Month: March 2026

Wrecking Ball: On the American addiction to destruction

During my year of History of Theatre classes at Virginia Tech ca. 1983, Dept. Head Don Drapeau lectured about Western theater/re traditions that began in Greece, using the textbook History of Theatre (Fourth Edition, by the time I took the class) by Oscar G. Brockett. From the Greek and Roman multi-purpose arenas, we’d make our way through the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages and the Pageant Plays, where you’d come to realize that all theaters are essentially churches, which is to say, churches are theaters, built for audience and players. By the Renaissance, special buildings called theatres, (from the Greek amphitheatron, or “place with spectators all around”) were being constructed solely for the purpose of the thing that is a play. And at some point in a lecture, Don would intone, speaking about every theatre from the Rose to the Old Globe, “And it burned down.” Eventually, by the end of the second quarter, we students would complete his thought for him.

By the end of the third quarter, we could have changed it to “And it was demolished.”

This edition stopped being handed down with me, as I knew I would be a teacher and could use it. I never did get back any theater book I loaned to starving theatre majors, either because the concept of building a personal library didn’t occur to them or else it did and they kept them; or maybe they gave my books to someone else, or possibly sold them back to the Virginia Tech bookstore, or threw them out—as Americans do. I still miss my copy of Renaissance Drama, Kelly.

As a theater-going New Yorker, you start memorizing the locations of all the major houses, Shubert Alley, the re-namings of long-standing places (The Brooks Atkinson is now The Lena Horne, for example); you absorb the history, how a row of old, beautiful theaters, including the legendary Morosco, was demolished to make way for the Marriott Marquis Hotel—and no hotel could look more impersonal or corporate, including the fast the glass elevators that speed you to the top floors. (Its only redeeming feature, the ready availability of restrooms on the fourth floor, is now a thing of the past, the doors locked. Because America is punitive by design.)

I have been revisiting theater history this week reading Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater, 1850-1970 by Leonard Jacobs, published in 2008. The book was given to me not long ago by my friend, Richard, a Broadway stage manager, when he saw me reading it at his house. (Lest I think he was being overly generous (or trying to dump a mediocre item), he told me that the year the book came out, two different people had gifted him a copy.) In photo after photo, you see old-time theater greats and photos of the theaters where they played, and the building narrative runs something like, “Built in 1926, demolished in 1936.” These stunning marble edifices, intricately carved, doodads all over, stunning interiors, painted ceilings (and you have to imagine the colors, as the photos are black and white)—each one gone inside of ten, twenty, or thirty years to make way for a concrete and glass office building.

So not only are the magnificent vessels of the performing arts built and demolished, when they were constructed at their height in the 1890s to the 1920s, America was both Gilded and also cultured; and then they all came down, the buildings and the people, in a crash with the Crash. Cue the wrecking balls.

The business of America is business. Really lousy business.

Page after page of these historic photos (along with captions heavy with dates and commentary, but oddly inconsistent in things like addresses or anecdotes), you see that only a few of these theater palaces survive and are still in use. “It was demolished.” And it got me wondering about the Western penchant for demolition—from Trump’s midnight teardown of White House East Wing and the coming teardown of The [Trump] Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to Israel’s U.S.-funded thermal bombing Gaza and the coming similar Israeli-U.S. treatment of Iran: what is it about Western culture that cannot bear the idea of anything as it is, taking its own time, whether it’s civilization or a meadow or The Morosco?

I think back to “It burned down.” With every innovation, from candles to gas lamps to limelight—theater owners saw money to be made by closing the roofs and playing both day and night; and with every chance of money to be made comes the risk of imminent destruction. Does this habit of money and tech rewire our brains? I think yes.

According to an article a friend sent me, the corporate-imposed use (by Microsoft and Google, etc.) of things like Copilot and ChatGPT and AI is also rewiring our brains to the point that very, very soon indeed humans will not be able to construct any original thought into a coherent sentence—even just the finishing of a text thought or correcting our spelling, via apps we didn’t ask for, is retraining us to rely on technology—demolishing us, as it were, to make way for data centers.

To what end? I ask this a lot.

All the nature, all the artistic work of architecture (as was), demolished by the Trumps of the world to make way for Towers in homage to themselves, wiping out what was, our history, our beauty, for ego. And we lose knowledge, too. Walking around Queens last weekend, my friend Cathy and I ran into our friends Lisa and Jodi, and Lisa remarked that something I once said about bricks got her paying attention to the way our many brick buildings are constructed. We pointed to the building across the street and showed Cathy. Here’s a photo to explain:

Note the running bond pattern is interrupted every five rows to place bricks turned the other direction. There’s a name for this, and I could look it up, and I used to know it, but you can find it if it interests you. It’s Sunday.

And I learned about this method of brick construction, done for stability, from my teacher friend Tommy many years ago. And from my friend Jim, who learned it from an architect friend, I learned that all the high-up doodads and sculptural features on fancy city buildings were created for the viewing pleasure of the people on the upper floors across the street. You know, with design and thought and attention to detail. I think about all these arts—carvings and mortar and bricks and marble and doodads in service to beauty as one enters a building devoted to other arts—and marvel at the cavalier attitude businessmen take to paying to demolish all this craft for the sake of a hideous concrete and glass tower to make money; I equally marvel that there are businesses devoted to doing this demolition without blinking. Money money.

Sitting on the 7 Train to and from Manhattan last evening (and the night return) to see a play, I was among the few people daydreaming or observing; everyone else was on their phones or listening to something in their earbuds, and I got to thinking about all the ways we are demolishing our innermost selves so someone we will never know can make a shit ton of money.

