In Shakespeare’s England, it was not uncommon for the doors to the theatres to be closed due to the plague. The stages and seats of the most celebrated theatres—The Swan, The Rose, the great Globe itself—much like the “Lizzie” over the last two years, remained empty, and missing from them was the magic of the shared experience. The theatre’s most valuable commodity.
Over the last two years I have found new kinship to the Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. How, just like in The Tempest, Nature can swiftly remind us of just how
fragile our existence is. I know now how it must have felt for them to lose their connection to the stories that helped them heal, that made them laugh, made them cry, and that gave them hope. Stories that not only entertained, but at their best showed them they are not alone in the world.
After all this time away, it has never been more clear to me that a play and the Story within it has its greatest value in the connection between the storyteller and the audience. A play without an audience is something more akin to literature when the experience of the story is not shared. 400 years ago, the theatres were filled with people who all experienced life in very different ways. Though there were constant reminders of the differences between them, in the theatre, in sharing the experience of a story well told, somehow, in those brief moments they were all the same. The people went to the theatre to be reminded again of what it is to be human. When the plagues came, those stories were put on shelves to collect dust and the people were confined to their circumstance and the differences between them seemed more pronounced.
I’ve realized through these struggles that the difficulties of Shakespeare’s time are not so different from our own. We have endured a Tempestuous time and, in our separation, we have missed each other and the stories that bring people into the same room that would otherwise not be. Now that the sun has begun to peek through the clouds of the storm, it is time to take the stories off of the shelf and make them plays again as they were meant to be. We welcome you back to “the boards” as our story needs its most valued ingredient: an Audience. Perhaps the stories endure because we continue to struggle with so many of the same questions. For all the differences we might have, what seems clearer to me now more than ever is that, in the end, we all want something similar from this life. Now that the doors of our theatres have reopened, we can continue the tradition of experiencing something together that reminds us all of the things that we share. To remind us “how beauteous (Human)kind is.”
—Nicholas C. Avila