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Then it slammed into the world at large in the form of an uncontrollable apocalyptic flu.
Earlier that night, she was too young to ride the subway home alone.
Soon she will walk across frozen Lake Michigan to survive.
The pandemic ofStation Elevenburns hot.
He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.
Its a true civilization-wiping event.
That leaves little space for coughing fits and feverish head tosses.
Its all about the traumatic trickle-down.
The show understands that mission: This is about what we harvest long after the tragedy has been sown.
Its emergence in the winter of 2021 feels almost perfectly wrongly timed.
Theres been so little appetite for mushing around in our current predicament and so little quality output.
Overall, COVID hasnt exploded into a force for riveting TV.
Perhaps thats because our pandemic has often slipped into the pedestrian.
School-board scuffles, desk partitions, and backed-up shipping lanes are not the stuff global catastrophe art sups on.
What narrative-thirsty viewer wants to see a hundred straight weeks of people scheduling Zooms and hunting down rapid tests?
It is often the case that reflection and distance incubate far superior art about any contemporary crisis.
Which is what makesStation Elevenso perversely satisfying.
It shuns the tidy shape of traditional disaster narratives.
It abandons characters and relationships for unfathomable stretches, then snaps back to them with full, tight focus.
This is a reordering of Maslows hierarchy with self-expression shoved in just above shelter.
Because survival is insufficient is the Traveling Symphonys tagline, scrawled across the sides of their converted pickup trucks.
(Its taken from an episode ofStar Trek, recalled with as much respect as Shakespeare.)
Survival is the core of most postapocalyptic, post-pandemic, post-the-world-is-fucking-collapsing narratives.
But who will die?
We tell ourselves stories because people die.
The fine arts, those youd buy supplies for at Blick or B&H, are essentially gone.
But the art of tongues and eyebrows and strides and embraces is fully available.
The Traveling Symphony performs only works of Shakespeare, the best of what the world once made.
In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world.
Hints of the shows absolutely spasmodic joy are there in the music choices.
Its there in the costumes, both onstage and off.
Alexs jorts are studded with sequins and bedecked by wafting tulle sewn down each side.
Later, one character will wear a bubbly patchwork denim shrug that beautifully defies all logic.
It doesnt keep her warm and its onerous to dine in; she just feels good in it.
That zaniness isnt just frivolity.
The first time young Kirsten sees it, shes coloring, idling away in the pre-pandemic theater.
Its hers, and its beautiful, and it bridges the long, long divide.
