There’s a video of Young Jean Lee performing her 2011 play We’re Gonna Die on Vimeo. It’s an exercise in minimalism and mortality: a single person with a mic backed up by a band—part stand-up, part rock concert, part TED talk, and part campfire confession—relaying a series of humiliating, horrifying, gory, and mundane incidents-in-the-life-of, and Lee is brilliant: eyes dry, voice wry, bangs on her face, feet on the ground, and a pocket full of tunes that worm their way into your ear. With the murmur of the crowd in the room, that video is a relic of a time and place we won’t reenter soon. Just before lockdown began, a production of We’re Gonna Die was playing off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater, one of the last houses to go dark in New York. And while sheltering in place, Theatre Y embarked upon making a film of the work, intentionally a piece by and for plague times.
Armed with Álvarez’s perspective on events in Europe and charged with an injunction by Lee that no one be exposed to sickness during the process, Theatre Y dove into creating remotely. “I invited Emily [Bragg, who plays the narrator] to live with us immediately,” says Lorraine. “I said, ‘Move into our living room. I just have the feeling we’re never coming out again, and if you don’t move into my house right now, we’re never going to be able to interact!”
Like live performance, Theatre Y’s production of We’re Gonna Die has a finite number of showings. And Lorraine insists that, despite their foray into film, including a series of Andràs Visky shorts, as well as a film of his Juliet to be released this November, Theatre Y exists to create theater. “Some artists say, ‘I don’t do virtual. You’ll see me when we’re back in the flesh,’” notes Lorraine. “Is that acceptable, knowing we have a whole society starving for something right now? Can we innovate, or is that reducing the art form? Knowing how to take care of the form during this crisis is really hard.”
9/18-10/25: Fri-Sun 7 PM, theatre-y.com, F
