may be a good place to mention that Ars Nova did not seek an article about the course it has chosen. On the contrary, Blinkwolt and Jason Eagan, the company’s artistic director, worried that discussing it publicly could look like they were shaming colleagues amid an industry-rattling pandemic. They know that other arts leaders are agonizing, too, about how best to take care of their people and safeguard their institutions.“It’s not meant to be virtue-signaling,” Eagan said from his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, “but we are putting money in artists’ pockets. That is something we are doing because we are in the fortunate position of being able to do it.”As Blinkwolt framed it, that ability has nothing to do with an angel donor — there isn’t one, she said — but rather serendipity. More