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The Thesis Committee for Andrew Ian Paryzer Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

Playable Plays: An Exploration in Writing Living Narratives for Interacting Audiences

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor: Steven Dietz

Elizabeth Engelman

Kirk Lynn

Playable Plays: An Exploration in Writing Living Narratives for Interacting Audiences

Andrew Ian Paryzer

Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Dedication

This thesis (and everything else I’ve made, and will make) is dedicated to my mother, Devorah Uriel.

Abstract

Playable Plays: An Exploration in Writing Living Narratives for Interacting Audiences

Andrew Ian Paryzer, MFA The University of Texas at Austin, 2018

Supervisor: Steven Dietz

This thesis is an attempt to utilize the playwriting lessons I learned at UT in service of writing compelling stories in immersive theater, virtual reality, and video games . . . and then to break down the distinctions between them, within a single piece of dramatic writing. I will reflect on my initial explorations into writing in immersive forms at UT – the video game/interactive performance Intro to Being Here, and the branching-narrative

VR script Casey – and on the process that led to my play Loverboy. From this I will glean four lessons, which I will connect with my thoughts and research on immersive forms to generate a series of “bold declarations” for writing audience-interactive narratives. I will then use these declarations to take one story idea and outline it in three different forms: one as a so-called “Play-type play”, one as immersive theater, and one in virtual reality.

From here I will take that story idea and explore how I could write what I call a “Playable play”: a live story experience that mixes and melds these storytelling forms to move the audience, both internally and externally.

v Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Quest for Playable Plays ...... 1

2. The Status Quo: Reflections on pre-Loverboy Play-type Plays -- Alter ...... 8

3. The Status Quo: Reflections on Immersive Theater and Video Game Work -- Intro to Being Here ...... 10

4. The Status Quo: Reflections on Work in Virtual Reality -- Casey ...... 17

5. The Four Lessons: Reflections on Loverboy ...... 20

6. Bold Declarations: Applying Loverboy Lessons to Immersive Forms ...... 27

7. Testing Nimbleness: Introducing Muzzle Tough ...... 43

8. Testing Nimbleness: Muzzle Tough as a Play-type Play ...... 45

9. Testing Nimbleness: Muzzle Tough as Immersive Theater ...... 47

10. Testing Nimbleness: Muzzle Tough as a Virtual Reality Narrative ...... 51

11. A Playable Play: One Muzzle Tough, Three Forms ...... 55

12. Conclusion ...... 58

Loverboy ...... 60

Intro to Being Here (performance text) ...... 121

Works Cited ...... 130

1. Introduction: The Quest for Playable Plays

It’s an imaginary 10pm on an imaginary Saturday night, at a scruffy bar – let’s call it “Posse

East” – in Austin, Texas. Three people sit around a table, having some beers, when the conversation turns to this (very real) topic: what is the greatest moment of live performance you’ve ever experienced?

Person A sips an Austin Beerworks IPA. “It was Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, at The

Music Box on Broadway. The very last moment of the play. You’ve seen Mark Rylance virtuosically play this hedonist wild man, with a ticking clock from the play’s very first moments that in 24 hours he’s gonna be kicked off the land he’s parked his trailer on. And when those hours expire – and an army of policemen are about to descend on him – he drums and incants the names of his ancestors, the names of Britain’s pagan gods, and the massive unmoving trees on the set start to sway, and a primordial sound grows and grows until it almost hurt my ears, and – blackout. End of play. It was the fusion of an epic performance with an epic moment of spectacle that ‘paid off’ this character’s journey in a perfect, yet unexpectedly grand manner. And I got to experience that story.”

Person B nurses a beer that nobody in the bar could pronounce properly. “It was an experience I had in Sleep No More, by the immersive theater company Punchdrunk. You are free to walk around five floors, which are populated with some performers and a ton of other audience members – with all of us wearing masks. Near the end of the allotted time, I found myself in a room that was obviously meant to be Mac and Lady Mac’s bedroom – it’s a free interpretation of that Shakespeare play I shall not name – and I watched this dancer, playing

Lady Mac, do this lithe and sharp dance piece around what I took to be the “Out, damned spot”

section of the play. It was beautiful, and I was captivated, but for some reason – maybe there were too many other audience members there? Maybe it was just because I could? – I bolted off into a shadowy room I hadn’t explored yet, adjacent to the bedroom. And suddenly . . . it was colder than the bedroom, I remember immediately . . . I was in a vast winding expanse, a ruin, toppled pillars, and not a single other audience member around. And I just wandered. I felt vacuous, empty, lost. I felt, to the bone, a bit of what Lady Mac was feeling in her dance. It was as if I had entered her psyche. It was absolutely transcendent, and I was part of that story.”

Person C pounds a Lone Star. “It was right before I came here, actually. My brother just got one of those PlayStation VR sets, and we loaded it up and I played this game called London

Heist. The story was silly – you’re in on this jewel heist? And someone turns on you and you end up tied to a chair? Something like that? – I didn’t really track it. But there’s one little section where you’re sitting at a booth, and on the table in front of you is a cigar and a lighter. And when

I picked them up with the controllers in my hands – which show up as hands in the headset – I could light the cigar and smoke it. It sounds simplistic and ridiculous, but performing even that simple task in VR was absolutely mind-blowing. And then, of course, I threw the lighter at the guy talking to me, and put the lit cigar in the bag next to me – which the game didn’t mark or respond to, but was incredibly amusing nonetheless. I guess what made it profound is that I was the performer, and the performance – but without the stage fright, or talent prerequisites, because

I was only performing for myself. The technology gave me enough distance from day-to-day experience that such a performance was intrinsically joyful. I got to be that story.”

They get another round of drinks.

A The whole thing with live performance, for me, is the performance! And how can you pay the type of attention you need to fully feel what is happening in front of you if you’re

meant to be moving around, or be a part of it, or be the whole of it? Great performance affects your insides, not your outsides.

B Why not both? Why not a performance that affects your insides, then affects your outsides, and then affects your insides again? Why not performance that is literally moving?

A I don’t wanna do that kind of work.

C I think performance should only be that kind of work. I think the whole idea of forcing people into a place and making them experience something – trapping their body and manipulating their environment to try and make them think and feel certain things at certain times – I mean, I’ve been live-Tweeting this whole conversation. The Digital Age has destroyed the old paradigms of content creation. We are all creators of content. This is all performance. That is the direction our world is going.

A So you’re saying your manipulation of a digital environment in a VR experience is more valuable to you than what you could get from the collected works of Shakespeare.

C I want to occupy a world where I am Shakespeare. And there will be the Shakespeare of VR – the person who creates worlds that you can act within and manipulate to make you a legendary creator. That person will come. That’s what I want.

A Is that selfish?

C Probably.

B There’s a middle ground here. You can create moments of powerful watching, and also have moments of meaningful movement, and most importantly – and I can’t believe this hasn’t come up yet – you can have all of that with other people!

A Yes! Of course!

B If there’s a performance, and you don’t see it and feel it with other people, did a performance really happen?

C If it’s in VR, then yes.

B I don’t see how it’s much different than a TV show. The images are pre-made. It’s not live.

C But you are live. When you are in it. You are necessary to it. That is where the joy is.

B I agree with you there.

A We’ll need to get a lot drunker before I do.

