A Note from the Editor: Essentials

John Fletcher

Theatre Topics, Volume 31, Number 2, July 2021, pp. ix-xii (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2021.0020

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802097

[ Access provided at 20 Oct 2021 03:34 GMT from UW-Madison Libraries ]

 A Note from the Editor: Essentials

As those readers who saw the original call for papers know, my initial plans for a 2021 special
issue centered on the notion of intimacy. I imagined a slate of pieces about intimacy choreography
on stage and screen, intimacy awareness in theatre classrooms, and intimate ruminations about the
ever-fascinating transactions between performers and audiences, between dramatic events and the
places that house them, and between projects that speak to and with one another across time and
space. That was in March 2020.

By April, it became clear that the year would turn the comfort of familiar intimacies into
aching nostalgia. Remember seeing a live show in a crowded theatre? Remember reconnecting with
friends over drinks at a conference or a party? Remember hugging someone? Of course, 2020–21
inflicted deeper wounds: lives snuffed out, justice undone, incomes suspended, and political stabili-
ties frayed. Losing touch—refraining from physical closeness with others, especially indoors—only
made these traumas harder to endure.

The idea of essentials as a replacement special issue topic grew out of the absence of intimacy. I
realized, first, that many in our society—the so-called essential workers—did not have the privilege
of isolation. For people like delivery drivers, grocers, food staff, medical personnel, and custodial
workers, continued contact was obligatory, often without the necessary gear to keep them safe. The
pandemic reminded us again how badly we as a culture do at valuing those whose labors we depend
on every day. What other essentials, I wondered, do we take for granted?

I saw also how theatre artists and teachers were adapting to the prohibition on proximity.
How does a live artform go remote? How do I perform a scene with you when even our smallest
interactions suffer a microsecond’s time delay? How do I connect with students when all we can
see of one another are glitchy Brady Bunch boxes, many of which are blank? How do I enjoy that
organic exchange with colleagues about work and lives when every Zoom session feels like a strained,
excuse-my-mess/children/pets/stress performance of perseverance? What remains when we have
stripped away so much that we would normally define as essential to theatre, teaching, and even
everyday interactions?

Some pandemic lessons have proved valuable. We have all acquired an appreciation of personal
boundaries, a change that intimacy-awareness specialists have long argued for. Classes and conferences
(and even in some cases productions) have become much more accessible for many thanks to lowered
costs, universal recording, and audio captioning. So many old practices and conventions we thought
indispensable now seem optional or even retrograde. Although I like being able to handle certain
interactions with Zoom, even I worry about how the technology imposes troubling renegotiations
of privacy and work–life balance.

On a different level, all of us are much more conscious now of the fragility of our social and
political norms. Most of us, hopefully, are more careful about recognizing the injustices against BIPOC
folk and others that such norms can mask. As we emerge from the pandemic, we find ourselves sad,
tired, and frazzled. But I hope we have also grown wiser and defter, inoculated against certain kinds
of ignorance and poised to respond to future challenges. How long will such wisdom and dexterity
last, I wonder? What booster shots may be required to reinforce them?

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The fourteen pieces in this issue each capture a bit of the stress and isolation since the pandemic
began. Each essay dwells on something essential about theatrical practice, teaching, and research,
and each gestures beyond the present, lifting up durable reflections and questions for us to carry
out of quarantine.

I love how our three peer-reviewed essays for this issue represent the different forms that
“scholarship” can take in our field. Nathan Stith, Aria Gastón-Panthaki, and Rachel Morris get us
started with an impressive mixed-method study, “The Theatre Industry’s Essential Workers: Catalysts
for Change.” Combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, the authors provide a snapshot of
the pandemic year’s impact on professional theatre workers. Yet, far from relaying a list of laments,
the writers spotlight areas of hope and activism. This year, they reveal, has helped many profession-
als reassess what theatre can and should do differently moving forward. Reading artists’ dreams for
tomorrow makes me even more eager to see theatres reopen.

