My play, “IN OUR TIME: Pandemic Stories from the Frontlines” was presented in two staged readings in February in 2024. Work on this play began in Dec of 2020, during the thick of COVID when my artistic partner in my company, Hiawatha Project, Heather Irwin, and I began interviewing women ICU physicians from across the country.   During this time, I also became fascinated with the writings of Ernest Hemingway, specifically his novella In Our Time written 100 years ago, during another time of world wide pandemic and war. 

The result is a new play that weaves first-hand accounts of women critical care doctors with excerpts from Hemingway to create a poetic and moving exploration of two pandemic eras echoing with parallel themes of loss, grief and alienation. In “IN OUR TIME: Pandemic Stories from the Frontlines,” characters and stories layer through stage space and time reaching for connection between words and worlds.   (You can check out the  2022 Broadway World article about the creative concepts behind this play.)

(As an artist I am often drawn to juxtapositions of historical perspectives that can duel and sing with our contemporary and personal narratives. This play stylistically aligns with several of my other plays such as RedBull Shorts Winner and New Play Lab Winner “Helen at the Gym,” published with Stage Rights, and Hiawatha Project’s show “JH: Mechanics of a Legend” which premiered at the August Wilson Center in 2017.)

But back to my point and the title of this blog post The After Death and After Birth.

In this play there are a lot of deaths. Like a lot.  In fact a common refrain echoed throughout the play by several characters is,  “Just the deaths.  All the deaths.  So many.” And as you might imagine there could be a lot of “coughing” and “gasping” and “dying breaths.”

However, I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to represent a “death by coughing” on stage.  Or to even try to re-create a “real death” onstage at all.  All dying in my play “IN OUR TIME” is represented by a repeated “death gesture” that is set up early in the play, and dead bodies are represented by stacks of folded up umbrellas.

“When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees,” is the line from Hemingway’s In Our Time that helped to provide shape and structure to our simple death gesture. When people “die” they simply repeat the death gesture.  When a dead body needed to be represented on stage, “stacked like cordwood in an amazon fulfillment center in Brooklyn” as NPR reported on the dead bodies piling up in the spring of 2020, then an umbrella was used as visual representation. 

I find that representing a “realistic” slow dying and death onstage is a joke, and unless you are trying to be funny, artists shouldn’t try to “realistically” recreate death.  It will always be a falsified thing on stage, so to pretend that we are recreating it with any intentions for realism seems like a very self-important and short sighted artistic choice.  Better to choose ritual and gesture and consciously delineate the representation of dying as a means to respectfully lift up the “real thing,” and thereby acknowledging that we will never be able to meaningfully recreate it “realistically.”  (When people “die” onstage in other shows do you enjoy watching the actors breathe as they lie there “dead?”  I do!  It’s a real thing, that reveals the lie.  That’s engaging in an artform whose purpose is to use a lie to tell the truth.)  

Theatre was created out of ritual.  It is a ritual. “Performance may also be understood as “restored behavior,” the organized re-enactment of mythic or actual events as well as the role-playing of religious, political, professional, familial, and social life.” (From “Performance and Ritual” Encylopedia.com.) 

A primary purpose of theater is to hold up an idea or experience or event so that we can, “learn to look at our own commonplace objects and practices, our own self-evident understanding, with different, perhaps even with other, eyes.” (From Do the Rite Thing, by J.Z. Smith was a historian of religion at the University of Chicago – really interesting lecture if you have the time!)

Ok, I don’t want to go too far down the source notation tunnel here, this isn’t a PhD thesis paper, this is just for my blog on my website, and the 10 other people who may read it. (Thank you, if you are one!) And of course I love what Anne Bogart says about gesture too. (Ok, ok moving on!) 

All I’m saying (writing)  is to even THINK you can recreate a death in a realistic way is disrespectful to those who have died or those who have sat by someone who drew their last breaths, during agonal breathing, or the death rattle.   It’s like kids playing war in the backyard.  They get hit. They cough.  They lay down and die.  To them this death means nothing.  It’s part of the game of killing. It’s not about lifting up the dying.  

And yet I see professional productions that too often try to erroneously represent a “realistic death” with what is actually a common gesture for death – without even realizing it. (cough cough gasp lie down die) Too often unexamined artistic choices on stage are generally disrespectful to the event or action in which they are actually striving to uphold, honor or acknowledge.  Better again, to just acknowledge the gesture is in fact a gesture, and then choose one carefully and reverently to represent the real thing (in this case dying)  instead of ignorantly attempting to recreate it. (Dying.)

When my father died I sat by his bed.  The sound of his death rattle shook me.  I acknowledge the sounds and realities of dying in the play with dialogue.  We hold it up.  We don’t disguise it or replicate in a way that is “pretending not to be a replication” or try to “recreate it realistically” in an artform which is made of pretend.  Instead death is made real by holding it up with emotional effects on characters, and with the power of language.

EXCERPT from the play.