***

To state what is probably obvious at this point: I am all three of these people. The potent experiences they’ve discussed are mine, and the contradictory convictions they hold are mine as well. I began my time at UT Austin as Person A, was provoked by my classwork and collaborations into making work as Person B, and through my own independent explorations discovered Person C’s voice.

It is also obvious to me, at the precipice of my precious three years here, that Person A is the one who has been notably shifted during my time in graduate school. This is exactly how it should be; this is the person who applied to UT’s MFA Playwriting program three times, who gobbled up as much of the New York theatre world as he could for most of his twenties, who has been fashioning stories with dialogue since he was eighteen. I am Person A. I am (to borrow language from Professor Kirk Lynn) a writer of “Play-type plays”:

Play-type play: a storytelling form that evokes an audience member’s live and internal (intellectual, emotional, spiritual, etc.) engagement.

Person B and Person C are writers of immersive theater and VR, which in this thesis I will collectively call (along with video games) “immersive forms”:

Immersive form: a storytelling form that evokes an audience member’s live and external (actions, interactions, etc.) engagement.

As I finish my time at UT I’m struck by how loudly the voices of these two ring in my head, and how they beg me to be given as full expression as Person A was.

I made important initial explorations within each of these three people through a project at UT: my play Alter aligning with Person A, my video game/interactive theater piece Intro to

Being Here with Person B, and my VR script Casey with Person C. The ‘shifting’ I referred to in my Play-type playwriting came through the process that led to my piece Loverboy – which I consider to be the most successful work I’ve made, to date.

Yet I do not wish for this thesis to be a patting-of-my-own-back. When Steven Dietz, my professor and thesis adviser, suggested to me that the ideal thesis is a “document of the future,” it didn’t take long for me to close on the terrain of such a document. It is the terrain of that scruffy bar of my imagination, and it leads not deeper into any of the three people mentioned but toward a fourth – the observer, the listener, the integrator – someone I aspire to in my real-life flesh-and- blood temperament.

This fourth person – let’s say he’s the bartender – thinks this to himself: “Why can’t you go to a play and watch a character give another character a flower, and then go plant that flower, and then put on a VR headset and shed your petals? And – why not – take off the headset and watch the character hold up the petal-less flower and vow never to talk to the other character again? Why are these three people thinking these have to be three separate events? Why can’t it

be one?” Let’s say the bartender coins a term for this event. Let’s say he calls it a “Playable play”:

Playable play: a storytelling form that unifies the live internal and external experiences of the audience member; a narrative collaboration between audience and creator.

This thesis is a quest to find that bartender-artist within me. It is a quest in five parts, and if I am successful I will have articulated, inculcated, and practiced the ways of thinking that will allow me to write Playable plays.

The first part of the quest is defining my status quo. I will look back at the three pre-

Loverboy projects I mentioned above, reflecting on what I have learned from these forms and how I work within them.

The second part aims to define what spurred my artistic shift between writing Alter and the second version of Loverboy. I lay this out in the form of four lessons: (1) putting heart at the center of my work; (2) setting and honoring creative parameters; (3) inviting my collaborators to be generative artists; and (4) privileging the concept of motion in all levels of storytelling.

Part three of the quest asks: how can I apply these four lessons to my work in immersive theater, VR, video game, and hybrid forms? My goal here is to form a series of bold declarations for writing immersive forms that arise from combining my four lessons with research and personal experiences.

Section four of the journey uses the four lessons and bold declarations to outline a single story idea in three different forms: as a so-called “Play-type play,” as an immersive theatre experience, and as a VR story. In doing this, I will test my ability to structure narrative in each of these distinct forms in ways that consciously take advantage of what they do best.

The quest ends with an exploration: of how I could write the story idea from the previous section by mixing and melding those three forms, and dissolving the boundaries between them.

This will be an intuitive exercise, built on the preceding investigations of immersive forms, and will yield a blueprint for a Playable play.

In my conclusion, I will articulate a vision for my playwriting work going forward: one that builds off this Playable play experiment; that mixes and melds the forms discussed in this thesis with fluidity, precision, and narrative intent.

2. The Status Quo: Reflections on pre-Loverboy Play-type Plays – Alter

If I had to condense what I’ve learned about writing plays at UT into one word, it would be live – not only in the obvious sense that a play happens in real-time, but in the sense that the work itself should be like a living thing, both in how I create it and in how it’s taken in by an audience. My experience with my play Alter is instructive to talk about in this case, as I believe it is a play that – despite having compelling elements – led me in a brave new direction because of its lack of live-ness.

Alter is about a couple, Kaci and Ty, who are expecting their first child. Ty’s brother,

Finn, has recently passed away from a video game binge-induced heart attack. On the anniversary of his death, a group of Finn’s friends from the online game he played – called

“Alter” – vow to live in the ‘real world’ as embodiments of their in-game avatars. They enter Ty and Kaci’s life and aim to have Kaci – who Finn harbored great affection for in life – become

‘one of them.’

I spent countless hours building the backstory and world of Alter. I read anthropological studies of virtual worlds, created a Second Life account (the main inspiration for the Alter virtual world I invented), created documents related to the fictionalized Alter religion, and so on and so forth. I looked at my play and my concept as something that I had to fill in completely, immaculately, and then communicate in similar fullness within the content of my play. Looking back now, I can trace this “world-write first, play-write later” ethos through several of my other early plays (Breath Dash Breath Dash Breath, about a sinister government transcription company; Mother of Gone, about a futurist end-of-life company that commissions robotic seal pets) – but at the time, it was the only way I knew how to work.

I had the opportunity in the summer of 2017 to work on Alter at the Kennedy Center

MFA Playwrights’ Workshop. The room of ten seasoned and intelligent new-play actors blew holes through my story and world-logic the size of cannonballs. I was able to patch up some of them, but after the fact I realized that wasn’t really the point. I had made a play that was fairly repellent to collaboration; a play that, although I wasn’t aware of it, was talking-down to those who wished to engage with it. A play that wanted to prove to its audience/collaborators how smart it was, instead of a play that wanted to channel and engage the intelligences of those who touched it. More importantly, I had made for myself a playwriting process that replicated all this, in varying degrees, in each new play I wrote.

Alter, like all my earlier plays, had moments I deeply cared about . . . but I can’t say I constructed the entire thing from that place. It had more to do more with things like “highly theatrical”, “cool”, “technology-related”, “of a piece with what I’ve made before” – and, yes, even “what grad schools might like.”

When I heard Alter read aloud at the Kennedy Center, it all came home to roost. I was pacing in the back the entire time, because I was so deeply uncomfortable. I saw the Artistic

Director of a theatre I’ve worshipped for years literally hide his face in his hands, forehead wrinkled as a silent accordion. How did this happen?, I thought. How did I write my way into this room, when so much of the writing I’ve done to get here feels so deeply wrong to me?

I met my play and I didn’t care about it, and (pleasantries and all good intentions aside) neither did my collaborators. I came home and started thinking about other things I might do with my life. Then I took a breath and asked myself: Can I make sure I never feel that way about my writing, ever again? Can I write, uncompromisingly, work that is alive to my collaborators, my audiences, myself?

