The Post-Gazette started naming a theatrical Performer of the Year in 1984 and has done so every year since. That’s 36 years and 40 performers honored, including multiple winners a few times.

But 2020 has been different. After a promising start, Pittsburgh’s theater scene was brought to a crashing halt in March by COVID-19. There has been little live theater since, even if you include dogged attempts to fill the gap online.

This current shutdown will extend well into 2021, although there is hope that live theater will start to reappear by summer. If so, then 2020 and 2021 may together give us something like a full theatrical year.

With that hope in mind, the Post-Gazette has decided to suspend the Performer of the Year for 2020 and name one for 2020-2021. Senior theater critic Christopher Rawson and former theater critic Sharon Eberson will keep their 2020 notes. They will continue to uphold the guidelines, which limit the award to actors in Pittsburgh productions, with no repeats of previous winners.

But one thing may be different. We won’t forget the theater innovators of 2020, those artists who took the plunge into the unknown virtual realm of live and recorded theater. We kept a close eye on the near daily variety shows, audio plays, webinars, Zoom performances, drive-in festivals and more.

In our accounting for the best theater of 2020-2021, this perseverance and art will be recognized for its achievement as well as its reminder of what we were missing and its hope of what was surely to come, when we all gather once more for live theater.

First Published: January 3, 2021, 12:00 p.m.