“The Line,” a play of communal horror, follows health-care workers battling COVID-19, and Hannibal Buress’s new special turns a police encounter into comedy and catharsis.
Our species cannot make sense of warnings. In January, when reports of the coronavirus in Wuhan began to appear on the front page of the Times, we in New York grimaced and flipped past. Even as northern Italy succumbed, Milan’s Fashion Week rattled along. Something was happening to someone else, again. In retrospect, the confused feeling of early March in New York was like the sickening pause that heralds the arrival of a tsunami, the water receding before the wave crashes down. Now that we have been spat out onto drier land, we try to persuade the rest of the country to look at us, to listen, to learn from our mistakes, and we get silence, or worse, in return.
If the progression of the unchecked virus doesn’t scare the anti-maskers and the politicians who cynically enable them, it’s unlikely that watching “The Line,” a new play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen about New York City health-care workers battling covid-19, will do much to advance the cause. Still, it makes for an urgent, heartrending hour; maybe dramatized truth can slip through a window when the doors of reason have been slammed. Directed by Blank, and produced and presented by the Public, “The Line” is streaming on YouTube through September 1st, and, in a welcome effort at accessibility, is also available with Spanish subtitles, in closed captioning and sign language, and with audio description for the visually impaired. So far, more than twenty-eight thousand people have watched the play, likely a far larger audience than the physical theatre could have accommodated over the course of a run. If there is an understandable appetite for escapism these days, there is clearly also a hunger for works that try to parse our baffling shared reality.