20/20 Visions

Bonnie Marranca

T his is not the first time that we have been in the midst of preparing an

issue of PAJ when a momentous event has occurred. Over four decades
there have been many, encompassing Poland’s Solidarity movement, 这
Iraq War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Occupy Wall Street. And now, 那一年
2020 has brought one of the most catastrophic times in the post-war period in
the form of the coronavirus. A great cloud of unknowing has descended over
the globe. We don’t know what will happen, where we are going, who we will
变得. This extraordinary situation has taken hold everywhere and threatens
all aspects of human existence: 社会的, 政治的, 经济的, 生物, 文化.

First came the initial shock and feelings of fear and isolation, then the accompa-
nying attempts to process the weight of it all. For those in our field, the pandemic
marked a long-term halt in earning a living, cancelled engagements years in the
制作, the inability to create new work or to present it, while also encouraging
commitments to new ways of making theatre. Many artists and institutions felt
compelled to produce content for livestreaming or to develop online communi-
ties to maintain a presence. Others admitted to relishing the time at home, 这
freedom from overbooked calendars and ever-present compulsive productivity.
仍然, clearing the mental space for writing proved challenging, and watching
live performance on a screen unsatisfactory over an extended timeframe. 这
human voice on the telephone was again valued, after years of texting and avoid-
ing contact. For those fortunate enough to do so, this new slow time became
an opportunity for reading and reflecting on life changes in between the pauses
for daily necessities.

In continuing under the present conditions, we at PAJ prepared for the fall issue.
How would we acknowledge the coronavirus? We decided that the Segal Talks
series of daily interviews online with artists and cultural thinkers around the
地球, curated by Frank Hentschker of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at
CUNY (纽约) between March and July, should be offered to our worldwide read-
ership. This would be our way of making a contribution to the conversation, 经过

PAJ 126 (2020), PP. 1–2. 

https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_e_00531

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creating a record in print of this exceptional time and place in world history.
PAJ’s assistant editor, Benjamin Gillespie, with the assistance of Sarah Lucie
and Jennifer Joan Thompson, took on the task of editing selected excerpts from
thirty artists, representing twenty countries, to be ready for the fall issue. 这些
wide-ranging commentaries demonstrate that while the coronavirus is global,
the repercussions are felt locally and on a daily basis in different regions of the
世界. It is no surprise that representatives of rich and poor countries would have
very different perspectives on this existential crisis. Politics and the pandemic
are inextricably bound.

Through these recent months, surveying political events as they unfold here and
国外, I sometimes felt like I have been living in a Witkiewicz play, something
like Guybal Wahazar, with its out-sized and fuming tyrant held in place by a pack
of scheming sycophants, a world where time and space and language are distorted
on shifting planes of reality. At other times, what comes to mind are those thir-
ties’ and forties’ film comedies that take place in a fictitious old Europe, 例如
the Marx Brothers’ classic Duck Soup, at the center of which are ministers and
functionaries scrambling to satisfy the head of state’s increasingly crazed whims.
The current American political spectacle in this age of social media, 即
the Federal response in Oregon, has recently been described by historian Anne
Applebaum in the foreboding terms of “performative authoritarianism.”

In more hopeful moments, reflecting on the performance of everyday life I find
inspiration from the esteemed theatre figure Vaclav Havel, whose legacy he left
to the world in his majestic essay “The Power of the Powerless,” a manifesto
illuminating the path to “living in truth” that any individual could follow. 他的
humanist vision looked beyond what democratic institutions can do for people to
what they must do for themselves. It is a “post-democratic” position in the most
profoundly empowering, philosophical sense. In these times of coronavirus and
illiberal forces spreading across continents, his words have the feeling of grace
notes for our saddened melody of existence. He imagined—

a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the
relationship of human beings to what I have called the “human order,”
which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed
rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility,
a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human com-
munity—these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.

It is said that Havel used to hide his manuscripts in trees to keep them safe from
the authorities. Perhaps in the secret life of trees there are new books of knowl-
edge awaiting our discovery. 同时, we wait, we do our work, we go on.

2  PAJ 126

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