A Midsummer Night’s Stream

There’s no real substitute for live theater, but during the pandemic lockdown, companies across America hastily threw together online performances to keep their audiences engaged and their actors at least partially employed. “Zoom theater” grew increasingly skillful over the 18 months that theaters were closed, though an essential weirdness remained—that of watching actors in front of individual computers doing their best to interact with other actors in front of their computers. As the lockdown eased, it was possible to bring creative teams together for in-person performances, though the audiences were still remote.

Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater produced an innovative “all-digital season” in 2020–21: while adhering to Covid safety procedures, actors and crew in a remote farmhouse produced what The New York Times called “beautiful film-stage hybrids” that people could watch online. The Wilma claimed viewers in 49 states and 15 countries, and its peers also had surprisingly large online audiences; the Red Bull Theater, a small New York company that usually performs in venues with a few hundred seats, was astonished to learn that its online reading of Ben Jonson’s Volpone attracted 10,000 viewers.

Such numbers swiftly declined when the theaters reopened in September 2021, and in-person attendance has yet to return to prepandemic levels. One solution to the problem of diminished ticket sales is to take advantage of the lessons learned during Covid and to make live theater accessible to more people. Whether it’s livestreamed (you buy a virtual ticket and sit down at your monitor at curtain time to watch the performance as it happens) or a livestream “capture” (a recording that virtual ticketholders can view later), digital presentation is becoming an accepted adjunct to theater companies’ primary commitment to live performance. The static archival recordings that theater historians and fans had to rely on for decades have been replaced by sophisticated, multicamera livestreams that come closer to reproducing the excitement of being there.

Occasional live television broadcasts of theatrical performances have occurred since the Carol Channing vehicle Show Girl aired in 1961, but livestream theater went big and went global in 2009, when London’s National Theatre broadcast a performance of Racine’s Phèdre to nearly 300 movie theaters worldwide. In America, online viewing began in 2016, when the newly launched BroadwayHD livestreamed the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of the musical She Loves Me to viewers in more than 60 countries. BroadwayHD soon settled into a comfortable niche as a subscription service offering on-demand access to Broadway shows and Broadway-caliber shows—that is, musicals and star vehicles. That worked for commercial producers and the more crowd-pleasing offerings of bigger nonprofit theaters like the Roundabout. But the question for most nonprofit and regional companies, dedicated to showcasing playwrights and more challenging work, was whether livestreaming could help support that mission.