[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/great-artistic-works-during-plagues/2020/11/05/6575cac2-1d29-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html|
More than 400 years ago, as epidemics raged in London, forcing theaters and other public places to shutter, William Shakespeare was busy crafting stories of kings going mad and thanes coveting power. He was, scholars believe, in the midst of an astonishingly potent creative period, one that produced some of the most extraordinary tragedies ever written — “King Lear” and “Macbeth” among them.
It was a remarkable achievement, one that got me thinking about our current moment and the possibility that during this pandemic, society’s artful dreamers might find their own inspiration and make similarly groundbreaking creations. “The great work begins,” playwright Tony Kushner wrote as the final words of “Angels in America,” his sprawling dramatic diptych of another terrible modern epidemic.
In perilous, isolating times, we hunger with a special zeal for great work by artists who can capture the experience for us. The novel coronavirus that has infected nearly 50 million people worldwide and killed 1.2 million — including more than 233,000 in the United States — has also created a vacuum in live entertainment of all kinds. That includes the performing arts, whose theaters and studios have been forced to shutter for months as organizations also furlough or dismiss scores of the 5.1 million arts workers in this country.
Stage actors union says no theaters are safe without these guidelines for reopening
All at once, the curtains closed on hundreds of plays, ballets, concerts, musicals — as well as the in-person classes in drama, music and dance that feed the future of these forms. Though some arts lovers have followed their favorite companies to the Web, where videos of old productions and super-skeletal versions of new projects are being tried out, one can’t avoid a certain hollow feeling — a cultural deprivation unprecedented in our lifetimes. Pause for just a moment from reflecting on the terrible losses inflicted on so many families by the coronavirus, and imagine another type of devastation: a life’s dream of seeing your new play onstage, or appearing in a recital marking the launch of your career, washed away in a tidal wave of worry about contagion in public places.
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