Finding Joy During COVID-19

Fear is an old friend now. It’s something we used to attempt to live with or conquer in pre-pandemic days. Now it greets us every morning with the sun, like an evil Cheshire cat clawing at our brain.

We talked about it before leaving the house on our first drive to Miami Beach since March; fear that is. My husband and I were on our way to see an outdoor theatrical production on Lincoln Road staged by Miami New Drama called “Seven Deadly Sins.” Would it be safe?

Florida was the third state to surpass 1 million coronavirus cases behind Texas and California, and the infection rate in Miami-Dade County is climbing at an alarming rate. Hospitals are filling up. It feels like every day there is a new announcement of a prominent member in our community coming down with COVID-19, but our local mayors say they can’t get Gov. DeSantis on the phone. 

Catastrophe is in the air. “The ’rona” feels as thick as swamp in the Louisiana bayou, reinforced by the hauntingly empty cruise ships at the Port of Miami that we passed while crossing the MacArthur Causeway.

Once on Lincoln Road, where even store mannequins wear masks, we began to feel safe and fear got a temporary kick to the curb. While waiting for the show(s) to begin, we enjoyed an exhilarating R&B singer and pianist and ordered a drink at the bar, named “Purgatory” – a fitting image for where we are right now in society, in between heaven and hell. The moment reminded me of how much I love live theater and the nightlife that goes along with it.

It felt almost sinful. Are we allowed to experience joy during a pandemic?

At the box office you are assigned wristbands that pair to one of seven named storefront stages: “Envy,” “Gluttony,” “Greed,” “Lust, “Pride,” “Sloth” and “Wrath,” known collectively as the seven deadly sins since ancient times.

As you congregate near your first assigned vice, you are greeted by a guide who reiterates mandatory mask-wearing rules and instructs everyone to plug their provided new earbuds into the little audio box discreetly affixed to the side of each chair. Seats are in singles or pairs and socially distanced. Only about a dozen masked audience members fit in front of each storefront.

Actors safely perform one or two-person 10-minute plays behind encased glass, representing each of the seven deadly sins. Audience members move from one storefront to the next in between plays with their guide. Fewer than 100 people experience all seven sins each evening, less than a quarter of Miami New Drama’s usual capacity in its home at the Colony Theatre.

This may not be the same as sitting shoulder to shoulder in a beautiful, dark, silent theater watching a major production unfold on a professionally lit stage, but it sure comes close, and it beats by a mile all the virtual experiences currently on parade.

This ambitious return to live theater comes at the insistence of artistic director Michel Hausmann and managing director Nicholas Richberg, who both firmly believe theater is meant to be experienced live. They were determined to find a way to make it happen, even at the expense of their budget, and thanks to collaboration, connections, a little luck, a lot of hard work and overcoming logistical minefields, what they have accomplished is nothing short of revolutionary. If necessity is the mother of invention, Miami New Drama has proven what ingenuity can accomplish.

Within the collection of plays, “Greed” introduces siblings facing the death of their father and what that portends for their inheritance. “Gluttony” presents Richard Nixon in 1987 plotting his return to the White House. “Sloth” is inspired by the story of Rachel Dolezal, a white professor and NAACP leader who infamously pretended to be Black. “Pride” features the come-to-life statue of John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery politician who served as our seventh vice president from 1825-1832. In June of last year, his statue was removed from its 115-foot-tall pedestal in Charleston, South Carolina, but Calhoun won’t fade away before making us see our 21st-century selves. “Lust” takes us to the red light district in Amsterdam. “Envy” brings two formerly engaged concert pianists together at Carnegie Hall on the night one of them is about to accomplish their mutual lifelong dream. And my favorite is “Memories in the Blood,” performed by Carmen Peláez in the simplest of spaces to depict “Wrath.” 

Peláez takes us on a seemingly mundane journey to the market and back, where she remarks on making small talk with a vendor about the heat behind masks in a coronavirus world ... and of walking back home, “Which is no longer home, it no longer feels like home, is a place of exile. The walk towards it is a walk towards confinement.” As we begin to relate to the cabin fever that took her to the market in the first place, her journey reaches way back to the past, years before COVID-19, only to realize that people have always worn masks, and that our walls of confinement are not physical barriers at all. 

“Seven Deadly Sins” was originally scheduled to run through the holidays, but has been extended well into January and will hopefully continue beyond that. Premium tickets are $75 and general seating is $60; they are available for purchase at MiamiNewDrama.org/7deadlysins.

There are so few joys in life right now. One of them is experiencing “Seven Deadly Sins” on Lincoln Road. So, I recommend you mask up and join the socially distanced crowd to sin safely with glee.