The Theater Kids at the End of the World

The first time I saw the movie Reign of Fire, I spent much of it tipsily annoyed. Not enough dragons! Not nearly enough dragons. But one part stood out: A pair of survivors of the dragonpocalypse, telling stories to children. And what did they tell? Well. A key moment from The Empire Strikes Back, basically. Carefully enough to not get their pants sued off, but also clearly identifiable as such.

Stories survive. I loved that in the middle of this ridiculous movie, the film paused on that thought. Without movies, people told their own versions. It made so much sense (much more than the rest of the film).

Stories about stories are a common theme in our corner of the narrative playground; there are books aplenty about other books, about the power of storytelling, about shaping the world through story. But in the last year or so I’ve stumbled more than once across a particular variant of this—one that’s about performance, about theater, as much as it’s about the stories being told. Let’s call it, for fun’s sake and because it’s always good to nod to Douglas Adams, the theater troupe at the end of the world.

Before this recent run of theater-loving SFF adventures, there was Station Eleven, way back in 2014 and then again on televisions in late 2021. That novel is shot through with theater, from the momentous performance of King Lear to the adventures of the Traveling Symphony, the troupe to which young Kirsten belongs. Station Eleven is about a lot of things, but when I look back, this is what I remember: Art after the end-times. The way theater can create community.

And, practically speaking, the question of what kind of art thrives after the end of (or drastic change to) the world. Some books would last, for a while, but printing and distributing new ones would be much more difficult. Music, yes—music performance in a fraught world is a subject of Sarah Pinsker’s eerily timely novel A Song for a New Day. But I tend to avoid novels about music for the simple reason that I have been too involved in music, and they so often feel wrong to my brain. (Not Pinsker’s! That one is just right.)

I’ve never been a theater kid. The closest I got was being swallowed by mashed potatoes in a high school play once. It was not a meaningful role, but being part of the play, even for that single scene, meant something to me: the hours spent together, the excitement, the practical behind-the-scenes stuff, the giddiness with which we all spilled out of the school after opening night. It was a tiny taste of a certain kind of community—one that I keep running into in books. 

In Joel Dane’s The Ragpicker, a play appears in the back half of the book to sort of, kind of tell the reader about the origins of the crisis of connectivity that led to the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting. No one performs this play—it stands apart within the book—but the story it tells casts a shadow over the rest of the novel. (It also points straight back to Frankenstein, to other monsters of humanity’s own making.) 

Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk follows Cinnamon Jones as she tries to pull together the annual Next World Festival, which involves just about everyone in her post-water-wars community. Archangels bursts at the seams with all kinds of creativity and community, and its finale involves a rapturous melding of the two. But for the bulk of the book, Cinnamon is working, trying to pull off this massive production in the face of a whole lot of crises. It is an atypical adventure and a delightful exploration of the work of art, and where that shimmies right up against the work of maintaining a community. 

And that’s what I keep coming back to: Theater as communal art that can survive without the internet, without electricity, without all the things so frequently taken for granted these days. We can keep telling stories; we can keep writing on paper (while there’s paper); we can keep playing songs. But the most idealistic magical post-disaster theater troupes are more than entertainment. They’re a refuge in which, sometimes, everyone performs. In Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, the Black Square is a theater that is also a train. It’s a semi-magical train, full of compartments that are hard to find, dizzying when a person runs through it. But when it stops, it tells stories about how the world came to be, before something fell from “the something tree.” The Naming Song is about a world that lost its language, and what that means for the world and the people in it. Words are divined and delivered, a one-word performance for each newly found word.

But the Black Square communicates in things other than language, too: wild props, glass somethings, the mystery of its very existence and the unpredictability of its appearances. People run away to join the theater and get new titles by choosing a playing card. Everyone has a role, on stage and off. (The main character, the courier, protests, but she too gets cast in the plays.) The art becomes—or always is—subversive.

Halfway or so through Rakesfall, there is a performance. “CONTENT WARNING: IMPERIALISM, MASS MURDER, TORTURE.” The play is only a few pages long, but it bleeds out through the rest of the looping, dazzling book. The story is also history and legend, much of it likely lost on its audience—“mostly WHITE and mostly AMERICAN”—but Vajra Chandrasekera couches it in performance, in a series of exchanges that a reader ignorant of Sri Lankan history can understand in concept, if not recognize in detail. The chorus, the bodies on the stage who are not the ostensible protagonists, are the dead. There are a lot of them. The named characters don’t see them. In the next chapter, it’s been four hundred years since the play. “There is no stage. This is not a play. This is a conspiracy.”

(Any errors in this rough summary are solely the responsibility of this ignorant American, presently cursing the rarity of websites that will provide English-language references to figures mentioned in said play-within-a-book.)

A very different play occupies the mind of a character in Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass. Uri, the housemate of the unnamed narrator, has been working on a play about “the crisis”:

Uri’s paradoxical play, in which he is the only performer, is about Icarus and Daedalus at once. Snippets of it appear throughout the book, running in parallel to the narrator’s story (which involves her job driving a bus in circles, the appearance of giant art objects in the shape of bird’s nests, and a lot of loneliness). Eventually, Uri performs his play, and the town loves it—but after a while, he decides to use the stage to frame something else. A different kind of story. (This isn’t a spoilery, twisty kind of book, but should you read it, you should get to experience that moment for yourself.) Uri’s play—a solo performance that brings the town together, a finite piece of art with an ending that doesn’t want to be an ending—contains its own kind of multitudes. And in a tiny little town that no one ever leaves, it also offers something new.

These stories that contain performances speak to me in some way I don’t have the language to explain. It’s not always the end of the world, and it’s not always theater, not directly; there’s a fantastic stretch of Remember You Will Die that concerns a filmmaker and an actress, and the ways their stories spin out and touch other lives. It’s not just new books, of course: GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot centers on a pair of puppet-show producing siblings. There are all the film bits in Radiance, and Catherynne Valente also goes all-out on performance in Space Opera. There’s William Alexander’s “The Golden Tooth: A Solo Show by Orion Cabrera,” which is, yes, in the form of a solo show—but one in which the performer continually insists on the audience’s involvement. 

And maybe that’s it: Maybe I love the reminder that stories exist beyond their tellers. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.”

These stories that bring performance to the foreground—they refuse to let readers ignore their own place in the story. They ask readers to think about their role in the exchange. Reading Rakesfall, a white American reader becomes more aware of her role as watcher, as spectator. Reading “The Golden Tooth,” a reader might wonder which role they would step into, if asked. Every story shows its bones if you look hard enough, but these theater tales are a reminder how much practical work goes into every production, every performance, every bit of art created by human minds and hands. 

And, yes, sometimes they float the idea that even if the world as we know it crumbles, the theater kids will survive, and they’ll figure out how to make props out of nothing and stages out of trains. I like that idea a lot.