3. The Status Quo: Reflections on Immersive Theater and Video Game Work – Intro to Being Here

Luckily, I only had to look back about three months to find a piece of my work that did these things. Intro to Being Here was a project I created and led as part of the Cohen New Works

Festival at UT Austin in April 2017. It is an integrated video game and interactive, highly- improvised theater performance that contained minimal amounts of set dialogue and vast amounts of audience exploration, interaction, and creation. It was my first bold attempt to make good on parallel explorations I had been captivated by from my very first semester at UT – explorations that have roots in my earliest story experiences as a human: in video games.

My love of games lies directly adjacent to my deepest creative impulses. My earliest loves were platformers: the old-school Super Mario Brothers series, which cultivated in me the hand-eye coordination and razor-sharp reflexes that led to my early acumen with the alto saxophone – and the buddings of my love affair with music. From there was The Legend of Zelda series: epic adventure quests with fantastic enemies, items, and love stories – which fed my earliest desires to tell my own stories. And lastly, as I rounded my teens into adulthood, I discovered games such as Theme Park and Civilization, in which you are given tools to create entire enterprises or world cultures, grow them, and shepherd them through various trials and travails . . . generative impulses which found equal purchase in my love for writing plays.

“Found” is probably not the right tense for that word. Over winter break of 2017 I fell headlong into a game called Stardew Valley, in which I played an enterprising young farmer named Poppy, fresh from the city and seeking a more rustic existence. Having inherited my grandfather’s farm, I slowly learned the basics of tending to crops, animal husbandry, and the personalities of the handful of fellow denizens of the small town of Stardew Valley. In the early

weeks I had to eat foraged fruit to keep me from passing out in the fields. As of this writing, I have over a million gold, a thriving winery (with a cellar full of casks for aging), and a growing brood of pigs who are experts at rooting for truffles.

My Stardew Valley life is legitimately satisfying in a way that feels more solid and enduring (if not transcendent) than the ‘lives’ I live as an audience member in plays. Part of this is a function of time – I’ve spent around 100 hours within Stardew Valley – but I would posit that there’s a more essential ingredient: Stardew Valley collaborates with me in an incredibly satisfying way. It invites me into its world and gives me the space and tools to make an experience and a story that rewards the time I put into it, over and over and over again.

Stardew Valley does have storylines that develop with various non-player characters as you play, but I’ve found that my favorite games don’t even need those; they just need to create a potent way for me to activate my own narrative brain. Major League Baseball Featuring Ken

Griffey, Jr. is a Nintendo 64 game that my best friend and I have played over and over for more than a decade. We’ve played entire seasons and won World Series with the Rockies, Cubs,

Yankees, and Padres; we have favorite players we trade for, every time we start the game over; we have a lingo we’ve created side-by-side over the years for various plays and pitches and base running tricks. He is a Tony-winning actor, one of the most brilliant theatricals minds I’ve ever known, and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve stayed in Brooklyn to play that old video game instead of taking the train into Manhattan to see a show.

This love of mine was triggered early on in my studies at UT Austin. I notably recall reading the play text for A Game of You, a one-person performance by the Danish theater troupe

Ontroerend Goed, in Kirk Lynn’s Devising class in the Spring of 2016. It made me interested in

intimate, immersive theater for the first time . . . a theatrical form that, in my opinion, is intimately related to video games.

A Game of You is a series of interactions, performed in a loop in a series of interconnected and identically-laid-out rooms, in which an audience member is asked to consider who they are – in how they physically present themselves, how they describe themselves, and the assumptions strangers make about them – in variety of different contexts. These range from seeing yourself in a mirror, to watching an actor mimic how you behaved when you were looking at yourself in that mirror (they were observing you through the other side), to watching video footage of a camera that was hidden in the mirror, to watching another audience member and having your assumptions about them covertly recorded, to watching a performer playing you alongside a new audience-member in the very same room you started, and finally receiving a CD with audio of the assumptions a stranger made about you.

I love how the piece plays with ideas around how we construct our ideas of ourselves, in a sense, and how we are all being constructed by others simultaneously. It’s a theme that is shared by a lot of the digital games I’ve loved in my life, as well: games like the aforementioned

Civilization, where you build and manage an empire from ancient times through the modern era, and Pokémon (and other role-playing games [RPGs]), in which you train and customize your companions through various means. It is this fascination of mine with creation, across genres, that inspired Intro to Being Here.

I conceptualized what would become Intro to Being Here in Liz Engelman’s

Entrepreneurship for the Performing Arts class1. In that class I set the first solid parameters for the project, in the form of a mission statement:

To create a production of an original play simultaneously with the release of smartphone game I have authored -- with both existing in the same fictional 'world' -- while positioning the live event as an essential component of the gaming experience, and vice versa.2

This launched the experiment that became Intro to Being Here. It also shaped the coursework I undertook at UT to a profound degree. I enrolled in a Writing for Interactive Game & Media course in the Spring of 2016, completing a short text-based game that modeled many of the mechanics I would utilize in the Intro to Being Here video game.

The New Works Festival version of this piece started with each ticketed audience member receiving a download for a computer game (for desktop), accompanied by an e-mail from a character called the Human Professor. As part of a “class” they would be attending (the date of the live event), the Professor asks each audience member to access an alternate reality called the Platform through the computer game. There, he says, they will meet and guide something called a Content through the digital world, with a chance that said Content would emerge from the Platform to attend the “class” with them.

I co-created the video game with digital environment designer Christina “PhaZero”

Curlee and programmer/designer Kevin Sun. It is a first-person “walking simulator” that situates you in a digital replica of various sections of the Winship Drama Building. You materialize in

1 I also found, in rummaging through old documents, this line in a vision statement from said Entrepreneurship class on 9/22/15 (my first month of graduate school): “In my third year I will execute a thesis that boldly blends dramatic writing texts across mediums.” I constructed this thesis with no memory of ever having wrote that. 2 Project-based mission statement, homework for Entrepreneurship for the Performing Arts, 10/1/15

room 2.112 – a faithful recreation of the room, down to how many chairs are in each row of the raked seating area – and meet a limbless floating creature . . . your Content. By pressing certain keys are you able to (a) move around the space, (b) compel your Content to follow you, and (c)

“feed” certain objects scattered around the space to your Content. These objects (which range from beer bottles to fire to sharks) are also scattered throughout the greater Winship rendering – which is designed with an unreal, ultra-colorful, digi-pop aesthetic. You make a loop around

Winship, down the stairs near the costume shop, through the atrium, past the front door – and pick up a key, which allows you to open a gate to go up the stairs past the Payne lobby and back into 2.112. All the while, you have the option of making your Content follow you at whichever pace you decide – as well as feeding it as much/as many of the objects you find as you desire.

When you return to 2.112, you are given the ability to “Upload” your content into the real world.

When you complete this task, the game ends.

The game was programmed so that the artistic team was able to (1) track how many of each object were “eaten” by each player’s Content, (2) track how often the Content was compelled to follow the player-character, as opposed to staying static; and (3) if the player finished the game and “uploaded” their content. Based off this data – with the third of these being a necessary prerequisite – I assigned one of 18 different possible Content ‘types’ to nine different audience members.

The performance piece (directed by Eric Vera) took place in Winship 2.112 – the real-life version of the room you materialize in, within the game. The audience members who were matched with Content had their names on signs for specific seats, with the name of the Content they made in the game (e.g. “Cloud” or “Gold”) on a sign next to them. When the play started, nine actors entered – each playing one of the created Contents – and sat at their respective seat,

immediately launching into a conversation with the person that created them in the Platform.

