Back in May, NPR’s “All Things Considered” broadcast an accounting of the impact of COVID on New York’s theater industry. The latter term applies. Preparing a drama for the stage on Broadway is little different than other capital ventures. It actually is a more risky one for investors, since most productions lose money.

COVID came along to strip away the audience that night after night, month after month measure the success or failure of a musical or play. That would-be audience turned to lesser, safer entertainments. To producers’ dismay, it hasn’t come back.

At university I had the good fortune to experience years of a theater department’s productions of the classics. There was Shakespeare, of course, but then the whole range of American playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. Today the focus may be on plays of the equally deserving August Wilson.

Long ago, stage performers went to Hollywood, where factories rendered plays, musicals, even Shakespearean drama and a lot else, on nitrate (then safer material) that could be shipped in a box to a moviehouse near you. Television, with commercial interruptions, proved a further remove from the power and range of live performances.

Theater is what we’d had in centuries past — even big city opera performers boarding trains to perform arias for an evening in Kansas or in Idaho. Far from the city’s polished performance came these dramas. The play was the thing.

Mostly beyond COVID’s grasp, what have we now wanting our attention, our preservation? One of my favorites is the summer series of operettas and plays at Unadilla.

Forty years ago, Bill Blackly and Ann O’Brian chose a small pasture on a gravel road a few crooked miles from Marshfield, Vermont, to assemble and fit out as a theater a Quonset hut. These were large arched metal utility buildings made at Unadilla, New York, for the military in World War II. The grand hut serves annually for one of a range of Gilbert & Sullivan performances. This summer it is Mikado’s turn. A most amazingly talented pianist rips off the score each night.

Some years ago a separate, very accommodating theater was added on the grounds. There each summer a series of plays are performed each summer. Works of Anton Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Ghassan Kanafani are scheduled this year. The latter topically centers on the Palestinians’ “mass eviction by Israeli forces” in 1948.

Way up north at Glover, Vermont, summer performances of the Domestic Resurrection Circus continue. I first experienced this political theater of Peter and Elka Schumann in Brooklyn, New York, nearly 60 years ago, and twice was drawn to perform a bit with them. Schumann is longer on his stilts and the smoke of dramatic conflagrations there has drifted away, but the power and spirit of his celebration of the martyrdom of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero hovers still. Young people, fired by the theater’s history, displayed as well in the barn-museum, bring new energy to performances each season.

Down and near enough to the I-91 corridor of theater options I’m perusing are Montpelier’s Lost Nation Theater and White River’s Northern Stage, each offering seasons of mostly new work. Lebanon Opera House offers Broadway musicals at a nearer range.

The theater departments at Dartmouh, Smith, Amherst colleges, and UMass offer rich seasons of both classic drama and new work. At an extreme of distance is Chester Theater in Chester. In 1990, famous Vincent Dowling came here from directorship of the Abbey Theater in Dublin, Ireland, to found this theater and to perform. Here one could experience one of our history-making actors.

Chester’s new works have always richly rewarded the effort to attend. To make the distance less significant our party of four followed a matinee performance with dinner at one of Northampton’s excellent restaurants.

While satellite and online media eagerly grabs our attention and drags us away, it is live performance that summons us back — to maintain its very existence.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian, currently editing his newest work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”