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

And yet no body has ever died quietly.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

No, not if you’ve actually been there  By the deathbed. NO! Not quiet.  Never.

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

Right? Even if they wanted to  die quietly.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Hahah. Maybe quiet the way we normally understand people – alive people – to make noise.  Their voices may be stopped.  Like the way we tell children “Hey quiet down!

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

Right.  But the body still screams.

The hiss and crackle of the steam from the dying fire continues.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Still convulses – each organ fighting for its last – purpose, I guess.  It’s last job – to cleanse, to pump to/

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

/To breathe. To breathe!

MARJORIE as PHYSICIAN

Agonal breathing. 

NICK as SOLDIER

The rattle.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Yes, the death rattle.

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

More like a roar. 

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Yes…different in every dying body.  But never quiet.  

NICK as SOLDIER

Sometimes like a motorcycle – so deafening.  

MARJORIE as PHYSICIAN

I’ve thought that too! About the motorcycle!  Your body’s last ride in the air. So loud sometimes your ears can ring.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Or an angry animal.  Like a cat.  A  caged cat –  at the vet.

HELEN as SOLDIER

Right.  But wet.  A growl as they drown.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Right.  Really just secretions from the respiratory system.  That can no longer clear, of course.  A drowning.  But never quiet. No.

NICK as SOLDIER

Not for the people by the water’s edge.  Never.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

And that’s what we were, weren’t we?  On the edge.   By the water.

MARJORIE as PHYSICIAN

Huh. Life guards.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Right? Just standing on the shore – with all your swim skills and CPR and oaths and training.

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

Watching the rip current take another.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Yeah. Shit.

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

And no cute sweet David Hasllehoff.

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

Haha! Or beach.  Or real sunshine on your face. Hah!

Even the coals have died. The hospital beeps return.  Maybe mixed with rumbles of traffic.  A motorcycle.

NICK as SOLDIER

All the windows/of the hospital

CORNELIA as PHYSICIAN

/of the hospital were nailed /shut.

HELEN as PHYSICIAN

/shut.  Shit.  That’s the truth.

END OF EXCERPT

“All the windows of the hospital were nailed shut.” is a line from Hemingway which is often repeated in the play.

And now to the umbrellas.   In a play about pandemic death you are going to have a lot of dead bodies to deal with on stage.  I was adamant that we not have actors flopping down with their eyes closed, and lying on stage just pretending to be dead.  (Here again, the moment when you enjoy watching their stomachs go up and down as they breathe.  Right? And maybe even think, if they cared more would they at least try to hold their breath a little?  And then no, that’s a terrible thing to think.  Poor actors should at least breathe without guilt.)

Throughout the show COVID is referenced through sound design as a great storm, sometimes one that seems far off, sometimes as a hurricane right on top of the characters.  Umbrellas are used as a visual metaphor throughout the play. When opened up and held above, they create a sad isolation or quarantine feeling for the sole character underneath the umbrella.  When a relative dies, often a parent or grandparent in this play, the actors look up into their umbrella and then slowly close them and hold them.  

I remember that when my father died in March  2020, I felt like I had lost whatever shelter I had in this life.  As deaths are referenced in the play the umbrellas begin to stack up just as the NPR described in the May of 2020, “Like stacked like cordwood in a refrigerated trailer.”

One of the many ICU physicians whom I interviewed spoke to me about how meaningful the umbrellas were to her after she saw a staged reading.  “I mean, I saw hundreds and hundreds of people die in those years, and yet somehow when those umbrellas were closed and then stacked on stage, I was able to process the bodies and all the deaths in a different way.  I felt like I was able to realize all those people more in a way.  I’m so glad you didn’t have real bodies onstage,” she said.

Here is an example of a well chosen visual metaphor and gesture, lifting the “real thing” to a place of ritual and reverence far better than a “realistic interpretation” of the thing on stage. (Which will always be fake anyway, because again good theater is a lie which tells the truth.)

And for the record, I feel the same way about births onstage as I do about most deaths.  As a woman who has birthed two children without an epidural, I find most births onstage to be incredibly disrespectful to women.  Most onstage births are gestural – without acknowledging that they are actually gestural. Oh, God, the screaming, the silly fast breathing, the sweating, the cursing out of husbands – all gestures that seem to be derivatives of old television shows (probably from the 50’s and 60’s ) where most women in labor were to be laughed at or belittled as a joke.  Labor, like agonal breathing before death, is such an intense physical and visceral experience that it actually cannot be replicated “realistically” in a sincere and serious way.  So unless you are trying to make a joke of a woman in labor (which hurts me to type) then please, please make a better artistic choice onstage, choose a new thoughtful gesture, make an abstracted moment, and lift it up to ritual, or acknowledge it through observation and language.

Let’s breathe new life into deaths (and births!)  onstage by making thoughtful new artistic choices in gesture, and therefore allow the power of ritual to create meaning far more “real” and effective than a carbon copy of an unacknowledged or even unrecognized gesture –  too often misunderstood and misrepresented onstage as the “real thing.”