After a few minutes of this, the Human Professor character entered and set out the context for the performance: each audience member paired with a Content would “assist” this new being in figuring out what it means to be what they are (Water, Empty Space, Tree, etc.) in the “real world” by helping them prepare for a series of four exercises that are done in front of the audience (“class”). The first involved the Content introducing their “person” to the group; the second was the Content “meeting” a (projected) version of themselves, and learning more about what they are from this; the third an interaction the Content has with another Content in the room; and, finally, a goodbye and thank-you the Content would deliver to their “person”, with a description of what specific form they’d take in the “real world” (e.g. a puddle, if they were

Water, or a poodle if they were Dog). One of the nine Content each night would not participate in these final two exercises, and instead plead to the Professor that they not enter back into the world; the Professor would encourage them by showing a clip from the video-game world, and how the People in the room learned how to navigate a different reality to bring the Content here

– just as they were about to do. After the Content changes their mind and says goodbye to their

Person before entering the world, the Professor dismissed class and the experience ends.

I predict I’ll be spending a good amount of my creative life (and of this thesis) building upon the lessons I learned from Intro to Being Here. The first of these that comes to mind dovetails nicely with my main lesson from the Kennedy Center with Alter: creating space for my collaborators to make meaningful creative choices is incredibly thrilling to me. In Intro to Being

Here this took the form of the playscript itself; besides the Professor’s scripted language and the final scene, the rest of the piece was improvised entirely by the actors playing the Contents, with heavy input from how their attached audience members instructed them before each of the four

exercises. It was a joy to watch our performers, most of whom were also members of improv groups on campus, discover their different Content characters in rehearsal and practice wrapping them around spontaneous input from other cast members, who were “playing” unsuspecting audience members.

Equally noteworthy is that Intro to Being Here seemed to satisfy audiences who didn’t play the video game beforehand (which was fortunate, as many encountered bugs in downloading/playing it). In this sense I actually failed the initial goal I set out for the project in my Entrepreneurship class. Yet something perhaps even more magical emerged in its place: I brought something essential from the spirit of gaming into the play. The reactions of many audience members who “had” Content, after the show, were reminiscent of the aforementioned feelings my favorite video games evoked in me: a sense of satisfying ownership in having created something, and of being collaborated with by the form in a way that rewards the effort you put into it.

Intro to Being Here was my first piece of storytelling in an immersive form.3 It was my first notable creative output as Person B, to call back to the bar scene that begins this thesis.

3 I had written text for an immersive theater piece called FinalCon for The Museum of Human Achievement in October 2016, but my work there was mostly in writing monologue text, with side conversations with performers around how to handle audience-interaction elements. This, to me, falls short of the structure and rigor that I wish to write in immersive forms with.

4. The Status Quo: Reflections on Work in Virtual Reality – Casey

Person C was not far behind. As I developed the second version of Loverboy in the Fall of 2017, I enrolled in an independent study in writing for virtual reality with Radio-Television-

Film Department professor Deepak Chetty. The answer to why I first became interested in VR as a narrative form is embarrassingly simple: it is profoundly cool. The first VR story I ever experienced – My Brother’s Keeper, by PBS Digital Studios – brought me to tears and reorganized my mind in the way that my other experiences with unforgettable works of art have done. Yet I also recognized how much of that was due to this being my first fresh encounter with a new form, as opposed to it being a story that utilized the form’s potential in a profound way. I was in the woods in one scene and a gunshot caused me to duck and jolt my gaze in the direction of the noise; this was a dazzlingly effective simulation of reality, but it was exactly that – a simulation – and not a new way of experiencing narrative. It’s perhaps akin to how people who watched the very first film clips felt: dazzled by the galloping horse, and not yet able to conceptualize cross-cutting or film scores or CGI.

The result of my initial foray into the vast and still-being-charted space of VR was Casey, a draft of a script for a branching-choice story experience. You – the viewer – are a figurine- sized, immobile ‘being’ that is discovered by a seven-year old girl named Casey, in the empty attic of her new home. She vows to keep you safe, and thus to keep you a secret. You become linked to her memory, and her decision-making processes, and through the choices you make you play a role in how her personality develops -- from elementary school into her teenage years.

She takes you with to her climactic final day of high school, which leads to saying goodbye when Casey inevitably leaves her childhood home. You encounter Casey one last time – when

she is an adult, packing up the recently-sold house – before meeting the next child to discover you.

Casey uses a motion-tracking reticle (the displaying of an image that is “tied” to the direct center of wherever you’re casting your gaze, within your headset) in service of ‘building’ the internal life of the character of Casey. At the end of most of the experience’s scenes, two or more ‘options’ will be presented to the viewer in the form of looped segments from earlier in that scene; the ‘choice’ the viewer makes is the section of that scene that Casey will ‘absorb’ into her personality, and thus affect her future trajectory. These choice-points are when the reticle – in the shape of Casey’s eye – appears, and the direction we cast our gaze becomes a double of how

Casey views herself and her own experience.

Virtual reality opens up the possibility of entering into faithful simulations of various versions of human experience . . . but it also allows us the possibility of enacting points-of-view that we’d never naturally have. Casey is interested in the latter of these – in that it ‘casts’ the viewer as a tiny, action figure-sized entity who is hidden in cardboard boxes (with viewing-holes punched through), taken to school in a purse, cupped gently in Casey’s hands, etc. And through these choices, we are hopefully led to have an empathic experience of what it means to embody a form vastly different than our own.

I directed a test shoot of a short section of the Casey script in November 2017, in collaboration with MFA Integrated Media candidate Robert Mallin. While I didn’t have the resources to implement the reticle-tracking choice mechanism, I was most struck by the perspective of being inside a small cardboard box while holes were being poked in it with a pencil. The combination of presence and otherworldliness was delicious – and confirmed to me that this was a recipe I wanted to pursue in my future VR endeavors.

In many ways, Intro to Being Here and Casey were overcorrections from Alter: pieces in which I ceded large amounts of creative control to my collaborators and audiences, instead of being the sole generator of a highly-specified story and aesthetic. Yet both of the works I’ve highlighted in this section are in immersive forms. Would these experiments have an influence on the next Play-type play I wrote: a piece called Loverboy?

5. The Four Lessons: Reflections on Loverboy

Loverboy was initially drafted in the spring of 2017. It was about five young women who set out to restart humanity on Mars. I dove into research on planetary habitability and began fleshing out a stylized, high-concept theatrical realm for these characters to inhabit. Part of that work involved writing a bumbling assistant named Loverboy, who helped with menial tasks and was choked from speaking cogently by an abstracted weird love language that ran through his head. I made choices that begat more research that begat dialogue that desperately wanted to show its research. More like an essay than an organism.

So, despite my work on Intro to Being Here and Casey, I repeated most of my writing habits from Alter.

As part of the Professional Development Workshop course in April 2017 I brought in a guest respondent, the Obie award-winning director Daniel Aukin, to listen in on the first draft of

Loverboy. My time with him began the process of truly confronting and changing how I write plays. This is what I wrote, in a piece that comprised most of my PDW presentation on 4/2/17:

This Saturday morning I started my work in the room with Daniel. I did what I have always done for readings of mine: I took out pen and paper and made copious notes on how the things I wrote cause me displeasure in the present moment. I then augmented my page with a collage of exceedingly intelligent and valid responses to the text from my readers. By the end of the reading I had filled most corners of one side of a college-ruled sheet of paper, and was already thinking of how I’d start filling in the story gaps or rearranging scenes to have it make more sense by the next day. Because: progress.

