Hello.
I’m back, after a ten-month, life altering, time travel to Theatrius.com, and to a world of theatre reviewing and beyond. Oh, yes, and learning how to maneuver the many tricky pathways of media. Quite the exploration! Tough navigation, too.
Haven’t posted a lot of my 27 reviews because they find their way on Theatrius.com, Facebook, twitter, and now Instagram … all those direct electronic lines to many people’s computers.
My last review, “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy”, represent the isolated, yet expansive sojourn through Covid 19. The voyage took to space when COVID 19 invaded our lives and incarcerated us in own homes amid a world-wide pandemic. Like Egon, (Joshua William Gelb) we were flying “where no man had gone before.”
Every once-in-a-while, while I was away, I thought about blending my own experiences about writing these reviews into my blog–not actual impressions and opinions and snippets of the plot. But how the particular review relates to my experiences and thoughts, and maybe some of yours.
Actually, my true feeling is that all written reviews relate to the universality of human nature, and how the human, in nature, is achingly slow to change. But that’s not new.
Covid is. And how it quickly altered many of our lives, all aspects of our existence, is also new.
My change is very much like “Egon Tichy’s” life voyage: a causal time loop blowing all aspects of ourselves asunder, then somehow, through exploring each clone in life, each day of the week, we manage to reunite with ourselves, the new us.
But what we realize through this experience is that many of us, through the quarantine, have expanded, have grown, like the many Egons! And quickly.
I’ve written reviews for many streamed theatres in the Bay Area and throughout the world. My favorite has been the Australian theatres, but I have watched awesome shows in theatres in Ireland, and of course, the bigger theatres in England, and add New York to those streaming list. It’s a true cultural learning experience.
But now as theatre houses begin to open their doors in England, that avenue has closed to me. And soon the doors will shut to my Australian favorites, and then Ireland and Scotland, and then the one theatre in Wales! And New York! One of the playwrights in Australia wrote to Theatrius and thanked us for reviewing their show. That was like a hug from around the world! Soon I will be confined to reviewing Bay Area shows. As wonderful as that is, the world-wide stages will be in-person, non-streamed, really what we miss the most at home, the realness of live theatre. However, I’ll feel quarantined again, alone in the Bay Area, yes, but renewed, yes, a different me with a different perspective on theatre, and culture.
My friends who work remote, with children at home, feel the expanded change of freedom, but confined. Many say they have spent more valued time with their family than ever before. They have organized their time, share the load, and the children benefit also. Of course, there is craziness, but they have united to expand their options; car rides, games, camping, hikes. They, too, like Egon, have to expand their chambers.
Freedom is an odd word, isn’t it? We can feel free in the mandated confines of our homes. Several of my friends do not want to venture out to the ball-and-chain rituals that bound them for years: family members, work, gyms, driving the kids to soccer and birthday parties.
Like Egon, having the rocket-shattering difficulty of fixing a rudder, we have altered the direction in our lives, and found healthy solutions in the horrible universe of a deadly disease.