What makes online theater special
Is it still theater if you can press “pause,” shape it into evenly sized screens and access it on your phone?
Online theater shows, which have proliferated in recent weeks, are not any kind of replacement for “real” theater. They are not a credible simulation. They are not an equivalent or a useful variation. But they are making do with what they’ve got, they’ve become their own thing. I, for one, am grateful, and I’m decreeing that this is proper theater.
These Facebook Live and
Zoom and Twitch projects, planned and rehearsed and staged and presented in ways that fly in the face of the way theater is usually done, have been a godsend for me. There are tougher withdrawals, but it has been odd to realize that these past five weeks has been the longest time I’ve spent without seeing live entertainment since I was a young child.
Since even at the best of times live theater isn’t there every time you want it, theater junkies like myself can be pretty accepting of new forms. I’ve always been a big fan of radio theater, whether it’s the “Lux Radio Theater” golden age adaptations of famous plays from the 1930s or the contemporary, social issue-saturated works being commissioned now by the BBC. Those feel like theater to me. There’s a spareness and urgency to them that mimics aspects of the live theater experience.
On Friday, April 17, I tuned in the “KCAB Radio” channel on Twitch.TV. KCAB is an online offshoot of the student-run underground Yale Cabaret theater space on Park Street in New Haven. Yale Cabaret usually produces around 20 shows during the school year, which run for six performances each. For decades, I lived two blocks from the Cabaret and was a diehard Friday night at 11 p.m. regular.
This semester, one of the Cabaret plays was going to be “Ain’t No Dead Thing” by A.K. Payne, a current playwriting student at the Yale School of Drama and a recent graduate of Yale College. With the Cabaret space shuttered, the script was revised as an audio play. You could find a virtual playbill