That was when Daniel and Sam [Provenzano, MFA candidate and my PDW partner/collaborator] and I had a powerfully disruptive conversation. One of the many things I’ll take with me from that conversation was that I have never cultivated the skill to simply be with a play of mine while it is read aloud. The urge to revise and order and make choices – make progress – is tyrannical in me. I make plans to move in with my play and join our bank accounts before hearing its name. I didn’t listen to my play on Saturday. I had no idea if any of it actually meant anything to me. I wondered if it was

even possible for me to care about a play of mine at this stage, outside of being its mechanic. On Saturday I took two separate naps.

Yesterday, I cleared the space on the table in front of me and I kept my eyes open and I listened to the same exact draft read aloud again. All of the writing that caused me physical discomfort was still there, and still caused me pain, but my experiment was in looking my work in the eye. Sitting in the room and not identifying as the causer of its faults. More like someone who is a curious conversation partner. It sounds so fucking obvious as I write it that a playwright should behave this way, but yesterday was the first time I was ever able to do it. Because it was the only time I ever walked into the room with it being my goal, and my only goal. And I actually learned some things.

I had a conversation with my play yesterday, and it told me it wasn’t actually [a] play. It was research.

After setting it aside for a while, I picked Loverboy back up to see if I could sift something out from the research . . . something that was worth spending hours of my one earthly life making a play around. I latched on immediately to the aforementioned twisted love language I wrote for the Loverboy character. I cared about this, I determined. So that’s where I started. And I paired this with a small scene I wrote at the very end of the PDW process, in which Loverboy returns home to live with his mother, twenty or so years after the play I had written took place.4 What grew from there was a completely different play: a play centered around this mother-son relationship; a play emerging completely from their pains and joys.

In October 2017 I had an experience that made me realize I was on the right track: a public reading of an early draft of the new Loverboy that didn’t make me want to hide my head behind a pillar. By the end of the Fall 2017 semester, I had found the general shape of the play – with the indispensable assistance of Kirk Lynn’s Playwrights’ Gym class, and my collaboration with MFA Directing candidate Jess Shoemaker.

4 Liz Engelman memorably pointed to this scene as (if I recall correctly) the most honest thing she had yet read of mine.

I can say with some confidence that, as of this writing, Loverboy is the most successful piece of dramatic writing I’ve yet created. Perhaps none of that matters as much as the fact that it’s my favorite work of mine. And because of this, I started thinking about what happened. What did I do differently to make Loverboy work?

***

(1) Begin where I care.5 And keep it up.

Loverboy is far from a perfect play. But it is the play that I have been most ruthless with myself about caring for. If I write a beat that doesn’t move me, doesn’t evoke a frisson (or set up one that does), I know I still have work to do. This is the lesson to vanquish my well-tempered internal voice of “I was intending to make this moment feel like a blah blah” or “I was trying to subtly align the multiple symbolic meanings of the word suit!” or any other number of justifications I’ve followed that steer my writing away from the heart. If I am having an honest conversation with my play – to use the language of my PDW share – I will always know whether

I’ve written a scene or a system or a sentence that matters to me . . . or doesn’t.

(2) Set parameters for my piece. And honor them.

I re-started Loverboy as a two-character play with no sci-fi or alternate-world constructions. I knew from the beginning I wanted to honor that . . . with the notable exception of a flood of young women onstage, who I originally conceived in the previous version as being the daughters of the five Mars colonizers. This, of course, was far too notable an exception: an

5 This was an edit I made to the famed John Cage quote, “Begin Anywhere,” in one of the first sessions of Steven Dietz’s Collaboration class. If I’m going to try and revise a John Cage quote, I have a lot more work to do to back it up.

example of not honoring a parameter. The daughters, however, fought to remain . . . and thus they became a parameter themselves, and inspired me to write a play that necessitated and justified their presence.

My boundary-marking had some origin in how I wanted to grow as an artist (e.g. I’ve never written a two-hander and wanted to exercise that muscle) – but also stemmed from how I wanted to use the theatrical form. It is a play about the love between a parent and child, full of moments that aim to evoke ache and tenderness, and I believed the container of a Play-type play to be an ideal conveyer of such a small-yet-dense story. And, of course, I was interested in feeling what fifty bodies on that stage would feel like, after we’ve ached for an hour with these two people – what that release is – and how it’d be impossible to replace actually being in that room, experiencing that mass of humanity.

In October 2016 I had a conversation with guest artist Paula Vogel, and amongst the many unforgettable things she told me was this: do two or three things extraordinarily in a play, instead of nine or ten things decently6. She told me I had enough plays in me that I would be able to get to those other things. This lies close to the heart of this lesson: if I am too flexible and inclusive with the parameters I set, it will inevitably feel like I have set no boundaries at all.

(3) Give space for my collaborators to be generative.

The story of Loverboy is, in some ways, just as much Jess Shoemaker’s story as it is mine. She was assigned to be the play’s director for the 2018 UT New Theatre (UTNT)

6 Here Paula used the language of “devices,” which I took to be systems within a story that tie into the central conflict/force/energy of the play (e.g. James Tyrone’s obsession with keeping the electric bill low in Long Day’s Journey Into Night). By this standard, the Daughters themselves became a device in Loverboy: they amplify and re- contextualize Loverboy’s wild, loving internal voice. If I had kept them Martian, they would have become a separate device entirely.

showcase, but has ended up being its steward. Her passion and intelligence around the work has had a profound effect on its development. And this doesn’t just mean she has given me great notes. Her love for the daughters made me want to keep them in the play for her, and answering the resulting questions helped me locate the play’s beating heart. She’s also said things to me as blatant as, “Loverboy should draw things in chalk on the set,” to which I’ve responded “Yes” and went and wrote that into my play. In writing this version of Loverboy I discovered a new joy for pleasing and empowering my collaborators – and while it’s important to me to keep the parameters of who does the actual writing firm, I’ve found my work benefits from letting those who know it and love it speak directly to it.

Knowing that my play would be produced as part of the UTNT showcase, I considered the resources of our department to be a generative collaborator as well . . . namely that we have a large pool of hungry actors to draw from. This was a strong impetus for writing the daughters into the script.

Lastly:

(4) Make my play move, in ways big and small . . . as if it were a living thing.

In an early scene in Loverboy, the title character wakes up his mother in the middle of the night. “I abandoned you,” he tells her. In the first draft of my script, she replies:

MOM: I never stop feeling close to you. Even when you’re distant. That’s how it is, with a child.

In my current draft, that line reads:

MOM: You have no say in that.

A rewrite like this, to me, is now far more satisfying than researching and theatricalizing a highfalutin alternate-reality concept. It gives me such a variety of joys. First off, it’s efficient: the same sentiment is conveyed in a quarter of the words. Secondly – and notably, for this thesis – it lets the audience do the work of filling in the layers of meaning I was working so hard to bullet- point in the first version of this line. Mom’s unbendable love for her son is packed into the subtext after she speaks that line, and the brevity of the language allows the audience space to swim in those implied meanings.

Lastly, there is palpable motion between these two lines (whereas there is little motion between the three sentences of Mom’s, in the first draft of her line).

