Molly Sweeney: A Glitch in Dystopia
Livestreams. Let’s talk about them.
I anticipate I will be talking about livestreams a lot, and thankfully, there was one up this weekend that managed to encompass everything that is wrong with them. Well, maybe not wrong, but there are definitely some elements that we need to re-think about:
#1. It’s in the name. The live in livestream.
Not so live, it turns out. In Irish Repertory Theatre’s beautifully acted production of Molly Sweeney this past weekend….well, hold on. Was it actually performed last weekend, or was it performed a while ago? If you have attended a livestream performance of any kind in the past two months, you might ask yourself the same question. You might also ask, how is this any different than any other YouTube video? Well, usually on Zoom or any “true” YouTube livestream, you don’t have the ability to pause and start back up right where you left off. This leads me to believe that Molly Sweeney was a live version, for I had no ability to pause the livestream and un-pause right where I left off. So what leads me to think that maybe Molly Sweeney wasn’t live after all?
#2. A glitch in the system.
The livestream buffers. It doesn’t stop buffering. Is my WiFi acting up again? Oh no. There are people in the comments having the exact same issue. After 4 minutes of scattered confusion, the stream re-starts. However, it picks back up a little bit before our streams cut out. And it looks like the actor we left off with is either telling his story in the same exact way as before or he is being rewound and replayed. So the question stands: how live is this livestream really? Another question emerges: how do we work around glitches in the system as performers and creators who recognize that the same event never occurs twice?
I was once in a performance in high school. It wasn’t really a huge deal in hindsight. It was my sophomore year, and it was our end of the year showcase. As lowerclassmen, this was our one time to really shine, and it was my first leading role. The pressure was on. I was playing Susannah/Ellen in Shelagh Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air Pump (she’s still on my list of all time favorite playwrights, by the way). Anyway, this production occurred in two completely separate time periods. Different centuries. There were a lot of costume quick changes. At one point, we were doing a scene from the year 1999. It was a marital fight between Ellen and her husband. A repairman who was working on some household problem in the basement was supposed to come in and “interrupt.” There was one performance, though, where the actor who played the repairman couldn’t find his 1999 costume. We had two choices in the moment: this actor comes out in his 1799 costume and threatens to unravel Stephenson’s already well thought out structure, or I improv my way out of the scene.
I improved my way out of the scene, and still, to this day, this was one of the most exciting moments I have ever had in my acting career.
With livestreams, we don’t get these kinds of glitches. There’s hardly room for a costume error without tons of bodies running backstage, ripping off garments left and right. Livestreams remove this element of danger from theatre. It’s the danger of going live after 4-6 weeks of rehearsal. It’s the danger of getting the right costume piece, listening quietly behind the curtain for your cue, praying to G-d that tech got enough time to rehearse with their wee hours.
And isn’t all of this what theatre is really about?
#3. The real theatre is everything BUT the livestream.
Note that I haven’t actually mentioned one thing about the production except for its superb actors. It doesn’t really matter. The real theatre strikes me as everything I’m missing outside the stream. The real theatre is my mother coming into my room to show me her mask prototype that she sewed herself. I’ve paused my livestream to listen to her. To look at the next mask I’ll be wearing on my excursions from now until whenever. I press play again when she’s gone. But it’s too late. The moment has passed. I don’t care too much though. Because for me, the theatre no longer lies in the story on my screen. It’s in that Journey song blaring outside of my room while my stepdad sunbathes by our pool. It’s in the beautiful, yet frightening, storm that blew fiercely right outside my window last night as I was attempting to watch a Play-Per-View stream. It’s in my restless checking of my phone every 15 minutes for new news. More deaths. More knowledge? Grasping for something that feels relevant to me, present to me.
Anything will do.
Until then, every livestream goes like this.
