Digital theater was not just something that happened during the explosion of online innovation during the COVID-19 lockdown. To Magda Romanska, it’s a human right — a means of providing access to culture for people who long have been deprived of it: the disabled, the elderly, the homebound, the economically excluded, the geographically distant.
This argument is central to the case she makes for the importance of digital theater in “Digital Access to the Performing Arts: Comparative Study of Legal and Structural Challenges” (Bristol University Press, 163 pages), a book that is available for free online. Despite its unsexy title (and sometimes dense text), it functions as a kind of accessible handbook to rethink and reactivate the genre. “To compete with the appeal of streaming platforms,” Romanska writes, “theatres must reassess their commitment to digital programming, embracing the audiences that sustained them during the COVID lockdowns but have since been left behind,”
Developed by members of the Digital Access Research Project of the metaLAB at Harvard, the study offers a history of digital theater experiments before, during and after the lockdown; analyzes a series of “real and perceived” challenges, (real: reconciling copyright law with disability rights law; perceived: that there is a “substitution effect” which discourages patrons who watch digital theater from attending in-person theater, a supposed effect that is not backed up by research.”) gives some somewhat technical recommendations for legislation and partnerships. The author also details continuing successful case studies, (several of which I’ve also praised) such as Arlekin Players, and The League of Live Stream Theater, whose principals produced the first-ever simulcast of a Broadway play, Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” in January, 2022, and have continued to bring live theater into people’s homes ever since. Their latest production, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” captured live at Houston’s Alley Theatre, begins streaming tomorrow through Sunday into homes far from Texas.
