Five years ago today, the then-Governor of New York ordered all Broadway theaters closed because of Covid-19, which within days spawned a pioneering era of digital theater.  The shut-down lasted 18 months. Digital theater continues to this day.
Sure, the experimenting is less evident, certainly less publicized than during the height of the pandemic. But digital theater persists, albeit in less splashy ways. The four I’ve selected to honor this year have incorporated digital theater largely in such a way as to make it routine, which is arguably an accomplishment in itself. Three of the four were acknowledged in previous American Connected Theater Awards (ACTA), which I’ve been awarding informally every March since the first anniversary of the pandemic.  They are listed more or less alphabetically.

54 Below

54 Below, quietly without fanfare, livestreams the performances it also presents on stage. This month alone, the cabaret is live streaming more than 15 performances, including Norbert Leo Butz later this week, and the Lillias White Album Release Concert.

The League of Live Stream Theater

Oren Michaels and Jim Augustine founded the League as a non-profit shortly after they worked together on behalf of Second Stage Theater to produce the first-ever simulcast of a Broadway play, Lynn Nottage’s  “Clyde’s” in January, 2022 —  just four months after Broadway theaters started re-opening. They followed that up with two more Broadway plays in 2023, “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”

But it’s their expansion to regional theaters throughout the country over the past two years that suggests that digital theater was no flash in the pandemic. The League is currently livestreaming Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind from Pittsburgh Public Theater. Augustine doesn’t like to think of what they do as “broadcasting” into people’s homes, “but teleporting our audience members into the theater – welcoming people in.”

Theater in Quarantine

Joshua William Gelb created Theater in Quarantine in the same month that in-person theaters shut down,  turning the tiny closet in his East Village apartment into a stage. What began as playful experiments soon turned into adaptations of serious works of literature and original works of theater. 

His new season plays with hybrid in innovative ways, restaging one of his earliest Internet hits, “The 7^th Voyage of Egon Tichy” for an in person stage, and debuting later this  month “[Untitled Miniature]” which can be viewed in person at HERE Arts Center, and also on HERE’s digital streaming platform.Gelb describes the show as “a hybrid, digital confrontation performed entirely from a box” and “a durational, solo-performance and voyeuristic experience.”

Theater of War Productions

Since 2009, theater artist Bryan Doerries, well-versed in Ancient Greek, has been presenting readings of classic plays, primarily those by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, with increasingly starry casts, to stimulate discussion about current issues facing specific communities. His company, now called Theater of War Productions,  had its most high-profile success with “Antigone in Ferguson,” an adaptation of Sophocles’ 2,500-year-old tragedy, inspired by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The adaptation was first performed in Ferguson, then taken on the road – where I saw it in 2017 in a playground in the shadow of the Howard public housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The point of their performances has always been to prompt the discussion afterward by invited guests and members of the general audience.

In May, 2020, Theater of War began presenting its projects live online, and Doerries  had a revelation: Zoom turned out to be a surprisingly useful platform to encourage such community engagement.

Last week, a starry cast including Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black) and David Denman (The Office) performed selections from Homer’s Iliad, Book VI and scenes from The Trojan Women by Euripides both on Zoom and at the Epstein Family Amphitheater at UC San Diego in order to prompt discussion about the human cost of war.

Tomorrow, as part of Theater of War’s new journalism series, the actor Hope Davis will perform “A Diet Writer’s Regrets,” written by Rebecca Johns for The Atlantic Magazine, to help frame a guided audience discussion about the health and wellness industry. The event will be presented for free both on Zoom and to a live audience at WNYC’s studio, The Greene Space, and then broadcast on the radio station next week.