The presence of the absence

The last play I saw on stage, Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, had a short off-Broadway run before New York’s theaters were closed down in mid-March. Earlier that same week, my wife Hilary had received what would prove all too soon to be an unsuccessful double-lung transplant. She died on the last night of March, after which I returned to our apartment, where I spent the next three months in grief-stricken, near-unbroken solitude. Something had to give, and it did: at long last, I finally rented a car and got out of town.

I just returned from a three-night stay at Bridgeton House on the Delaware, a riverside inn to which I have been going for fifteen years, first alone and then with Hilary, who loved it as much as I did and do. It was the first time I’d been out of New York, or driven a car, since January, and the sensation of putting Manhattan behind me, even for a short while, was near-ecstatic. I even got my hair cut for the first time since December! The innkeepers, for all their wonderful friendliness, have necessarily imposed a prudent regime of social distancing on their guests, but that was perfectly fine with me—I wasn’t there to meet new people—and my room, whose screened patio looks out on the Delaware River, was beautiful and comfortable. I spent my evenings sitting in a rocking chair, smelling the nearby hydrangeas and watching the sunset and the fireflies. It felt as though I’d come home again.

And how am I feeling now that I’m back in New York? That’s hard to say. I think I’m starting to find my way out of the bewildering maze of sorrow, for I no longer miss Hilary with the same round-the-clock intensity that came perilously close to sinking me in April. At the same time, though, her memory is never far from my mind, and I’m still as lonely as I ever was. And while I’ve kept myself busy writing about theater webcasts for The Wall Street Journal, I miss going to the theater in something not wholly unlike the way in which I miss my life’s companion.

What I wrote about summer movies in Saturday’s Journal is no less applicable to live theater:

Be it a big-budget blockbuster or a small-scale tale of summer love, there is no substitute for watching a movie, in the summer or at any other time of year, in the company of silent, enthralled people huddled together in a darkened room.

Even more than moviegoing, playgoing is a collective experience. While it’s true that the webcasts I now review have turned out to be satisfying substitutes for live performance, I would give a great deal—anything but my health, in fact—to have seen them in the theater. Therein, of course, lies the catch: I can’t imagine that anyone in his right mind would knowingly expose himself to the ravages of COVID-19 merely to be immersed for an evening in the sounds of laughter and applause. That’s why nearly every performing-arts organization has suspended live performances until January, and we who live for theater are simply going to have to tough it out for the duration, contenting ourselves with webcasts until the pandemic is under control.

Like everyone else “in the profession,” I can’t help but wonder what the world of theater will look like a year from now. I expect, though, that a fair number of drama companies, including a few of the best-known ones, have closed their doors for good, and I fear greatly for the futures of the actors, directors, designers, and crew members who are now trying to figure out how to piece together a living. At the same time, I also believe deeply that theater, fulfilling as it does a fundamental need in the human soul for the collective communion of face-to-face storytelling, will ultimately reassert its claim on audiences. Marvelous though they are, movies are not enough. We need live theater, too, and I have faith—I think that’s the right word—that we will get it back.

For my own part, I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive the simultaneous losses of my beloved spouse and the art form to which I have devoted more than a decade and a half of my life. But I’m still here, and if Hilary’s death and the closing of America’s theaters didn’t kill me, then I figure I’m in it for the long haul. I hope you are, too.