Anne García-Romero shares a rich, thick description of María Irene Fornés’s playwriting peda-
gogy in “Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century.”
The author reminds us that Fornés’s work as a teacher is as essential to her legacy as her status as
a renowned playwright. By first relating her own experiences as Fornés’s student and then taking
us through how she and her collaborators have adapted Fornesian teaching to the present, García-
Romero brings us into “Irene’s room.” She gifts us with an intimate insight into one of our most
venerable artist-teachers.

No fewer than nine artist-scholar-teachers from multiple countries coordinated for this issue’s
final essay, “Theatre Essentials in Three Acts: Collaboration, Care, Time.” They warn that this piece
“is not an article.” Sure enough, the polyvocal tapestry of arguments, inquiries, and experiences you
will find in their offering does not resemble either of the other two peer-reviewed essays—or anything
else I have read in Theatre Topics. Yet, echoing the piece’s anonymous readers, I affirm that this also
is a kind of research, a collectively devised performative writing that enacts the themes it analyzes.
Sprawling and poignant, messy and beautiful, the piece distills so much of what 2020–21 has come
to represent in my memory. Different segments will captivate some readers and bewilder others;
your mileage may vary. I urge you never to forget, however, the minor miracle of collaborative time
and care this work represents. Intimate in defiance of isolation, these authors’ work leaves us with
both challenge and inspiration.

We have eleven notes from the field. The first four address pedagogy before, within, and beyond
the pandemic time. Daniel Smith and Ann Folino White take us through the multiyear reshaping of
their theatre studies curriculum. Balancing the expectations of their production-minded program,
the makeup and needs of their students, and the imperative to decenter white Euro-Americanness
in historical and literary study, the authors model a difficult, necessary process of asking, “what is
essential in teaching theatre history?” Their struggles, questions, and answers will hopefully guide
others’ curricular revisions.

Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard, two of the first and most accomplished advocates for theatrical
intimacy awareness, apply their philosophy of consent to the Zoom teaching era in “Consent and
Cameras in the Great Digital Pivot.” As they observe, Zoom and related platforms are not merely
impersonal, but also strikingly intimate. Zoom centers on our faces and invades our spaces. Respect-
ing students’ right to consent or not to this intimacy, the authors argue, may involve tolerating and
adapting to students’ choice to keep their cameras turned off. I suspect their thoughtful provocations
will persist even as many classes shift away from all-remote teaching.

The difficulties of such transitions back to “normal life” form the basis of Kate Busselle’s
“De-Roling and Debriefing: Essential Aftercare for Educational Theatre.” She calls for attention
to helping young actors transition from deep immersion in theatrical roles to their everyday lives.
 A Note from the Editor: Essentials xi

Drawing on techniques of psychodrama as well as prior calls for debriefing after productions, Busselle
makes a compelling case for incorporating structured decompression as a best practice for classes
and rehearsal rooms.

Rick Mitchell theorizes another kind of de-roling in “Teaching in the Age of the Essential
Online Classroom: Pandemic Playwriting and the Emancipated Spectator.” In this case (and fol-
lowing philosopher Jacques Rancière’s model of the ignorant schoolmaster), Mitchell adapts to
the pandemic shutdown by relinquishing his role as all-knowing, in-control expert in playwriting
classes. By allowing his students space to express their experiences and feelings in open projects,
Mitchell discovers reserves of creativity and honesty in them that he might otherwise have missed.
The examples he shares are a real treat.

Karen Jean Martinson and Nicola Olsen bridge the transition from teaching to production in
their lively conversation, “The Total Theatre Eye: A Conversation about Dramaturgy and Creativity.”
They recreate the thrill of two bright and creative artist-scholars sharpening a sense of what produc-
tion dramaturgy can be. Their talk reinforces how dramaturgy involves not merely lobby displays or
research packets (although these are wonderful), but also a “total theatre eye”—a perspective that can
enhance collaborative possibility in the rehearsal room. I especially admire how this piece models a
healthy, mutually rewarding relationship between mentor (Martinson) and mentee (Olsen).

We turn then to the essentials of production practices. Although no one would wish for a
pandemic, the past year has offered a rare opportunity to test long-argued theoretical stances about
“liveness” in theatre. As critics rush to rethink if and how theatre happens without physical co-pres-
ence, they will turn to the manifold creative experiments that artists have innovated during 2020–21.

