Experiments in Audio Theatre, Radical and Retro

"Look with thine ears," Lear tells poor blind Gloucester, and that is exactly what the rest of us should do now we know that the majority of New York theatres will not open their doors until, at the most optimistic guesstimate, the middle of next year. Zoom fatigue set in months ago, but audio is stepping into the breach to take us places that glazed screen-gazing can't. The eyes tend toward the literal, while what we only hear can bloom, the way a novel does, in the privacy of the mind, as is the case with two new productions--one radical, one retro--that use audio to light a path forward for performance in the COVID era and beyond. "A Thousand Ways" (produced by the Brooklyn-based ArKtype) was created by the duo Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, who go by the moniker 600 Highwaymen and are known for devising inventive, sincere theatre of a kind that makes urbane audiences fatted on cynicism feel wonder afresh. In "This Great Country," from 2012, seventeen performers, some experienced, some green, acted out scenes from "Death of a Salesman," transforming that classic into something rich and strange; "Employee of the Year," staged in 2014, had five girls under the age of eleven tell the story of one woman's adulthood.