Motion: things CHANGING in a play, as opposed to things happening; a force that steers away from closure – in every “answer,” the next question is embedded.7

The first version of Mom’s line closed Loverboy’s line of inquiry down; it was a brick wall of

“No, this is how it is.” The second version of Mom’s line opens up a vast terrain of what it means to love a child who is adrift . . . and how she might react to his planned departure the next morning. Before I came to UT I had neither the eye nor the language to even detect this in mine or others’ writing; I look back at plays I love now and see that motion is deeply embedded in every page.8

***

While these four lessons were borne out of the Loverboy process specifically, I inevitably starting thinking back to my experiences with Intro to Being Here and Casey. What would a

7 With unending gratitude to Steven Dietz for this definition, this tool, and the potency with which he teaches it. 8 In the parlance of my video-game roots, I consider motion to be the ultimate “cheat code” for playwriting: if a scene feels dull, or my play seems to be stalling, the answer seems to always lie in a blockage of motion.

similar leap look like for me as a writer in immersive theater and virtual reality? Would it be possible to re-contextualize these four lessons within these other forms, to help forge a path towards writing the Playable play?

6. Bold Declarations: Applying Loverboy Lessons to Immersive Forms

In this section I will stake out some ground in how I wish to write in audience-interactive forms. In the spirit of the dive-bar conversation from the beginning of this thesis – and sharpening the assuredness of those characters speaking within me – I will assemble a collection of bold declarations for writing in immersive theater, video games, and VR, by applying my four

Loverboy lessons to my experiences in interactive story forms. These declarations will subsequently fuel outlines I will write for a Play-type play idea I have that I wish to write in immersive theater and VR formats . . . and galvanize the weaving of these forms into the

Playable play I am questing toward.

In this section I will draw repeatedly on a couple memorable pieces of immersive entertainment I’ve experienced in recent years. Sleep No More, the aforementioned immersive dance piece by Punchdrunk that integrates noir themes with the Scottish play, is one of them.

The other, House of Eternal Return, is an “explorable” installation by the art collective Meow

Wolf that sets you loose in a home once occupied by the Selig family, and is now quarantined between our world and a series of fantastical alternate dimensions.

(1) Set parameters for my piece. And honor them.

When I consider setting parameters for immersive forms, my first need is to fully investigate the wider creative terrain I must set those parameters within. Thus, the first bold declaration is the most basic:

Choose the storytelling form(s) I use with intention.

In Intro to Being Here I used a pre-event video game, actors in onstage performance, and significant audience interaction to tell my story. Sleep No More uses immersive set/sound/lighting design, actors in ‘looped’ environmental performance, and targeted audience interaction. Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return uses immersive design, video, and interactive digital interfaces. I would argue that each “recipe” of forms pointed the pieces toward certain interactive strategies: Intro to Being Here’s recipe allowed for the audience to be strong co- storytellers, Sleep No More casts the audience as voyeurs, and House of Eternal Return inspires pure exploration and wonder. If House of Eternal Return had actors in it, the incredible specificity and magic of its immersive alternate dimensions might be sapped (as well as your permission to ‘take in’ video and artifacts at your own pace); if Sleep No More had a strong interactive digital element, it would likely compromise the sensuousness of the world they wish to create.

Taking stock of the combination of forms I wish to utilize, while considering them in a dynamic relationship with the intended tone of the story, is a valuable evaluative tool. And every choice opens more doors: in the above thought experiment, for example, I felt compelled to split the category of ‘performance’ into sub-sections, because the difference between how the actors in Intro to Being Here functioned (shifting between one-on-one conversations with audience members and performing to a full audience) and how they function in Sleep No More

(performing a pre-set ‘loop’ of movement in a large “explorable” environment, with occasional interactions with specific audience members) is drastic. My experience of Sleep No More is that the performers functioned more as environment and spectacle. My experience of Intro to Being

Here is that they functioned more as storytellers and story-gatherers. There was story in Sleep

No More, to be sure, but my experience of it is that it was conveyed more in the immersive design than in the actors’ performances. There is no right or wrong here; there is simply the question of what each of these forms are doing, and whether they are “doing” toward telling the story, actively shaping the story, or shaping the immersive environment.

Tap into what is most essential about each form I use.

While the answers to this question will necessarily be subjective, this is fertile ground to stake my claim as an artist in these mediums – and to channel the bold opinions of the three people at the bar, from the beginning of this thesis. Person A would say that Play-type plays are unique in how they activate an audience’s ability to imaginatively ‘fill in the gaps’ (in time, in scene settings, etc.) and allow for a visceral experience of a story from a close distance. Person B would say that immersive theater mixes these strengths with an opportunity to become a part of the story – or at least to experience the story on your own terms, to some extent. And Person C would assert that virtual reality gives the opportunity to collapse the space entirely between audience and narrative . . . that its ability to completely alter your sensory inputs/outputs lends the potential for storytelling on a highly intense and intimate level.

This question of what is most essential takes on added complexity when different forms are fused together within one narrative experience. Scattered throughout House of Eternal Return are small kiosks with animated videos playing on a loop. I put headphones on and tuned into them for a few small chunks of time, but I quickly tuned out both times and went back to exploring the magical forests and vertical buses and glowing dinosaur bones around me. I’m not sure that my instinct had anything to do with the quality of the video content, or how it told the

backstory of the so-called Anomaly and how it suspended this house between dimensions; my instinct is that I had that reaction because it was situated in a relationship to the design that made it feel less essential and exciting. I could imagine Meow Wolf making a room where you lie down and pull aside a section of the ground and see the same video – and I believe something like that would be a much more effective integration.

In my opinion, there is a focus that is required for making video content satisfying: you have to narrow the audience’s sensory world to what is happening within that screen. I aspire to create work that likewise frames what is most alive about each form I use – and I aim to be an artist who is always trying to unpack what that essential-ness looks like for each form, for each piece. For the Play-type plays I love the most, it is literal liveness9. Seeing a family dance as hard as they can, just after they hear their father has received a terminal cancer diagnosis, in

Clare Barron’s You Got Older; watching Mark Rylance’s nearly-magical gliding walk as Olivia in Twelfth Night; The Seagull at Lake Lucille, sitting in the bone-soaking rain, watching

Konstantin swim across a literal lake to meet Nina and courier her back across on his back.

These are the antecedents to my decision to end Loverboy with a chorus of fifty Daughters . . . I want my plays to call blatant attention to the sweat, tears, flesh and blood with which they are conveyed.

Virtual reality, while being on the opposite end of the literal-liveness spectrum, is a storytelling form that holds a lot of heat for me because it is in its infancy as an art form. There is no consensus yet on how it is best used to tell stories – or how stories are best received within it.

Because of this, I feel free to pursue bold creative parameters. Is this a form best suited for

9 This is not to say that I don’t crave and cherish such things as well-honed storymaking, evocative language, and so on in plays – just that I love those things as much in other storytelling forms, too, and that it is this potential for liveness spectacle that feels like an implied parameter to me, as a Play-type playmaker.

exploring complex branching narrative pathways intuitively, as in a video game but sans controllers? Those parameters spawned my aforementioned VR experiment Casey. Is this a form best suited to provide an aesthetic layer over a live interactive performance experience? That would lead to a piece like Jordan Tannehill’s Draw Me Close, in which an actor in a motion- capture suit performs and engages with you while you see her and your environment rendered in crude child-like sketches.

