Pre-Pandemic Memories: Performance in the Before Times

Kevin Ramessar, Debbie Christine Tjong, Janelle McDermoth, and Freddy Hall in We’re Gonna Die at Second Stage Theater (2020). Photo: Joan Marcus.

In this issue, PAJ’s regular Art & Performance Notes section features memories of live performance prior to the shutdown of theatres during the Covid-19 pandemic. For many, March 2021 marked a full year since the closing of theatres as live performances moved online, were postponed indefinitely, or canceled altogether. While there were numerous virtual productions that arose from this period to engage with, this issue provides a unique moment in time—between lockdown and the return of in-person theatre—to engage with the past from the far side of a global pandemic. Has the very means (and meaning) of performance changed for good? Will Zoom be the proscenium arch of the twenty-first century?

Contributors were asked to write about one of the last shows they attended in person and to reflect on how these specific productions resonated over the past year. We also asked them to write about how the production’s meaning has shifted from the perspective of the present. The ten essays collected here riff on the turn from the live to the virtual, the impact of the pandemic on theatres and theatre audiences, the rise of social and political movements over the past year, and, more broadly, on the play of pre-pandemic memories in a time of social distancing. Essays recall both the joys and frustrations of attending live theatre as well as the aesthetic experience of watching these productions, and the act of planning for and going to a performance event to share collective space with others—experiences that have all but disappeared into memory over the past year and a half.

The productions discussed here range in style and content, including work from playwrights Matthew Lopez, Tony Kushner, Dominique Morisseau, Lucas Hnath, Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, and Young Jean Lee; a dance piece by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born; a hands-on interactive technology performance at BAM’s Fishman Space; and productions directed by Robert Lepage and Simon Stone. As theatres prepare to return to in-person performance, and public gatherings become normalized once again, these essays reflect on time spent away from live theatre and the importance of memories that sustained us all during isolation.