One of my big disappointments in this year of pandemic lockdown was the cancellation of all of the Shakespeare festivals I normally would have attended during the summer and into the fall. But this afternoon, I got to experience a live production of King Lear by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, performed in a distanced manner over the internet. This is the festival that normally does the Free Shakespeare in the Park performances during the summer. Apparently some theaters have produced plays using Zoom, where each actor appears in their own box in a matrix. This production was unique in that all of the actors were performing physically separated and used green screens, then they were composited together against different backgrounds appropriate for each scene. Apparently the actors couldn’t see each other, only hear each other. The resulting video quality wasn’t great, and the green screen artifacts were quite noticeable, but overall it worked as a play. Visually it was a little sketchy, but considering what they were doing it was quite impressive.
In this production they had the lead be a female, but still referred to her as King. It gave a few scenes a little different flavor, but no major difference. There was also periodic inter-scene sound effects of news reports on BLM unrest to try and make it timely. The setting was supposed to be America, but this was only superficially noticeable. They were clever in the way they had to appear to pass items between actors, or do stage fights. It was good to be able to see at least one “live” production this summer. Hopefully things won’t be shutdown forever.
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However the US State Department issued a Level 4 travel advisory basically saying do not travel internationally, and if you were already traveling get back immediately or you might get stuck outside the country for an indeterminant period. I hesitated a while, but things appeared to be changing quickly so I eventually decided to cut my trip shot to ensure I’d be able to get back (as did most of my fellow travelers). I canceled some days in my Airbnb and changed my plane tickets to fly home the day after the tour. Luckily they both had essentially waived the penalties for changing plans. 
The flight out of Mexico was uneventful, and clearing US Customs in Houston was super quick as there were no lines. This was in big contrast to some news reports we’d seen a few days earlier where they had rerouted planes coming from Europe to just a few airports and they were checking everybody for disease symptoms, causing massive crowds. My original connecting flight out of Houston was canceled (I assume due to lack of passengers) and I caught another flight two hours later, which was 3/4 empty. I made my way home and when I went to get on the bus, the front half was taped off to keep people away from the driver, so we had to enter by the back door — but it turned out to be a free ride. After finally getting home, I quickly ran to the store to get some groceries on a Saturday night, and many of the shelves looked like locusts had been through.