The current parameter captivating me, as of this writing, comes from my reading of VR pioneer Jaron Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything. It is a wild and fascinating book, but this passage especially touched off something within me:

I’ve always thought that when VR matures someday, then an artwork, a lesson, or a conversation in VR will not be made up of a virtual place you visit, as current imagination usually holds, but a form you turn into. After all, there is no absolute distinction between avatar and world in VR. If the clouds turn when you turn your wrists, you gradually take them on as part of your body map. You and clouds, one.10

When I think of the most affecting moments I’ve had in VR, many of them are united by how they manipulated my “body map.” In Spheres: Song of Spacetime, a VR experience by Eliza

McNitt, I was a ray of light being sucked into a black hole, with two spheres for glowing hands, and I looked upward as glowing strands were siphoned from those spheres and pulled upward. It gave me the most magical, peculiar feeling, as if something ephemeral was being tugged away from my actual body. In Meow Wolf’s VR experience The Atrium, I was a gaunt hamster on a floating platform, free to zoom around a child’s bedroom as I saw fit – but I was far more fascinated by my hands, their bony-thin digits moving in perfect unison with each small movement of my fingers.

10 Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything, pg. 141.

Can I tell stories in VR on the body-map of my viewers? That is a parameter I’m dying to set, and honor, with my next VR project. I’m especially eager because I feel that the VR experiences I’ve had that make strong body-map choices – including the two examples above – have done so in a way that doesn’t directly interface with the stories being told.

(2) Give space for my collaborators to be generative.

One of the great gifts my time at UT has given me is scrambling my preconceptions of how work can be made. I’ve certainly worked in a paradigm where the word on the page is ineffable, and design/direction forms aim to unite around a pre-scripted story. I was also part of a design-driven project, though, where most of my writing was cut at the last minute. Then there was the devised project where there was more onstage time of me dancing than text I’d written.

What I believe to be the sum total of all this is the falling-away of how precious I feel about my writing. I want to invite my collaborators in. And in the case of writing in immersive forms, that set of collaborators very much includes my audience.

Invite audiences into the piece with generosity, sensitivity, and blamelessness.

I ask myself to begin my work as a writer from a place of deep, heartfelt investment. And with immersive forms, it is incumbent on me to create an environment where collaborating audience members begin from a place of investment, caring, and effective invitation.

Asking an audience member to take active part in a performance – to make choices that will be seen by a group of people, that will have consequences seen by a group of people – is not a small thing to ask. I strongly identify as an introvert, and there are few thoughts more terrifying

to me than sitting in an audience at a plan and being dragged onstage as some sort of

“participatory” ploy.

Which is why I’ll never forget when it happened to me. It was a performance of Old

Hats, created and performed by the legendary clown duo of Bill Irwin and David Shiner, at the

Signature Theater’s Diamond Stage in New York City. It was a full house, Saturday evening show, and suddenly David Shiner had my hand and was thrusting me into an Old West melodrama film-shoot. He took one look at me when I had landed in my spot onstage, read my absolute terror, and then shook his head, as if to say “Oh my god, this guy is awful.” The audience burst out in laughter. I took a deep breath. He then came up to me – onstage, in front of

300 people – looked me in the eye, and whispered: “Relax, son. You’re gonna be great.” And then held his nose as he walked away from me, eliciting an even louder roar of laughter . . . loudest of all from me. When I sat back down after the scene concluded, the man sitting next to me was convinced I was a plant.

I was about as ill-prepared a participant as I could imagine that show having. What I think David Shiner did is use that ill-preparedness to bring me in . . . to not try and push the square peg of what I was bringing into the experience into the round hole of his scene . . . but instead take what I gave him and make it a part of the piece. And not even just a part: he made me the star, for those moments, while all the while being attuned and observant enough of me to attend to what I needed as a nervous human creature. And by doing this, he fostered an attitude in me where (a) I could do no wrong (I actually forgot how to count downwards from 3 at one point, and it worked perfectly), and (b) I cared so intensely about what was happening on that stage – I was so attuned – I felt so alive.

I don’t think any Playable play text can replicate the level of audience-interaction mastery of a David Shiner. But thinking on that experience highlights some of the most basic emotional needs human have: being properly understood, being accepted for who they are, being welcome in the spaces they occupy. I aspire for the interacting audience member to enter a piece in the same fashion I enter it, as initial creator: with presence, investment, and passion.

Consider how I collaborate with the interacting audience member(s) to create our story.

In Intro to Being Here I gave the audience a video game, by which they could create a character (within set parameters) to meet. I then gave nine audience members the opportunity to verbally influence their characters’ personalities at specific points – with the first one of these happening without their being aware of it! – in a classroom structure that was not flexible. There were specific points where I reached out to invite the audience into the collaboration – and those points have different levels of depth, in regard to how much potential collaborative influence the audience has. The game in Intro to Being Here, for example, constrained the player to one of eighteen possible results for the character you create – whereas there are countless possibilities for how you might shape the Content in the performance piece.

Pinpoint when, and how much, collaborative influence interacting audience(s) have.

The above is intimately tied to the notion of status: another central concept I have engaged with as a playwright here at UT. Just as there is always a status relationship (who has the power?) between two or more characters onstage, there is always a status relationship between the interacting audience member and the piece itself. And, as in Play-type plays, there is

a lot of power in moments where status shifts – or an implied status is different than an actual status. When the people paired with Content in Intro to Being Here were introduced to the group by those Content – without being aware that their initial conversation was going to be mined for details – I could see the power of the status shift on those audience members’ faces . . . most did not enter that room expecting to be co-creators of the performance. This shift seemed to delight the audience members not paired with Content, as well. (Presumably in the same way they’d enjoy a status shift between script-locked performers onstage!)

Identify the tools at the audience’s disposal, through which they can collaborate.

In a video game such as Stardew Valley these tools are buttons/joysticks on a controller, with which relationships can be altered and new objects created; in the performance of Intro to

Being Here it was spoken language between audience member and their Content; in Sleep No

More and House of Eternal Return the stories are essentially set, with audiences having collaborative agency only in choosing which pieces they experience, and when they choose to experience them. Within each of these choices are countless other choices, of course.11 It feels essential, though, to pinpoint the means by which the audience might influence the story.

Not only do I want audiences to move a story, or move within a story, I want to structure the experience so that they make choices from a place of wanting to create meaning – or at least seeking out meaning. These tools should always be designed and implemented toward this goal.

(3) Make my play move, in ways big and small . . . as if it were a living thing.

11 For example, you can have the player of a video game choose the dialogue choice “Angry” and have it result in the line “You make me want to vomit hot lava” – or, if you choose it within a scene after a strenuous argument, have it result in “If I had more energy I’d disagree with you.”

This is a literalizing of the conceptual idea of motion that has been so instrumental to my playwriting life. Whereas I as a writer am creating movement within characters’ dramatic actions, back-stories, or relationships, audience members in immersive forms can be moving the story themselves – which leads to:

Create spatial motion between the audience and the story – which moves toward which?

