Nine days, which feel like nine weeks, have gone by, as of this writing, since Broadway went dark and New York’s theatres closed their doors. By the time you read this, it may well feel like nine years. The suddenness with which the city’s performance ecosystem has vanished defies comprehension—it’s as if the Great Barrier Reef had died overnight. Grasping for comparison, we have to look well beyond the proximate disasters of Hurricane Sandy and 9/11, when, ultimately, the shows went resolutely on. There’s been some optimistic speculation online as to whether Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in quarantine when the plague forced the Globe to close, in the summer of 1606. (A comforting thought, if you happen to be both a genius and good at focussing in times of existential crisis.) During the Second World War, London initially shut its theatres and cinemas—“a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity,” George Bernard Shaw called the decision—only to reopen many of them when it became clear that morale needed boosting. But keeping calm and carrying on is not in the pandemic playbook. We are our own threat. The enemy is within.
What’s immediately apparent, in a suddenly theatreless world, is how difficult theatre is to replace. The mechanism—bodies doing things in front of other bodies—is too basic. (Or bodies cavorting with other bodies, as the case may be; among this season’s now suspended offerings was Taylor Mac’s new play, “The Fre,” in which the audience was seated in a ball pit.) You can tape theatre and stream it, for which I am hugely grateful, not least because it gives more people access to shows. But what you watch through this method is inevitably only a facsimile of the real thing. It’s like eating a food that you can smell but not taste.
I hope it doesn’t sound too prematurely elegiac to say that one of the things I miss about going to the theatre is the going: leaving home, travelling, with a sense of purpose, to a specific place at an appointed hour. I miss threading my way through the obstacle course of Times Square, secretly proud of my agility. And I miss being part of an audience, one soul among many. I even miss the reliable, infuriating madness of other people. Dear Elderly Sir, who inexplicably texted throughout “Greater Clements”: I may not think highly of you personally, but I hope you’re doing all right. Dear Madam, whose chromatic, flutelike snoring during the first act of “The Ferryman” led to an intra-aisle shushing war the likes of which I have never heard before or since: my best wishes to you. To the tweens who packed together in a line around the block, just before the advent of social distancing, for a preview of “Six”: your energy was infectious, I hope only in the figurative sense. Please stay home.
Theatre artists and technicians are out of work right now, which spells terrible anxiety and financial distress. It also means that creative people are trying to find creative things to do. If there is one silver lining to this crisis, it’s that it hit in the age of the smartphone, when performance is everywhere. So we find our perspective shifted. The ratio is now one to one: me watching you, my screen to yours. Glamour? Mystique? Polish? Shine? No, no, no, and no. But who needs them? This is a time for the curtain to be pulled back.
Instagram Live, previously a place for celebrities to offer the public slick glimpses into their worlds, has been repurposed as a cabaret, abuzz with performing artists doing what they can for us from their living rooms. Patti Smith and her daughter Jesse Paris Smith squeezed together to serenade their followers through the screen. The sublime jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, with Sullivan Fortner on the piano, gave an impromptu concert; it looked as though the pair were performing for their own pleasure, which, in turn, bolstered ours. Rosie O’Donnell raised money for the Actors Fund by chatting, via video stream, with other performers, including Cynthia Erivo, Patti LuPone, Idina Menzel, and Chita Rivera. LuPone showed off her jukebox. Andrew Lloyd Webber sang “Happy Birthday” to Stephen Sondheim; Stephen Sondheim sang “Happy Birthday” to Andrew Lloyd Webber while vigorously washing his hands. Alan Menken, at a piano stationed in front of a grandfather clock, performed a career-skimming medley that ended, on the nose, with “A Whole New World,” from “Aladdin.” The lighting was reassuringly awful. Watching these bits was like getting stuck on a FaceTime call between the famous: cute at first, then a little boring, but endearingly nerdy, with Channel Thirteen fund-raiser-style energy.
It must be hard to make original work under these conditions of general menace, but some performers are persevering. The best I’ve seen in the past week was produced by the 24 Hour Plays, an organization whose regular stunt involves putting together plays and musicals that are written, rehearsed, and performed in the space of a single day. On Instagram, the group has been hosting a series of “viral monologues”: new, very short pieces that were commissioned from homebound playwrights and performed by homebound actors. The first installment, still available for viewing, was posted on March 17th. No surprise that the subject most on the minds of the playwrights was disaster. In a monologue by Lily Padilla, Marin Ireland, playing a dissolute young teacher, delivers, directly into a phone camera, what we soon realize is an application to be abducted by extraterrestrials. She’s ready to be beamed up and away from this cursed planet, but the question is whether the aliens will have her. “What I would contribute to your galaxy?” she asks, chewing her lip. “Well . . . I am enthusiastic. And I . . . think that’s an important quality on any team.” In just four minutes, Ireland, with her big, distant, unreadable eyes and expressive mouth, sketches a portrait of a woman who wants nothing more than to trade in her known life and surrender to the intoxicating unknown. “Honestly, I’m afraid the world is burning,” she says. “And it’s not that I’m afraid of dying or even catching fire. I just don’t want to watch.”
