Editor's Note:

As we wind to the close of one of the most difficult calendar years in my academic career, I feel privileged and honored to share with you the work you'll find below. 

It is an odd sensation, as a Theatre Historian, to be able to step back and realize that we are living in an historical moment--one that will change my art-form, and culture more broadly, forever. It is easy to trace, over the long history of theatre's history, the impact of pandemics, wars, and other points of mass cultural disruption on the trajectories of the artistic forms and on the industries of theatre. There can be no doubt that the ramifications of COVID-19 will change us--in measurable ways--as a human species. 

I had a moment this fall--when it was announced that the closure of Broadway would continue well into spring, that I realized that the material I was teaching in my Understanding Theatre classroom about the way that the theatre industry works may no longer be true in the present tense. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, I was teaching a history class (alongside my Theatre History to 1700 course). 

In that Theatre History course, we (in the company of generations of theatre historians before us) bemoaned the lack of primary source materials from many moments in history--from those from antiquity, lost to time or at the Library of Alexandria, to records unkept during the Early Middle Ages, to cultures unrecorded due to a lack of discernible written language, to missing personal records of significant historical figures who were born in obscurity, to those excluded from the record by historians due to racism, sexism, ablism, and other forms of academic negligence and cruelty.  We decided that we were unwilling to allow the record of this COVID moment to be so incomplete--and we were determined to take action. 

We are not attempting to be complete in our archive--in fact nowhere close. We chose to document something that we personally found interesting or worthy of our time and energy--in the hopes that others, in some abstract "after time" may find our interests to be useful. If you are a traveler in that "after time," then I hope we have helped in our small way.

C. Austin Hill, PhD