Coronavirus Impact: How a Crisis Is Changing the U.S.

I wanted to climb right through the screen into a seat a few rows from the stage.

It was a visceral impulse, not a rational one. It paid no heed to impossibility, or even recent memory — the feeling of unease that nagged in the last days before the theaters shut down, when from avidity and habit we kept packing the houses, breathing communal air.

That was a scant two weeks ago, but it feels eons longer since we’ve learned to keep a cautious social distance. For now we seek our drama fixes online, trying to fill the empty space left by the temporary absence of the empty spaces.

So a couple of recent evenings lately have found me peering into my laptop, watching plays that were digitally immortalized before the coronavirus thwarted their respective opening nights, and the runs that would have followed.

Both Ren Dara Santiago’s “The Siblings Play,” a world premiere at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York, and Mike Lew’s “Teenage Dick,” a Chicago premiere at Theater Wit, are available for ticketed streaming — a scrappily defiant, even noble insistence on the part of producers that the artists’ work on their small stages not simply disappear.

It is heartening that these recordings are there, and that the companies can earn some box office from them. But if you watch, you may arrive as I did at the conviction that you have not truly seen the plays.

That’s not the fault of the shows; it’s a function of experiencing them through the filter of a medium they weren’t constructed for.

Glowing at me through my screen, they felt flattened and far away — and, oh, how they made me wish I were in the room to sense all of their dimensions. Recordings of stage productions are frustrating by nature, pale relics of theater rather than theater itself.

I hesitate to say that, because it is a brutal truth, and don’t we all have enough of those in this strange pandemic time? The upside is the forceful argument these videos inadvertently make for the live experience — for the undiminished necessity of coming together in person to see a story unfold.