Despite the unprecedented scope of this cultural wound, I write to my city from a place of optimism – from an internal ache for community and togetherness. I write in knowing regard of the healthcare professionals sacrificing their wellbeing for my own; I write with gratitude, from the comfort and safety of my Centretown living room. 

I write to express how deeply I miss theatre. It has taken these two-ish weeks to grieve its former omnipotence in my life; no longer can I (like many of my friends and co-saboteurs) define my personhood solely by its business, its preoccupation with dramaturgy and semiotic resonance. My evenings aren’t spent in the dark of the Babs Asper or the GCTC; they’re occupied with growing anxiety at the abysmal state of my arts-sustained bank account.

I write, though, because I know that we will survive this – that our theatre will evolve, and perhaps even thrive. A few displaced productions will be lost to the panic, and for this I express the most supreme of empathy and commiseration; the precarity of my beloved art form does not escape me at this time. Some productions, however, saw the briefest glimpse into COVID-19; they opened in its earliest days of panic, with a surplus of crinkly gloves and hand sanitizer. We can’t be sure such shows will come back to the fullest of their imagined capacities, but we must still acknowledge that they happened – that even in their truncated state, they are ever-deserving of archival within the critical sphere.
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