As the Covid pandemic casts its shadow over the globe for a third year, its impact on theatre—as with everything else—cannot be ignored. Just enough time has passed for the first of many substantial works by theatre practitioners and scholars to emerge and assess the ways in which theatre has thrived and helped us to survive in the process. Barbara Fuchs's Theater of Lockdown and Caridad Svich's Toward a Future Theatre are two such projects, casting light on this evolving corpus. The books consider a vast array of theatre-makers as they advanced their works through the ongoing health crisis. New roles for both artist and spectator are taking shape while the nuances of liveness, co-presence, and co-temporality are tested as live artists move online to discover that the digital space can be genuinely live, and distance is not so far away.The scholarly writing of Philip Auslander, Andy Lavender, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and others who have been pursuing these questions for years is suddenly more prescient than ever. Although the world feels completely changed since 2019, Fuchs and Svich are both quick to point out that in many ways it is simply continuing its trajectory. The countless theatre artists who were pushed to experiment in the virtual realm out of necessity are actually building upon practices that have been around for many years. Similarly, these two writers also understand that the pandemic presents a convergence of escalating crises that, in addition to the virus, includes the climate crisis, democratic instabilities, gendered violence, and white supremacy, which have necessitated organized demonstrations of protest despite the risks of infection. Marco Pustianaz's Surviving Theatre makes for an interesting companion piece through its challenge to modes of spectatorship with an eye towards building an “affective archive” of the performed event. Pustianaz provides useful tools for engaging Fuchs and Svich's histories as they commence building the archive for theatre in the era of Covid.Fuchs examines theatre created in 2020 during the lockdowns, revealing how theatre continues to be live despite the obstacles to co-presence, which had previously been deemed essential to the liveness of theatre. Auslander's work on liveness as both historical and contingent is key, as is Lavender's notion of co-temporality and the concept of postdramatic theatre as popularized by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Fuchs observes that digital and in-person, distanced theatre during lockdown were not binaries, but were deeply entwined, given the shared technologies used for both, and since principles of audience engagement and access remained the same for the modalities. She illustrates this reading with deep dives into some of the excellent works produced in 2020, including Elli Papakonstantinou's Traces of Antigone, The Acme Corporation's The Institute for Counterfeit Memory, Forced Entertainment's End Meeting for All, and the viral Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, in addition to several pieces by Joshua William Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin's Theater in Quarantine.Fuchs provides us with a narrative of the creation of a distinct theatre of lockdown: making sense of the chaos, she outlines a somewhat progressive path of experimentation and discovery as artists shared resources and moved from screening prerecorded performances to testing the limits of Zoom to something hybrid/augmented to something altogether different. Many artists attempted to understand what made their online theatrical performances different from filmmaking, with Fuchs concluding that there was a “need for the audience's imagination to complete the picture—fundamentally distinguished online theater, whether or not it was recorded, from film.” One of the defining characteristics of Fuchs's Theater of Lockdown is the concept of simulation, which serves as more than just a form of compensation for a lack of co-presence due to lockdowns. Its deliberate self-awareness becomes a “postdramatic signature” of the unique form taking shape. It may be difficult to understand the extent to which these experiments were speaking to each other directly and which were happening concurrently in isolation; Fuchs describes this context as “not just a life raft but a flotilla of rapidly proliferating possibilities.” Theater of Lockdown chronicles the development of these experiments, creating both a historical record and a guide for future artists.Similarly, Caridad Svich's short and sweet interviews with sixty U.S. and UK theatre artists makes for engaging reading and, more importantly, serves as a historical account of this “death-haunted, radically unique” period. Towards a Future Theatre begins with a poetical text by playwright Tim Crouch that imagines taking soil samples from three different time periods: 2012, February 2020, and July 2020. Each moment reveals the growing horror of its present. “Political incompetence could now be measured in surplus deaths,” observes the narrator. And yet the moments demonstrate that while history accelerates, it also repeats. Interestingly, our present evokes for Svich “the spirit of both the 1968 revolutions centered on civil rights, racial justice and healing, gender equality and LGBTQIA rights, and the volatile, fractious 2008 Occupy movement.” As with Svich's other projects, like The Breath of Theatre and Theatre in Crisis?, the scope is ambitious, touching on the ills plaguing the theatre community beyond the immediate threat of Covid, such as systemic racism, ableism, and climate change. Svich's contributors are compelling as they discuss their experiences as live artists during lockdown, offering advice to emerging theatre-makers entering the field amidst this turmoil. While the book's format does not allow for a deep analysis of any particular social justice issue, it seems enough for Svich that these issues are simply called out. I suppose other readers would agree, particularly if the alternative was their omission.The most resonant sequence comes with Svich's acknowledgement that theatre has the capacity to harm to its audiences and artists. Mindful that we are living “in times of crisis and profound multivalent traumas,” Svich asks each contributor, “How can theatre be a vector for healing and heal itself?” Stephanie Ybarra observes that disruptions