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Article snippet: This will be anathema to stage purists, but here goes: I like watching theater on television. Of course, it is not the real thing. There is no smell of the greasepaint, no roar of the crowd. There is no sense of the actors’ physical presence, their breathing and sweat, the way they physically interact with one another. There is no communal joy. But there is theater, and that is something. For many of us growing up in the analog era without access to the stage, television was the only resource. New Yorkers of a certain age would have been familiar with the series “Play of the Week,” which was broadcast in 1959-61, and with PBS’s “American Playhouse,” from 1982-1994. I grew up in rural France with just three channels, but at least they regularly showed classics and middlebrow comedies; I learned to enjoy both. Now I see a lot of live theater, and yet I still love it on the small screen. Partly so I can see productions that don’t make it to New York, and partly because, although theater is distinguished by the uniqueness of the moment, sometimes you just want to rewind that moment as soon as it’s over. As the Thanksgiving weekend rolls around, with its abundant downtime, here are some online destinations for theater on-demand. Feel free to use your cellphone whenever you want and to crinkle candy wrappers — nobody will mind. Shakespeare dominates on-demand theater the way he dominates classical stages, and few institutions have embraced streaming as wholeheartedly a... Link to the full article to read more