I never thought I’d see a performance of a new play written by Wallace Shawn and directed by Andre Gregory. Really involving. If you haven’t seen My Dinner with Andre, I recommend it. Like Shawn’s drama characters, Gregory talks about experiences and ideas, and people almost never talk about things like that anymore. When I eavesdrop, I mostly hear about meal services and TV shows people are streaming; consumption is our modern life.

One thing about this technology: I’m really glad that spellcheck often still misses “teh” and “aobut” for automated fixes. That will change. But I prefer to make my own corrections, and take my own daydream subway rides, and walk whenever possible to my destination—to feel that I still own my own mind, my own body, that I have a choice of experience and destiny. Until I, too, am demolished.

Sending love, somehow, on a Sunday morning from Queens,

Miss O’

To My Sister Virginia

Woolf works to guide us

In the late years of her life, ca. 1936-1938, writer Virginia Woolf was experimenting with a text that combined the novel form with the essay form. The result was, in the end, two books, the novel The Years (which began its life as The Pargiters), and the essay Three Guineas. I’ve read many of Woolf’s novels half a dozen times each—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, the Waves, Orlando—I’ve even read Flush twice (the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, and it’s hilarious). I’ve read Jacob’s Room three times, I think, but the first time was the best, and Between the Acts at least twice; and the essay A Room of One’s Own I think four times through—I just finished it again recently and I think I finally got it all. It only took me 40 years.

Curiously, I have read her first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day only once—they aren’t that interesting, though I might change my mind. The same goes for the The Years (though, ironically and not surprisingly, as it was a straight family chronicle, it was Woolf’s best selling book). I’ve also read Three Guineas only once think—all of that at Oxford in 1992, when I studied Woolf as part of my master’s. Be impressed. (I’ve also read her short fiction, only “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” standing out in memory.)

I have a brilliant writer friend who thinks Woolf writes the worst fiction known to man. I could not disagree more. But this same writer does not disagree with me that Virginia Woolf had one of the finest minds of the 20th century, and I’d say any century. As I’ve probably told you, for me Virginia Woolf renders the world precisely the way I experience it. Do with that what you will.

Today I ran across this post from HistoryCoolKids on Instagram, and it made me recall how important her pacifist essay Three Guineas (1938) is in the Woolf pantheon—that’s the essay the post refers to—and also how aware Woolf was that men are fucking everything up (this was around the beginning of the next great world war, England once again at the center):

The post text:

Teaching my Oxford class was tutor Jeri Johnson, herself a James Joyce scholar who for only that one summer taught both Joyce and Woolf (in separate courses); curious as to why she would be drawn to such polar opposite modernist writers, I did some research, in the time before Google, availing myself of the school library where I was teaching, and saw quickly that the writers were exact contemporaries, 1882-1941. How about that? (Note: if you want to blow away a professor, show up with a little tidbit like that and set the stage for your A.) I also learned that Woolf detested Joyce’s Ulysses, finding it vulgar (she’s not wrong, what with all the mentions of snot, for example, and masturbation); and the most important thing about Joyce’s book for me is that it inspired Woolf to write Mrs. Dalloway in answer: one day in a life in London, a woman’s life, in response to one day in the life of a man in Dublin. Both texts have richness, but Woolf’s is not designed to keep scholars arguing for a century, and that alone speaks to her quote up there.

When Jeri assigned Three Guineas to read, I entered class the next day filled with ideas, bookmarked pages, notes in the margins. The essay’s premise is that Woolf has been asked for three guineas (pounds) to give in donation, one guinea each per charity, and she’s deciding which cause deserves her money. In the course of essay, she arrives at the conclusion that her final guinea can never go to supporting men taking us to war. My four classmates (this being an Oxford-style tutorial affair), all women, declared the essay a failure and Woolf a “shrill” woman. I sat in silence. They went on about how “now was not the time to call for peace,” “Hitler on the rise,” etc. They were utterly dismissive, and all discussion was shut down. Jeri looked at me.

“Lisa,” she said, “you’ve been awfully quiet.” I looked up and stated, “I loved it.” Jeri started to smile, and thus encouraged, I went into my rapture: “This is a woman who knows she doesn’t have a lot of time…” and I began flipping to my bookmarks and reading my evidence. As I type this for you, I can feel myself in that little Oxford office, aged 26, sitting on the floor, speaking with a young woman’s ardor. No one else said anything. Class was over, Jeri assigned us something, and I was the last to file out. “Thank you,” she said, quietly. “You’re welcome,” I said, and left feeling that I’d found my own way and stood my ground intellectually for the first time in my academic life. That’s pretty cool.

We are living in an age where the lies of men, the vulgarities of men, the warmongering and whore mongering and shit-peddling of men must finally end, or we all go down and forever.

Quote from Three Guineas, the button I wear to every protest.

This evening I’m embarking on a reread of both The Years and Three Guineas, because the mind of Woolf ca. 1936, when she began her work—seeing the writing on the wall in Germany—reminds me of myself and my female friends in 2026. Nearly a century on, men are still running and fucking up everything. I need fortification. We don’t have a lot of time.

Should you wish to start your own Woolf journey, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I recommend Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando—definitely not To the Lighthouse or The Waves; though I think they really are her masterpieces, it’s so hard to see why without a little primer. I speak from experience, take it or leave it.

Woolf continues to inspire. The composer Max Richter and choreographer Wayne MacGregor created Woolf Works, which I saw on video during Covid from The Royal Ballet in Britain, and live in 2024 in New York. The only one of the three ballets that really works is based on Mrs. Dalloway, and I mention this because I’d love to see what women artists would do with the same material. You know. (I made this watercolor to show my friends who recommended the piece:)

Covid creation by LO’H, for those in the know. You come, too.

Sending you love and Woolf inspiration as antidote to all the maleness madness. Let me know how you get on.