and crises are how we mark time. It is “history” in the Hegelian sense, where only conflict is worthy of being observed and therefore is perpetuated. Michael Garcés speaks beautifully against the “pornography of trauma” which is baked into Western dramaturgical praxis and, as a “cis-male paradigm,” has asserted itself in order to prevent alternative modes of storytelling to achieve legitimacy or conceivability. “We spend more time writing versions of the apocalypse than we do post-capitalist stories,” argues Anthony Simpson-Pike, which he contends has led to “a crisis of imagination as a political culture.” Morgan Green speaks about resisting a “‘The Show Must Go On’ mentality,” which convinces artists that they must produce at a rate that disregards the cost to their health and wellbeing.Fuchs, like Svich, does not simply point to new artists and shifting modes of theatre-making, but also calls for “greater access to envision and engage new audiences.” She believes we have seen a deliberate shift in terms of accessibility since the medium moved online, given “everyone has the best seat in the house” from their computer screen. Yet dangers from the pandemic have also necessitated new ways of being seen and new ways of looking. In Pustianaz's Surviving Theatre, spectatorship “is never a safe practice: even though imperfectly intimate, it is never distant enough” to prevent contagion from something like Covid. Pustianaz argues that the need for spectatorship was already fraught. He posits that spectators are surviving a separation from the stage; theatre exists because of its spectators, and continues to exist in those spectators long after the initial performed event has concluded. This double experience of the event, and what Pustianaz describes as the “either/and” of twilight, are key to his mode of analysis.Language and etymology are important to Pustianaz, and his scholarship is indebted to texts like Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster (1980)—an appropriate cornerstone for a monograph titled Surviving Theatre. Central to Pustianaz's project is his concept of the “speaking spectator,” which is born out of his extended grappling with Jacques Rancière's The Emancipated Spectator (2008). Instead of arguing, like Rancière, that the spectator must resist serving as a passive witness, Pustianaz finds greater power in the decision to remain a spectator, thereby completing the theatrical event. This is ultimately amounts to a political choice, one that affords greater agency than is found in Rancière's activist theatre. The paradox, according to Pustianaz, is that if a spectator “activates,” they become an actor. Pustianaz's spectator must speak if they are to survive beyond the conclusion of the performance event. Spectators must survive to provide a vital service contributing to what Pustianaz calls the “affective archive.” Here, spectatorship is an archival technology; as the spectator experiences a performance and later returns to that experience in the remembering of the event, the “double movement shapes the affective relation,” providing new knowledge in the imperfections of this embodied process, which for Pustianaz is a kind of twilight.Twilight is the liminal time of both day and night, serving for Pustianaz as a poetic mode of simultaneity, or “doubleness,” which helps explain the existence of his spectator. Pustianaz's work is not explicitly tied to the pandemic, as research for the monograph was completed well before 2020, with most of his case studies being productions from the early 2000s. Yet it seems clear that Pustianaz's mechanisms for the speaking spectator and an affective archive, conceived pre-pandemic, have the potential to be of great service to the study of theatre during Covid's slow catastrophe. I believe that this vision of twilight is a potent metaphor for understanding the contributions of Fuchs and Svich have made to our own processing of theatrical creation during the pandemic.Theatre in the era of Covid appears to be operating in a twilight space out of necessity. This form of theatre can be defined by certain shared characteristics: an emphasis on experienced time—specifically a rapid acceleration of anxieties folded into a static immobility, which I call “quarantine time”; an emphasis of product and process which attempts to heal body and/or mind; an emphasis on new kinds of access developed in order to continue working while expanding access to new spectators; and a new understanding of affects produced from this period of isolation and fear of infection, which ultimately exacerbates preexisting fears known to BIPOC theatre-makers. Theatre of quarantine time seems to exist at a shifting nexus for (virtual) co-presence and co-temporality where balance is navigated with the intention of providing for certain desires on the part of the artist and spectator. Mostly, this is done in pursuit of solace.Fuchs and Svich prioritize artists working towards defiant affirmations of life rather than acts of mourning during this pandemic, even as the global death toll rises past 5.5 million. I believe that we will see more works of mourning and corresponding studies once our culture reaches a collective sense of finality with this current pandemic.1 But we are not there yet, despite the collective exhaustion felt by many individuals. There is a logic to putting off larger spectacles of collective mourning, given we are all still in the throes of the event. As that shift takes place, theatre's role as a “memory machine” will be vital. In the meantime, I believe it is important to acknowledge the focus and temperament of the forms of theatre being created, particularly as they have been studied here by Fuchs and Svich.The books reviewed in this essay, alongside several others including Laura Bissell and Lucy Weir's Performance in a Pandemic, Catherine Quirk and Carolyn Ownbey's Covid Play/s: Entertainment and the Arts in Quarantimes, and my own Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times (co-edited with Kendra Claire Capece), only form the fascinating first wave of what will surely be a deluge of pandemic-era theatre scholarship in the coming years. These scholars have found the theatre of our present to be marked by precarious acts of survival, healing, and remembering. As we look ahead, I feel it is important to appreciate that twilight is fleeting. It can either be dusk or the dawn.