When it comes to our experience of the arts, the twenty-first century is unprecedented—and weird. We have greater access to more works of art than ever before, and it is glorious. We can pull up almost any text or painting on our smartphones in seconds. We can discover new artists and listen to entire albums on Spotify. We can even watch complete performances of operas and plays on YouTube. But this greater access has come at a cost so ubiquitous and invisible that it is easy to forget we are paying it. The cost is that nearly every experience of art that we have is heavily mediated and controlled, shifting the source of our pleasure in the experience from gift recipient to consumer and critic. With that shift we become less able than ever to experience resonance—and the transformation that potentially comes through it. Is there anything we can do to shift it back?

Walker Percy was not the first to point out that unless you were raised by wolves, your experience of everything is mediated to some degree. In his famous essay “Loss of the Creature” he imagines what it would have been like for early explorers to stumble on the vista we now call the Grand Canyon. They would have been utterly shocked and amazed by the “thing as it is.” But Percy argues that we can never have that kind of experience because the canyon has been “appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. . . . The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon.” (How quaint, Walker; wait until you hear about Instagram and virtual reality!) Percy’s point is less about the technology of mediation than about how it changes the source of pleasure in the experience. When we compare the view or event to our expectations, we live in the past. When we take a photo, we live in the future. The present experience of the event (or work of art) itself all but disappears. I was never more convinced of Percy’s point than when I saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. I waited and jostled for an unobstructed view, and the last obstacle I had to navigate was a group of bubbly young women with selfie sticks, their backs to the painting.

I promise I’m not just being a crotchety professor here. I’m not saying that you must fly to St. Petersburg and sit with Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son to experience its riches. All art is reproduction and representation—mediation—in some way. The problem is that we forget that the ubiquity of mediation works against the “sitting with it” type of deep attention that is necessary for resonance and transformation. When we scroll willy-nilly from thing to thing as sightseers, we are put in a different relationship with the things we are looking at. Our source of pleasure shifts from learning about the thing (or receiving the thing as gift) to saying something about it to someone else. We become tourists—or critics. Walter Benjamin described this shift when he analyzed cinema, which was a relatively new art form at that time. Because films are reproduced, distributed, and viewed at different times and places, they lose their aura. Benjamin saw this loss as positive and revolutionary because the masses can challenge tradition only when it has been demystified. But being a critic rather than a mere viewer changes us. We become passive consumers of material that we can take or leave at will because we are the ultimate arbiters, armed with remotes and scrolling fingers.

It’s a bit of a paradox. As critics with the power to judge, we are more passive and less attentive. This has little to do with the technology per se, and more to do with how technology habituates us to consume art—quickly, in bite-sized pieces, and in total control. If we are offended, we can turn it off, walk out, never listen to that artist again, or just flip on something else.

There is no escaping the age of simulacra and simulation. Our lives will become more and more virtual in the years ahead, no matter how intentionally we resist it. But that doesn’t mean we should give up. I think we would do well to instigate a revolution in the one form of art that resists this shift more powerfully than any other: live theatre. Theatre foregrounds art as event and experience—particularly the experience of someone else’s story. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that modern society is characterized by a lack of resonance, which he defines as a mode of relating to the world that involves being affected and responding, feeling alive and a part of things. He claims that literature (of which live theatre, I’m arguing, is an especially powerful case) can open a space for resonance by allowing us to encounter perspectives, experiences, and values that challenge our own. “Literature is not a simple escape; it is a complex encounter. It does not only take us away from reality; it brings us closer to it. It does not only take us away from ourselves; it brings us closer to ourselves. It does not only take us away from others; it brings us closer to others. Literature enables us to experience reality in new ways, to discover ourselves in new ways, to relate to others in new ways, that can resonate with us and change us.”

Art has the potential to change people because it offers a present experience, not a past argument. Live theatre increases the experiential component in every way. The actors are physically present, less than a softball’s throw away. You are aware that they may accidentally trip and fall, or spit on you if you are in the front few rows. Peter Brook, author of the brilliant classic The Empty Space, calls this “the immediate theatre.” Theatre “asserts itself in the present,” making it disturbing and dangerous. Its existence as living event explains why the theatre is the last to be liberated when a tyrannical regime is overthrown. “Instinctively, governments know that the living event could create a dangerous electricity—even if we see this happen all too seldom. But this ancient fear is a recognition of an ancient potential. The theatre is the arena where a living confrontation can take place.” When it is truthful, a living confrontation of a whole group of people can be intense like nothing else.

