Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic by Barbara Fuchs (review)

Reviewed by: Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic by Barbara Fuchs Steve Luber (He/Him) Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic. Barbara Fuchs. Methuen Drama Agitations: Text, Politics and Performances. London: Methuen Drama, 2023; pp. 233. The demise of theatre, brought about once every generation by some technology or cultural shift, never seems to stick, and indeed one of the qualities that keeps performance alive and relevant is its adaptability and ability to speak to contemporary moments. Curiously, no one was bemoaning the death of theatre during the near-global lockdown brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in early 2020; the main cause for concern was financial, which is typically cited as a symptom, not the cause, of the art's formal obsolescence. But it was a surprise to few that theatre became an idealized form during the quarantine: fueled by trauma, nostalgia, and isolation, the desire to find joy, contemplation, and connection in a room filled with people became an undeniable fantasy—a personal, artistic, and hygienic dream. Barbara Fuchs's Theater of Lockdown is a remarkable catalog of the early attempts to channel these energies. Covering experiments in Zoom, audio drama, site-specific, and multimodal performances, the book offers clear analyses and in-depth documentation of performances that are difficult to write about individually in any circumstance, let alone collectively in a volatile moment. The project is voracious in its attempt to find and share as many types of performance as possible: Fuchs brings together autoethnography, critical reception, and online and archival documentation (greatly enabled by the form) to examine performance across geographies (the US, UK, Spain, Canada, Colombia, Ireland, Greece, Mexico), experiences (from internationally recognized professional companies to MFA showcases), and sources (from Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, to contemporary texts from Qui Nguyen and Tiffany Nichole Greene, to devised work by Forced Entertainment and Joshua William Gelb). Historians will be able to better understand how theatre functioned during this crisis, and practitioners may find ideas and inspirations for how to create new approaches to audience engagement, design, and performance with digital platforms, even though the lockdown is no longer (nearly as much of) a factor. Each case study is a close reading of individual pieces, divided into chapters that reflect material, practical concerns of performance. One thorough and fascinating analysis is of Grumelot's Game Over (2020), an impressionistic exploration of the letters and relationship between Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov that took place across Zoom (with breakout rooms), WhatsApp, Instagram, and Spotify. Fuchs adeptly communicates the experience of viewing the piece while also jumping among the various media, discussing their semiotic possibilities and her personal technical struggles during the performance. Throughout, she validates the work's many layers: its commentary on everything from gaming, to nostalgia, to the fact that Chekhov was dying of tuberculosis while writing these letters. The author pulls at the many threads available to express the immediacy and depth of this and many other diverse performances. Fuchs, through this varied set of lenses, describes the power and effectiveness of performance, given that the multitude of logistical and emotional difficulties presented by quarantine places pressure on theatre's supposed weak points in the digital age, such as liveness or collective witnessing. The author is a clear champion of these artists and their works and finds triumph even in the cracks and failures of her case studies, which simultaneously reveal the limitation of the analysis; for any artists or scholars versed in media and performance, there is a notable lack of historical or theoretical context. Philip Auslander is mentioned, as is Baudrillard (only to be refuted), but this is the extent to which any prepandemic performance works or theories are woven into her analysis of the 2020 performance scene, resulting in a handful of overstatements about the ingenuity of these contemporary pieces—the faulty claim that intermedial performance was heretofore mostly the realm of the avant-garde or, most jarringly, the assertion that "we are all postdramatic now" (114). With regard to the Spanish theatre company Grumelot, she writes, "Game Over suggests what theater might look like [End Page...

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