Part of the pleasure of the 24 Hour viral monologues lies in seeing what actors do when left to their own devices, far from the smoothing, sculpting hand of a director. The selfie-video format has the feel of an audition tape, an allusion that the great Richard Kind makes explicit in a quick, clever monologue by Jesse Eisenberg, in which Kind asks Hollywood to cast him against type, for once, as a Gentile. In a piece by Stephen Adly Guirgis called “L.A. Yoga Motherfuckers,” Andre Royo sits in a car and launches into a disgruntled, hilariously unhinged rant about civility and “these Bernie bros and their Bernie hos,” who appear to have chased him out of a yoga class after he expressed support for Joe Biden. A coronavirus joke falls flat, but it’s good to see playwrights bringing new characters into the world to respond, in the moment, to the same things that we’re responding to. Free from motive, free of the harness of plot, they flicker briefly alive to share these strange times with us and then disappear, but not without leaving a mysterious, human trace.
In good times, we want performance to shake us and stir us, to horrify or delight, to rouse, to make us feel strong things. Daily living can dull the senses (including the moral one), and we ask the theatre to help us sharpen them again. But in a time of fear and strained feeling, when we are thinking non-stop about our welfare and its connection to other people, it’s comfort that we want. That’s why, while watching the 24 Hour viral monologues, I thought of one of my preferred forms of digital direct address, the soft-spoken parallel universe of the Internet genre called ASMR.
If you’re a digital native, you know what I’m talking about, so bear with me while I offer a brief introduction. ASMR is the name given to a physical sensation, without known neurological cause, of gentle and pervasive pleasure. The name, which is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” suggests some scientific authority that is as yet unfounded. No one knows what this thing is, or which neurons fire in the heads of the people who flock in droves to old Bob Ross videos on YouTube to bask in the unflappable lilt of his folksy patter and the calm, sure sound of his palette knife as it flicks and scrapes pigment onto the canvas.
One way to describe ASMR is as a kind of sustained tingling that begins in the scalp and spreads to the back and the limbs, a bit like the tickling that leads up to a sneeze. It’s as if a tiny hand has reached through the ear canal to deftly, tenderly, brush the surface of the brain with a feather. The shoulders relax; the jaw loosens. The feeling is induced by certain stimuli, or, in the language of the large Internet subculture of people who make videos to elicit an ASMR response in others, “triggers.” The sound of whispering and that of a low, calm voice are popular triggers, as are “mouth noises”: the light smack of lips parting, the clack of a hard consonant born at the back of the throat, the slur of the tongue sliding along the palate. Hundreds of ASMR videos on YouTube show women tapping and scratching long, manicured nails against countertops and makeup cases and the covers of hardback books. There are paper-crinkling videos, and videos in which women (it is usually, but not always, women; the genre has a bias toward a maternal, nurturing tone) pop bubble wrap, or plunge their fingers into bowls filled with buttons or M&M’s, or scatter and stroke the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I have listened to someone count in a slow whisper from one to a hundred in German, for no other reason than that it seemed soothing at the time.
Can this get a little creepy? Sure it can. I had thought that fixed notions of the eternal feminine were pretty much dead, and yet the band of young women who practice ASMR tend to take her as their guide. It can all get a bit haremesque. Click and click and click; one whisper chamber leads to another, and another, and another, the Internet turned, for a change, into a pleasure palace made by women for one another. The women of ASMR see themselves as caregivers, unofficial tenders to their fellow video watchers’ mental health, and, as totally nuts as that seems, they’re not altogether wrong.
What the best ASMRtists—as they are, of course, called—have figured out is that virtual reality does not have to rely on fancy technology. They are monologuists at heart, and, like all successful performers, they know how to employ the transitive property. You say that you are touching me; I feel, somehow, that I am being touched. Resourceful ASMR practitioners make canny use of simple tricks of perception, which have come to define the genre’s narrative conventions. Digital role-plays, which dominate ASMR-land, require the implication of a dialogue between the ASMRtist and you, the person being attended to—at the salon, or the shoe store, or whatever medical office you might visit to get an ear cleaning or a procedure, popular with ASMRtists, that is called, rather sinisterly, “a cranial nerve exam.” There are numerous videos in which an interlocutor “listens” and responds as you speak about the hard day you just had. Your participation is not actually required; just sit back, relax, and enjoy the sympathy.
A form that aims to soothe anxiety and calm the mind, to transmit physical sensation without touch, seems made for our frightening, contactless moment. The other day, I went to YouTube, and typed in “ASMR coronavirus.” Sure enough, up popped video after video. Some of them were pretty weird, even by the conventions of the genre; a Brazilian ASMRtist bouncing a rubber ball made to look like a molecule of COVID-19 is perhaps not to everyone’s taste. I am right now being “examined” by ASMR Darling, an ASMRtist with nearly two and a half million subscribers. She is wearing a lab coat and a face mask and is saying, in the softest tone possible, that she is about to take a nasal swab to test for the virus. It’s scary and soothing at the same time. In the world that she’s created, we can all get the care we need. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
