Of the pre-recorded theater options online, filmed back in that time when we could sit in an audience together, the plays that London's National Theatre have offered (for free, for a week at a time) on their YouTube channel have been seriously top-notch. This week's selection is particularly gripping: their 2016 staging of Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs, her last play and one that was never produced in her too-short lifetime. Hansberry makes the scourge of colonialism deeply personal by setting the action in an unspecified African country struggling to find its way to independence, at a mission run by white people who are not keen on examining their own racism and complicity. When Tshembe arrives home for a visit he finds himself in the middle of the maelstrom, and he is forced to confront the repercussions of centuries of imperialism as they resonate in his own family. The National Theatre's breathtaking production was directed by South African director and playwright Yaël Farber, and she makes powerful use of music and movement within the action of the play while simultaneously speaking to the very-present moment. I gave the cast a standing ovation in my living room.
See also: