The Forgotten Art of Assembly
Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making
It’s 11 am. Outside, the city is quiet and the high, pale cast of light is in the window. Inside, a feeling of exhilaration shoots through my body. I’ve successfully made it through the New York State unemployment website, a triumph so sizeable I no longer feel the need to do anything that even resembles productivity for the rest of the day. I, like many other theatre artists, have been laid off from the patchwork of employment that pays my rent and have had all artistic projects put on hold indefinitely. Now, wondering what to do next, confined to my living room, I begin slavishly scrolling through my social media feeds. This is when I notice a jarring dissonance between the kinds of posts that populate it. There are of course the self-aggrandizing posts advertising new quarantine workout routines, the dog and cat videos, and the photographs chronicling every home-cooked meal prepared and served on the same characterless Ikea china. Now that everyone has discovered Mark Bittman’s New York Times No-Knead Bread recipe, trying to escape the image of a mediocre country loaf is nigh impossible. But these aren’t the posts that give me pause, I have been lobbying for more yeasted doughs on Instagram for years. It is the virtual play readings, the 1-minute quarantine play scripts, the archival production footage, the musical…