The next three notes each provide invaluable case studies of such experiments. Mike Poblete
relates his process of dramaturging a digital Love’s Labour’s Lost in “Building an Engaging Zoom
World: Lessons from Dramaturging a Digital Love’s Labour’s Lost.” He surveys a range of remote
production possibilities, and the descriptions he shares of various productions make me regret miss-
ing them. His careful thought process for deciding which techniques to advocate and which to avoid
exemplify the dramaturgical “total theatre eye” that Martinson and Olsen relate.

Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy contributes a director’s perspective of a Zoom production in

“Directing the Virus with 7 Towers Theatre Company’s Down from Heaven.” Staging a work about
a pandemic during a pandemic—and over Zoom—seems a daunting task. Gutierrez-Dennehy’s
detailed decision process provides a useful complement to Poblete’s piece: two productions, very
different decisions. Best of all, Gutierrez-Dennehy usefully relates some of the lessons from Zoom
direction that she will carry back with her into the post-pandemic future.

Finally, Elena Araoz (assisted by Miranda Allegar and Katharine Matthias) explores puppets and
other performing objects in “Puppeteering Liveness: Reimagining Theatre for a Virtual Space.” Like
Poblete, they relate an array of I-can’t-believe-I’ve-not-heard-of-this delights, one of which supplies
the cover image for this issue. I am eager to see how their work continues to develop.

In their essays, Ian Garrett and Chris Bell each argue for essential values that should inspire
change in how we do and teach theatre beyond the pandemic. Garrett values sustainability, by which
he means not merely the using of recyclable materials for sets and costumes, but contextualizing
theatrical production within society-wide climatological relations. Doing so, Garrett argues, forces
theatre producers to think larger than any single production. Given that audiences driving to and
from shows generate most greenhouse gas emissions for theatres, for instance, how might theatre
production practices change? His work offers some starting points.

In “Prompts for Acknowledging Relations,” Bell underscores the need to acknowledge the
Indigenous peoples whose land that North American (at least) theatres and schools occupy. Using
xii John Fletcher

his site-specific-but-remote-learning class in Minneapolis as an example, Bell relates project prompts

and student responses that use performance to pose questions and dispel silences about the places
in which we live and work. Like Garrett, Bell asks not for singular, showy gestures, but for a deeper
contextual (and historical) awareness. How such consciousness might change theatrical practice
going forward remains an open, urgent question.

I end this special issue on essentials with Joshua Williams’s brief note, “The Smell.” It sounds
like a joke, right? What’s essential to theatre? The smell. LOL. And then, thanks to Williams, we pause
to think and stop laughing. What is the smell of theatre? I think of sweaty dressing rooms, rank
with the odor of adrenaline. I think of sawdust and new paint in tech. I think of cold, dry AC air
on opening night. I think of the smell of the audience, the aroma—uncomfortable and familiar at
once—of people packed into enclosed space. And I realize, to lose touch is to lose smell. As Williams
reminds us, COVID-19 is notorious for robbing its victims of smell. In his charming, moving piece,
he gives us a chance to mark and mourn that loss on a societal level.

Reflecting on the essence of smell in theatre, we are back to where we started—to intimacy. For
what is more intimate than scent? By consenting to breathe together within an enclosed space, we
consent to breathe one another in—we literally inspire one another. Will that act ever seem casual again
after COVID? Maybe not. Maybe it should retain a sense of shocking intimacy, corporal collabora-
tion, and emancipatory possibility. Surely those are qualities we want to hold as essential to theatre.

I close by thanking those whose inspirational work was essential to making this issue happen.
To Theatre Topics editor Noe Montez, online editor Margherita Laera, and managing editor Bob
Kowkabany, thank you for your support and hard work. To my assistant Katie Morris, thank you
for being a second set of eyes for me. My gratitude especially goes to the anonymous reviewers of
articles submitted to this issue for their wisdom and engagement. I thank all of those who submit-
ted essays, even if I could not include your piece here. I thank the authors published here for their
patience and hard work. And I thank you, readers, for your perseverance. I hope I can see you and
smell you and be inspired by you in person sometime soon.

—John Fletcher