nice to meet you.

Thank you for joining me for the introduction to my collection of belated theatre reviews and other assorted theatre writings. It’s been a dark eleven months (lol get it? because theaters have gone dark).

If you like me, or my writing, or theatre, or even if you just think there should be cooler websites that discuss theater than BroadwayDirect or whatever, join me here, where I’ll be writing 1-2 little pieces a week on the subject of my nerdiest passion. If you share this with enough people I promise that I will eventually write a whole article about why I think Lin-Manuel Miranda is a narc – just don’t tell him, because I can’t afford to get sued by Broadway’s most powerful geek.

In all seriousness, it’s been about a year since Broadway, Off-Broadway, and downtown theaters shuttered in the wake of quarantine and the Coronavirus pandemic. Since then, there have been varied (sort of lame) attempts at replicating live performance online (see: the Ratatouille musical conceived by bored teens on TikTok, the streaming of past productions from the Schaubühne in Berlin, and not much in between these two pillars of theatrical compensation), but the joys of theatergoing can’t quite be captured sitting on a couch or staring at a laptop. Second only to sitting in an audience and having a show wash over you is making it three blocks past the theater and finally turning to your friend to start nitpicking. That’s when you’re the closest you’ll be to really getting it: you still remember most of it, and you’re talking about it, solidifying opinions that you may soon have to defend (ask me about Mike Birbiglia’s generously lauded one-man show about being a bad parent and husband, The New One, I don’t think we’ll agree).

I don’t mean to nitpick in a meanspirited way, per se. Theatre is a live and inherently imperfect art form. In its repetition, it changes nightly: things go wrong, or things go unexpectedly right, but either way, a production will never be perfect or squeaky clean. Live performance relies upon several human artists working in the moment, whether they operate lightboards, remember choreography, or usher actors away from nails in the floor backstage (an underappreciated and thankless job). This guarantees an exciting (to me) risk of error. The relationship between a performance and its audience is a matter of trust: an audience wants to be swept away by a show, but its trust (and suspension of disbelief) relies upon successful, deliberate artistry and precision on behalf of the performance. Barring certain grouchy critics and theater grads with “friends” in the cast, most audience members want a play to work. In my case, nitpicking is an activity borne out of happy dissatisfaction. 

I started attending an average of two shows per week midway through my freshman year at New York University. I spent a year in Edinburgh and still managed to feed my voracious appetite: the pandemic marks the longest period in which I’ve gone without seeing a show in perhaps my entire theatergoing life (eleven months and counting). Therefore, as a personal writing project, I’ve decided to take inspiration from Suzan-Lori Parks and re-member my favorite theatrical experiences from the past eight years. By adding a dash between “re” and “member” in her essay “Possession,” Parks compares reconfiguring history to putting a dismembered body back together. I’d like to borrow this understanding of remembering as putting things back together: lasting personal impressions, reviews, production photos, anything that I can find that relates to the shows I’ve loved (or loved to talk about) to best recreate my time with them. I miss theatre! I use it to remember what’s gone on in my life, and the shows I’ve seen have hit me differently accordingly. I have literally no memory of anything that’s happened in quarantine because I cannot correspond events to shows.

I happen to be keen on shows with a surrealist bent that center women and people of color, but I will do my best to include a range of theatre that extends beyond my preferences and preoccupations. I’ll include shows that have received outsized accolades as well as readings during which fewer than 40 people were present. One of the reasons I love theatre is that its quality is not necessarily determinant of the size of an audience: I’ve seen expensive pieces of shit in Broadway theaters, and precious gems in empty basements or, in the case of Edinburgh, literal caves.

I also hope to write about how theatre informs my understanding of other things happening in the world, like The Bachelor or something. I might write about how Lin-Manuel Miranda got thrown in a garbage can by rapper Immortal Technique in high school. Listen, there’s not a lot going on right now.

Theatre is, to me, living philosophy. It provides me with endless ways of seeing the world through the black walls of its small rooms. I hope to honor it by stitching it back together enough to recreate my favorite conversations, the ones that happen on the walks to the subway or around the corner to the nearest diner after having sat in a darkened room for (ideally) ninety minutes.