Ojai Playwrights Conference: A Bit of Processing
Breaking down a great interactive technique from a great new play.
This summer I was fortunate to help put on, and bear witness to, the latest iteration of the Ojai Playwrights Conference. Recent years have laid waste to some of the American theater’s most venerable new play development programs, so I took this as an increasingly-precious moment to get acquainted with a handful of exceptional new works.
I left Ojai inspired and nourished by the these writers1 and the directors, dramaturgs, and performers who collaborated with them. Part of that was some of their compelling approaches to audience participation!
When there’s a “traditional” physical separation between audience and performance, as all the plays in this conference had, I find there’s a couple of defaults for creating interactive moments. From how I see it, it’s either (1) getting information from the crowd to fold into the moment — usually in the form of questions; or (2) breaking the physical divide: audience(s) brought onstage, or performers going into the crowd.
There are great new plays that do both2. But I experienced something in Default #1 in Ojai that made me realize that there’s a whole range of choices within performer/audience exchanges that I hadn’t yet contended with!
That’s thanks to the wondrous Julia Izumi, who was developing a heartbreaking slapstick hall-of-mirrors called Akira Kurosawa Explains his Movies and Yogurt (with love and active cultures!). This play manages to simultaneously be a clown show, film history lecture, meditation on regret, and dissection of Japanese/American cultural identity. I laughed, I cried, I begged the world to immediately give it a full production3.
There’s a section of the play where Julia herself plays a moderator of a panel discussion that features a few of the other actors — all of whom are playing versions of Akira Kurosawa. She begins by prompting the audience to ask a question of the Kurosawas, any question at all. When this happened in the performed reading, a member asked what they thought of The Magnificent Seven. The Moderator’s response was:
MODERATOR
So what I’m hearing from your great question is... (to panel.) what do you think is the strongest cultural influence on Akira Kurosawa’s work?
This elicited a huge laugh from the audience. I think there’s a few reasons for why this was so great: (1) the blatant ignoring of the question, combined with Julia playing the moderator with great earnestness; (2) its pointing-back to “culture,” a central theme; and (3) how it unexpectedly adheres to the overall tone of the play, which is one of constantly saying “THIS is the world we’ll be in together now!” and then yanking it away from us. The Moderator’s response was a humorous nod to how this piece is going to do what it wants…it’s on its own tracks, not ours!
At the same time, as an immersive/interactive designer, I also found this section to be somewhat transgressive. Because experiential mediums ask for energy from its participants, I generally think that accepting (if not outright centering) what they contribute is important. If that approach was taken in the above Moderator moment, it would probably lead to something like this:4
I’m not sure “Processing” is the best term for what’s happening here, but I think it does help outline the pivot-point between what an audience does and how a show responds. It’s also how I’m able to understand and appreciate that moment in Julia’s piece:
The shifting of how the audience is heard, and what the goal of the response is, creates an entirely new effect.
I think this Processing tool could be useful for breaking down interactive moments in a more microscopic way…for providing unexpected color and variety to interactions that could otherwise feel rote, or like filler.
The most obvious use cases are for when you want to create abstracted, uncanny, or surrealist tones (which are certainly not uncommon in the immersive sphere!). Imagine an interaction between an audience member wandering through an open world-style immersive piece, and a performer standing at a crossroads of hallways:
I think it’s still very possible to use this technique for a more naturalistic tone. Take the same performer, at the same crossroads:
This creates a more avuncular sort of character, clueless but well-meaning. You could imagine the conversation spinning out: “I mean, which of these hallways should I go down?” “I know what you mean. Sometimes you feel like you’re going down a hallway in life, as opposed to through it. Or even up it, you know? The way you frame it makes a big difference. Stay positive for me, yeah?”
While the examples above involve performers, there’s definitely applicability here for digital interactions inside an experience. One can easily imagine a bot programmed to respond to prompts through these off-kilter “Processing” filters…or just goes Julia Izumi-style at times and hammers home what it was always gonna say. (Although you’ll really want to make sure it fits the tone of the piece, lest people just think it’s lazily-made!)
I love playwrights. I love their dogged writing & revising towards the core of what they want their piece to be, while keeping a porousness in how to do so that leaves room for collaborators’ contributions. I love their wild inventiveness. And I love that their plays are like small planets, new worlds to revel in and learn from. That’s exactly what that Moderator moment did for me.
I’ll write a lot more in the future about what plays have taught and continue to teach me around immersive/interactive, but I hope this is a good start. At the very least, it’ll pass the time until I can see a full production of Julia’s play!!!
You can learn more about them here.
If you’re curious, this article I wrote for HowlRound goes deeper into how new plays are using these techniques — as well as how I see the intersection of the theater & immersive/interactive worlds.
This would assumedly lead to some improvised moment of answering, which the performers could angle towards a transition back into the script.