As the pandemic has sent most art forms scurrying into mole holes, some have had to adapt more than others. In the theater, the change has been especially pronounced, amounting to a complete upside-down flip: Big players can’t squeeze themselves into the new accommodations, but little ones feel right at home.
So the experimental, the fringe and the avant-garde, which have never depended on lavish funding or popular attention, are not only surviving in their online digs but also, at least by contrast, thriving. My diet as a theater critic has likewise flipped. Temporarily relieved of Broadway jukebox musicals and 16-week revivals, I am taking in more offbeat stuff than ever, and finding more to like in it.
Or more to learn from it, at least.
Last week alone, I watched a slapstick adaptation of a science fiction classic staged in a closet by Theater in Quarantine, a nearly wordless shadow-puppet show from Manual Cinema and a Zoom pandemic drama devised by Source Material. On Saturday I added an in-your-face autobiographical memoir about a wheelchair and a multimedia memory play produced, in part, by an academic think tank.
Mind you, offbeat material, by its nature, is not always as coherent or as charming as the polished commercial kind. Nor is everything offbeat always so fresh; though some of what I saw was making its debut via livestream, some of it was recorded. (Manual Cinema’s show, “Lula del Ray,” is part of the company’s 10th anniversary retrospective.) Furthermore, like moles everywhere, online experimental productions can be hard to catch: They pop up pretty suddenly and disappear fast.
But it’s worth the effort to track them down because they are doing the important work that the avant-garde has always done, only now on your computer and often for free. They push theater toward new content and forms.
Accessibility is a key theme in Athena Stevens’s play “Scrounger,” which was recorded in front of a live audience in January at the 50-seat Finborough Theater in London. (The recording can be streamed on YouTube through 7 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 3, and again on Aug. 31.) It is hardly experimental in concept: It’s basically a monologue, performed by Stevens, with Leigh Quinn assisting in a variety of small roles. But it is, unfortunately, avant-garde in its concerns, advancing a woefully belated discussion about making people with disabilities welcome in the theater both as audiences and artists.
Stevens, a Chicago-born playwright now living in England, has cerebral palsy. “Scrounger,” directed by Lily McLeish, is the galling true story of how she was kicked off a British Airways flight from London to Glasgow because the plane crew could not fit her motorized wheelchair into the cargo hold — and subsequently “trashed” it. Neither the regulations of the European Union nor a social media campaign that drew thousands of supporters seemed to help; she remained all but trapped in her apartment for weeks.
It says a lot about Stevens’s mordant tone that she named the play (and her character) for the insult online haters flung at her, as if she were perpetrating a scam instead of trying to regain her independent mobility. Also part of her strategy is a total lack of ingratiation, not only to authorities, but also to her boyfriend and even to the audience. She begins the play by congratulating us for being so “delightfully progressive” as to watch “a borderline freak show” in order to brag about it later.
“You’ll say how hard it was to watch me,” she predicts witheringly, “but you stuck through the awkward moments because you are a good person waiting for a poor outsider like me to be a vibrator to your ego.”
That part was in fact hard to watch, and hear; the captioning was of little help in interpreting some of Stevens’s speech. (It often rendered “Scrounger” as “grandeur.”) But the difficulty was apt: Disability or not, people don’t readily understand one another. And there was no mistaking the impact of the play’s shift from anecdote to insight, as all of Scrounger’s paths to recourse reach a dead end. “We can’t see what we want in the law, what we think ought to be there when it really isn’t,” she says mournfully.
Mainstream works won’t typically tell you, as “Scrounger” does, that optimism is just another privilege only a few can afford. But experimental works by Black playwrights, now beginning to reach wide audiences, have been showing us that for a while. Stevens, who is white, says she has been influenced by writers of color like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Arinzé Kene, at least in figuring out how do write about disability without writing a “disability play.” What I think she’s missed from those playwrights, at least in “Scrounger,” is the form-busting spirit that often accompanies the expansion of content.
Virginia Grise’s “a farm for meme” has the form-busting down. A 20-minute meditation on growth, death and rebirth, it mixes box puppets, shadow play, live film and archival footage into a gorgeous mise-en-scène that feels theatrical in its purposefully homemade aesthetic. Arms are made of red construction paper; flower stems, of measuring tapes.
Like Grise’s earlier work, including the award-winning “blu,” the story itself is poetic and symbolic — perhaps too much so, even in such a short piece. But it is anchored in the reality of the 14-acre South Central Farm that arose after the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles. As a child draws his memories of that Eden after it is bulldozed, a woman (Marlene Beltran) tells the story of the queer family and vibrant Chicano culture that flourished among its walnut trees.
Directed (“virtually”) by Elena Araoz, “a farm for meme” was produced by a consortium that includes Cara Mía Theater of North Texas and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, an academic research program Araoz leads at Princeton University. We are going to need those innovations, though it’s hard to say whether all of the ones I heard about in a companion seminar are viable. Plays on eBay? Ghost audiences?
But that’s the point, really. Ideas bubble up from underground during crises, thanks to people who couldn’t find a platform before. Now that they’re suggesting new kinds of stories and new ways of telling them, can we hope that, soon enough, the rest of the theater will start putting them together?
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