Taylor Mac’s “Pleasure and Pandemic,” a play set through the 1918 flu pandemic, was a brilliant spot on the horizon on the Magic Theater in San Francisco: a world-premiere manufacturing, to open in September for what would have been the theater’s first stay viewers in 18 months.
However now, in an extra life-meets-art-meets-life twist, the manufacturing, which was introduced in March, has been postponed indefinitely due to the Delta-variant-driven surge in Covid circumstances.
“Timing is every thing,” Mac mentioned in a press release. “With the rise of infections, this isn’t the time to interact wholeheartedly with the themes on this work. Our hope is that point will come quickly.”
Mac is finest recognized for “A 24-Decade Historical past of Fashionable Music,” a marathon 24-hour efficiency piece that takes in all of American historical past by way of music, refracted by way of a radical queer lens (and involving some exuberant viewers participation). “Pleasure and Pandemic,” to be directed by Loretta Greco, was partly impressed by a few of Mac’s analysis for that present and had been commissioned by the Magic, a 144-seat nonprofit theater with which Mac has an extended affiliation, earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic.
The play (through which Mac won’t seem) is about in Philadelphia in September 1918, close to the top of World Conflict I — on the day of the Fourth Liberty Mortgage Parade, which grew to become an notorious superspreader occasion — and in addition flashes ahead to 1951. It’s set in a kids’s artwork college and offers partially with Christian Science, through which Mac was raised.
In an e-mail on Wednesday, Mac known as “Pleasure and Pandemic” a piece “with lots of humor,” and wrote that the belief that the Delta variant can infect even vaccinated individuals “would alter the way in which the viewers is ready to pay attention.”
However “‘Pleasure and Pandemic’ isn’t actually a few pandemic (simply set throughout one),” Mac mentioned. “It’s extra about how perception, hope and religion collide with actuality. So our pandemic’s progress, and the way in which Individuals have politicized it, has solely deepened the most important theme of the play.”
The postponement got here as some stay theater has begun an unsure return within the San Francisco Bay Space. On Tuesday, “Hamilton” reopened on the Orpheum Theater, the place the viewers of roughly 2,000 had been required to submit proof of vaccination or a damaging coronavirus take a look at. And on Wednesday, the Berkeley Repertory Theater pushed again its season opening from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, and can now open with Charles Mee’s “Wintertime.”
Sean San José, the Magic’s not too long ago appointed creative director, vowed that Mac’s present will, finally, go on.
“That is, as Taylor Mac has jogged my memory, a time for ‘radical empathy,’” San José mentioned in a press release. “This piece WILL be premiering at Magic, however with the uncertainty round variant strains, we can’t absolutely embrace the resonance within the work. We’d like correct reflection time for this piece to be rightfully introduced.”
