Theater Comeback | Live Experiences | Storytelling Revival | Immersive Theater | Digital Fatigue | Post-Pandemic Culture | Future of Entertainment
You will start dancing, if you don’t know this or will flash a big smile on your face, if you already know this: The real, substantial, and ancient way of storytelling has come back. Entertaining live audience with raw stories, authentic human performance, and melting stone with spontaneous and natural emotions, such level of art and craft is already doing the classical dance around us in the post-pandemic, shocked world.
Theater Comeback
All over the world, theater is coming back. The art, which was killed by the plastic and mechanical story manufacturers, which was pushed aside by the greed to amass wealth on the cost of truth and honesty, is resurrecting with its ancient liveliness and is going to soothe your wounds given by the crony capitalists for the last 75+ years.
Live Experiences
Every living being, including plant, animal and human, craves for company, live touch, kiss and hug. We have evolved, survived and thrived while living with others—not independently. This culture of isolation, first started by TV, then exponentially amplified by the digital lifestyle, including the last two decades of the social media, is taking its toll. Our young bloods, who are the promise of our shared future, are choosing to die, voluntarily. If you don’t believe my words, look at this statistics:
According to WHO(World Health Organization)’s update on 25th Mar 2025, more than 720,000 people die by suicide, every year. It’s the 3rd top cause of death of our loved ones between 15 to 29 age group.
We can end this pandemic of living and suffering alone by the perfect opportunity to engage minds with the live performances: we will laugh, dance, cry and attain catharsis together, while sitting next to each other where no one is a digital stranger but our fellow human being.
Storytelling Revival
This ongoing period is actually a stage of the storytelling’s revival. What does it mean by resurgence? The answer lies in the empty movie theaters, saturated and failed films of big budgets: It’s the beginning of the end of copying and pasting one idea into millions of lifeless media products, sold through the crony and syndicated platforms, without the real world competition of authentic and artistic works.
When you read the plays of the storytelling stalwarts like of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and of Samuel Beckett(written in the early to the mid 20th century), then you will realize that we have been cheated with our money and robbed of our time with the plastic stories manufactured like assembly line method of mass production in the 21st century.
Immersive Theater
Here, immersive theater does not mean the technology-rich latest gadgets that promote loneliness and end up on the toe tags. Immersive theater meaning when the voice of the actor on stage melts strongest heart and cry of a baby at the dead body of her mother gives you a lifelong experience. You come out of such immersive participation with a resolution to change, and to do better for yourselves and others. If you are suffering from some mental health issues, the mesmerizing theater lets you go through catharsis, the real one, not artificially staged, that helps you immeasurably and much better than the expensive trip to a distracted psychologist who charges $250 or more per session.
Digital Fatigue
I have been using the internet since the late 1990s and was into it, in the early 2000s. At that time, it was a healthy and progressive addition to my life. But by 2003, I realized that there something wrong was going on and we were getting into a quagmire of nothingness. I left the digital world by 2004 and never returned to the black hole of loneliness and weirdness. Today, I use some of its tools just for the sake of communication and I discourage others to be a slave of the digital lifestyle. This comeback of theater into our life is a good excuse to get rid of this invisible master of the unconscious slavery.
Post-Pandemic Culture
In the early 2020, when we were caught off guard by the instant arrival of global lockdown, we spent a lot of time sitting idle and thinking about the life choices we had been making since the early1980s. We conducted introspection and many of us took radical step—post pandemic lockdown—and changed their lifestyle for better. This coming back of the ancient style of storytelling is a phenomenon that directly connected to this conscious choice made by many of us. And I am too happy for this timely renaissance.
Future of Entertainment
Theater is not only coming back but it’s going to be the future of entertainment. People are going away from screen, slowly, and very soon, this will be realized by big entertainment studios. Mumbai, the epicenter of 340+ movies per year, and its Bollywood’s products sold all over the world as the sensuous creation of the eastern civilization, is already going through an existential crisis. It never had faced such apathy from Indian filmgoers in the last 100+ years.
There is a big opportunity for those who love storytelling and live for the aesthetics of it. Make yourself ready, if your are busy in something else, and start preparing to entertain the world with the pulse of your heart. Those writers, who are searching for real subject shall read the plays of Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O’Neill, and of my three favorites, already mentioned in the beginning, especially of Arthur Miller. Their work will guide you to write stories for the postmodern audience. Miller is the ultimate darling of my heart and a look at his photo gives me strength, whenever I feel the burden of living a life of one’s own choice.
A Fun fact about Arthur Miller: For around five years, he was married to Marilyn Monroe, the American actress and super model whose fame, charm and charisma is still unmatched even after 75 years, and no one has reached the level of stardom, she enjoyed in her peak time. Unfortunately, their relationship ended as Miller was more into writing and Monroe was too busy in her movie career.
I made a promise in my latest eBook, titled: Manufacturing Authenticity, to write about theater in my next book. But it will take some time for the book to get published. I thought to share the good news without waiting so that my fellow storytellers can use the intervening period to welcome the opportunity with open and prepared arms.
Let’s write, design, stage and produce something that changes the world for better: We need to live long, not to die young.
Dive deeper: Create Your Own Meaning: How to Navigate the Craziness of Life
What to read next: The Manufactured Beggar
Authored by Zarion Zory
The Last Living Room: Why Theater is the Only Cure for a Digital Desert
The Loneliness Epidemic | The Human Connection
💐🙏🌹 Read more of my work at https://zarionzory.substack.com
This article was originally published on WordPress on August 25, 2025
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