Because theatre is a live event, you become more of a participant than a critic. You are all but forced to watch this story unfold in real time with actual human beings attempting to make your heart beat along with the story’s events. You don’t take photos, and you don’t talk to the people around you. Even getting up to go to the restroom is rude. Thus the playwright Tony Kushner writes that “theater is a hostage situation. You’re holding people in a room against their wills and demanding that they listen to you.” While all art is a way of the artist saying “Look at this! This is important!” in live theatre it’s much harder to look away. The playwright Richard Greenberg, finding himself one evening attending a play that was “beautifully written, superbly acted, and hell to sit through,” surmised that “this is why when we hate a play, we hate it so much more desperately than we do a movie or a novel or a painting. When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we’ve lost volition and time is passing. A stalled play feels like an existential threat.” But of course this also explains why good plays with quality performances have such power. They couple plot with presence, and we are compelled into deep attention to experience itself. We are offered an opportunity for resonance. We are moved.

The coupling of storytelling with living confrontation also gives theatre prophetic power that is not unlike excellent preaching. In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann argues that prophets expose and challenge the dominant consciousness and nourish an alternative consciousness. Flannery O’Connor was this kind of storyteller. She wrote that “the prophet’s vision is a goad to the conscience; it seeks to awaken us to what we are and what we are becoming. It seeks also to show us what we can be if we will only respond properly.” Great storytellers are like Nathan inviting David to resonate with a story that seems to have nothing to do with him (there’s a rich man who steals a precious lamb from a poor man) only later to be told, “You are that man!” Of course, most of us do not have our individual Nathans to concoct the tales we most need to hear. And no storyteller (even Nathan) can ensure that we will either make the connection to our own lives or respond properly. To be effective, storytellers can’t be didactic or sentimental. They can only stand and point with all their energy at who we are and what we are becoming, and hope that the raw truth speaks for itself. They can only invite and plead: Look at this!

The work of a critic can never replicate this power, but I would like to illustrate the way art as experience can prophetically reveal the dominant consciousness and challenge it. Cost of Living is a 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Polish-born immigrant Martyna Majok. It challenges our gnostic disgust with embodiment and finitude by putting the disabled and aging body front and centre, making embodied persons (of all types) the locus of significance. It also challenges the belief that individual autonomy is the highest value, where freedom is defined as freedom from something (disease, suffering, disability), by arguing that true freedom is the freedom to do something (love others, grow). It is the best example I have ever seen of prophetic theatre.

Cost of Living divides the stage and the timeline between two interiors, each featuring a disabled person and his or her caretaker. We are first introduced to Eddie, an unemployed trucker who is nearly suicidal over the recent death of his ex-wife, Ani. The play revisits their time together after a prior accident had turned her into a quadriplegic. (The accident was not the cause of their separation.) When the set revolves, we are introduced to John, a wealthy graduate student at Princeton who has severe cerebral palsy. He has just hired Jess, a struggling child of immigrants with her own complicated past. These two stories develop side by side (but independently of each other) through most of the play, without apparent relation between them.

Before much dialogue has taken place, Majok has already accomplished a major feat. She has centred her story on persons who are disabled and their caretakers. Because of this normalizing focus, all four characters have equal status in the eyes of the audience. Like all human beings, they each have gifts and privileges, flaws and foibles. Eddie is an able-bodied truck driver but struggles with alcoholism and a failed marriage. Ani is intelligent and capable but frustrated in her newly disabled body. John, suffering severe cerebral palsy from birth, has more wealth and privilege than all the characters but is arrogant and prejudiced. And Jess is young, intelligent, able-bodied, but also the poorest and most marginalized of them all. All the characters have blind spots and things they need to learn.

The result is that this is a play about ordinary people, their relationships, and their lives in their particular bodies, not about the abstract idea of disability. Live theatre makes the point more forcefully than anything (beyond personal experience) possibly can: these living bodies are right there. This is especially powerful when the director casts disabled actors. In the production I saw in New York City in September of 2022, Ani was played by Katy Sullivan, who was born without the lower half of both legs. Her understudy, Regan Linton, is wheelchair-bound. John was played by Gregg Mozgala, an actor and dancer who has a minor form of cerebral palsy. Mozgala told the New York Times, “I can bring everything, all my life experience to bear through this character. . . . I was denying that for a long time, but this play enables me to step into myself fully.” Mozgala distilled the experience like this: “I’m enough,” he said. “It’s not how disabled I can make John but how human can I make John.” The play forced him to think about his own humanity and to understand and accept himself as a person who lives with a disability. “That synergy has been one of the greatest gifts I will ever be given as a human being and as a working actor.”

Because the audience is held hostage, we cannot look away. We are almost forced to see these characters (and the actors) both as disabled and as far more than their disabilities. Majok invites us into private places and scenes that remind us of the frailty of all human life. In one, Ani, a quadriplegic, is in a bathtub (full of real water). At one point her ex-husband, who is bathing her, steps out to the kitchen to get an ashtray. When he is offstage, she is still talking to him and turns her head, causing her to slip completely underwater. I have never heard such a loud collective gasp in the theatre before. I lost my breath. The fragility of all human life was right in front of us.

That level of drama is unusual for this play. Cost of Living is more about the day-to-day lives of disabled people. Inasmuch as most of us are aware of these daily details, we simply don’t want to think about them. In one scene, the audience watches Jess bathing John. The actor is nude, and the scene progresses as realistically as possible—there’s a shower (again with real water) and the caregiver is looking away and covering him at appropriate times to keep his privacy. In the script, Majok gives these instructions: “December. John’s apartment. Jess showers John. We watch the entire act. It takes as long as it needs.” The scene is the opposite of voyeurism: it offers the best of what art can accomplish. It challenges our culture’s effort to hide the disabled body and the dying body from view. We hide disabled bodies because we don’t want to imagine that we could be that person, nor do we want to imagine being the caretaker of a disabled child or parent. We prefer to sustain the illusion that this will never happen to us.

The fact that all humans are persons made in the image of God (and worthy of a story told about them) is the thesis of the Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann’s magisterial book Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something.” He argues that no matter what their mental or physical condition, all beings born into the human family are persons. This makes the severely disabled—those who display few or none of the usual properties of persons—an acid test for our humanity. “They are human beings, and human beings are a kind of creature whose nature is to ‘have,’ not simply to ‘be,’ its nature. The human being, the being that has its mode of existence, is ipso facto a mystery, never merely the sum of its predicates.” By centring her play on persons who happen to be disabled, Majok insists that all persons should be recognized for being a member of the human family, not for possessing the useful or attractive properties of a “typical” human.

Cost of Living thus challenges the dominant consciousness before the characters are even developed. But as the play progresses, it becomes clear that Majok’s primary cultural target is the illusion that what we really want is individual autonomy and freedom, so that when it is taken away, so also goes any reason for living. First, the play reminds us that no one has individual autonomy and complete freedom to begin with. Eddie has the full use of his body, but he struggles with alcoholism and loneliness. He failed in his marriage. After the accident, Ani can’t imagine that Eddie might love her better through her new need for him, not despite of it. Jess has no money, no home, and an elite education that she can’t leverage. John’s money buys him a certain kind of autonomy and freedom that Jess doesn’t have—but he is almost completely blind to the privilege. John declares, “I have money. I can basically do anything I want except the things I can’t.” The play reveals that what John says is true of every single human being. No one can do everything they want to, and even when they can act, it is only a matter of time before that fact changes. The play exposes our division of people into two groups: the “disabled” and the “abled,” forgetting, as we always do, that when it comes to physical ability, we are all either “disabled” or “not yet disabled.” Perfect freedom to always act in accordance with our desires is an illusion.

Second, the audience enters the theatre assuming that disabled people must certainly be depressed because they are dependent on others, and that this fact is a huge drag on everybody. Despair all around. But by the time the audience leaves, they have learned that despair has a different cause. Despair comes from denying that suffering, frailty, and finitude are the cost of living for everyone. It comes from choosing to dwell inside the losses as if the losses are all there is and ever will be. According to the Catholic writer Andre Dubus, whom Majok quotes on the Cost of Living playbill I had in New York, while we assume that the goal of our individual lives is to lessen the pain and increase the joy, “the truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can’t have one without the other.” Furthermore, “what creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.” Dubus is not blaming the imagination, as if we could live without it. He is talking about how loss makes us forget that the only moment we have ever had is the present one. Majok’s play reminds us that to be here in the present moment—with the possibility of love—is everything. It is the greatest gift. In the words of Dubus: “We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

On a September night in New York, masked along with everyone else because the pandemic was still making live theatre a risk to actors, I was keenly aware that losses can be individual or corporate. They can be big and dramatic, or small and seemingly insignificant. But this play reminded me that we all face them. It reminded me that we need the losses to strip us of our illusions of independence and control. Because what remains of life after the losses is not self-sufficiency, or money, or success. What remains is the ever-existing possibility of, and need for, genuine healing love. When Ani confronts Eddie by saying that he’s only with her because he has no one better to be with, he replies, “That’s not how people work. People don’t go after people unless they fuckin need ’em. And everyone fuckin—needs ’em, someone. That’s what life is, what yer life, my life . . . is. Okay? That’s how people work. In life.”

What a gift it was to be jolted back into that reality. As I walked back to my hotel, some other playgoers were walking behind me for several blocks, talking excitedly about the play. I, too, was elated. It felt good to be alive, to be in a country and a city that recognizes the humanizing potential of the art of theatre. I also was keenly aware of my privilege to be able to attend the show. I didn’t know then that a year later a small theatre in Chicago would put on a new play by Martyna Majok called Sanctuary City, and that I would take students to it, and that this theatre would understand that the cost of tickets is the primary barrier between this life-changing experience and the people who need it. So, for less than half the cost of a movie ticket for each person, we went, gladly held hostage to this playwright who has something vital to say about the costs and joys of living this one precious life we’ve been given. It is my hope and prayer that more theatres endeavour to do the same.