This can take the form of audiences making tactical choices to influence the environment (as in when one makes a move in chess), or their physical movement within a space. The live elements of Intro to Being Here is an example of the former. The entirety of The House of Eternal Return an example of the latter; there is not a time-bound story being told within the space, beyond how you choose to move within it and make sense of the rooms, letters, etc. in your own way. My experience with that piece was that the most potent storytelling was purely architectural: when I enter a house first, then a refrigerator, and come out in a sci-fi space colony pod, I am introduced to the mind-bending logic of this piece. When I see a poster of a hamster in a child’s room, then enter her closet and descend into a cave with a winding spinal cord shaped like that hamster’s, I am introduced to how the lives of those who lived in this house might have influenced the magic beyond it. These are story moves that are predicated on physical moves.

Narratively, the form(s) should always move the audience deeper into the story.

This is a north-star declaration, as a writer in immersive forms.

I’ve found it instructive to think about interactive digital technologies in live performance, which considering this question. Onstage I’d rather see a puppet of an alien octopus empress – or a mop – than a gorgeously-rendered projected holographic representation of said empress. The first two options delight me because they enlist my imagination and disbelief-suspension – which are some of the automatic behaviors we have as theater audiences that engage us deeper in the story experience. I am similarly skeptical of audiences live-tweeting a play in the back row of an audience, and other applications that take you “out of the room.”

Which leads me to this question: is there a way to utilize technology in a way that supports and strengthens the theatrical event – and not just as a well-executed design element – I mean truly reconfigure how we experience a specific story together, in the same space, at the same time?

This was an underlying question I was asking with Intro to Being Here – in exploring whether creating a character in a video game would make you care more, when it became embodied and asked you for help. But as I alluded to previously, I found that the game didn’t deeply affect how people experienced the performance; the central satisfactions seemed to be self-contained within the theater piece.

I want to keep asking this question, and keep trying to answer this question, because I believe the answer is an emphatic “yes.” I believe the technology of our era will allow for us to have unprecedentedly seamless ways of processing and interfacing with live stories. I believe the technology of our era will give us the ability to “enter into” theatrical narratives in fresh new ways – in order to experience the live event with fuller, wider eyes.

Embrace the fact that the level of audience immersion is changeable.

In her seminal work Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray offers the following definition of “immersion”:

We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus . . . in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.12

The possibilities for immersion (and “learning to swim”) that VR offers is brought to mind – especially Meow Wolf’s The Atrium, which delightfully allows the participant to make certain hand gestures to fly around the space. Using this definition, one could imagine an even higher-level VR immersion incorporating smells, wind, haptic feedback, and so on. In Play-type plays, I’d argue, immersion is governed by the ‘fourth wall’: the work of Bertolt Brecht would thus be low on the immersion scale.

The idea of changing a level of immersion is a provocation stemming from moments of

Play-type plays I’ve seen. A recent example would be my classmate Elizabeth Doss’s play

Catalina de Erauso, in which the play itself “falls apart” in the second act and enters into a

(entirely scripted) “talkback” with the audience. The final scene of Angels in America also comes to mind, in which Prior Walter addresses the audience for the first (and only) time in the play.

Recalibrating immersion within a piece can create an immense amount of energy – and I suspect this to be true within Playable play forms, as well. What would it be like, in a participatory performance, for an actor to break character and tell you all the ways in which you might influence the next moment through your choices? What would it be like, in a VR experience, to

12 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, pgs. 98-9.

suddenly have your headset removed – but all your other senses still plugged into the digital world? These present opportunities to create more resonant motion in the work I create.

I will turn now to the work of Ben Samuel, who in his doctoral thesis Crafting Stories

Through Play details what he calls the “eleven axes of shared authorship” of interactive storytelling – which he applies to his work in games. Samuel’s “level of simulation” axis “refers to both the breadth and depth of physical, social, and emotional dynamic systems at play, their ability to influence one another and the game, and to in turn be influenced by the player.”13

Intro to Being Here’s central simulation “system” was social, and educational: the Content were rehearsed to ask after specific pieces of information before each “unit” of the play, to use these pieces of information to “build” a sense of how their Content behaves in the world, and to let their improvised interaction with another piece of Content be the final influence on what form they’d choose to take in our world when they depart. We toyed briefly with the idea that the

Content would refuse influence from the audience member, when they got to a certain state of

“development.” This would’ve been an example of the simulation system changing, mid-piece.

If I had included the means by which audience members teach the Content to move about the classroom, that would’ve been adding a new level of simulation to the piece.

Make the work respond organically to the many moves an audience member makes.

I save this declaration for last because I believe it has tremendously exciting applicability for working in immersive forms. Here I will turn to thinking on “game state”, which Samuel explains as:

13 Ben Samuel, Crafting Stories Through Play, pg. 156.

. . . how much ‘stuff’ there is in a system for the player and their potential collaborators to work with. In other words . . . different types of states that the player can get the system into that the collaborator can reason about, act upon to make further changes, and then allow the player to respond to in kind.14

My VR experiment Casey only “checks” for which choices the player made in previous bifurcating story-paths in order to present the next scene. If I were to add a capability to “check” how often the viewer looks into a void (directly behind their forward-view, say), that would allow me to achieve more differentiated game-states. This, in turn, would allow me to present content that more granularly reflects the audience’s choices (e.g. a viewer who chooses to solidify Casey’s happier memories, but looks into a void for more than half of the scenes, might be presented with new content that shows how Casey doesn’t feel like she’s being fully seen by you).

What excites me the most about game-state thinking is that it steers far clear of the simpler (and, in my opinion, far less personal) “Choose Your Own Adventure” narrative structures that I’ve seen employed more often than not in immersive theater contexts. If I know that you, the audience member, have eaten a banana on a table in the living room, have seen the magical banana grove to your right and chosen NOT to enter it, and then walked clear to the porch on the other side of the house, I can “reason” with those states and call an actor playing a perturbed banana tree to greet you at the porch. I have gathered enough information about your decisions that I can make a story choice that speaks directly to your decisions; contrast this with

“you can choose to go to the porch or the magical banana grove,” which asks the audience member themselves to consider all of the implications of that choice, without the aid of the experience. Game-state thinking is perhaps one of the strongest tools for making work that

14 Ben Samuel, Crafting Stories Through Play, pg. 158.

moves like a living thing: sensing your audience’s choices, amalgamating them, and presenting story beats (or removing story beats, or rearranging story beats) that honor and channel their liveness.

(4) Begin where I care. And keep it up.

For the first assignment I did in Devising class, in the Spring of my first year, I exchanged shirts with Professor Kirk Lynn and led him through a performed (and blindfolded) approximation of what my weekend was like waiting to hear if I’d make it off the waitlist and get into UT. I rode the subways in New York City (Kirk rolled on a chair through the halls of

Winship) as voices of doubt racked my brain (performers in my group running alongside him, voicing their own insecurities). After this we laid him down gently on the floor of 1.134, in silence, to ‘sleep.’ And in the ‘morning’ (after a phone-call sound), I played for him a voicemail: the one I had received, from Kirk himself, telling me that I was indeed being offered admission to UT.

Watching Kirk hearing his own voice, as me, at that moment when the entire narrative of my life took a massive pivot, was one of the most profound moments of performance (and simply being alive) I’ve ever experienced. He was embodying Drew Paryzer in this piece, but in its completion it became clear that the piece never would’ve happened if not for a call Kirk Lynn himself made, some nine months before. We were in that piece together, both as audience and creators. The choices we made in those moments, and the choices we made in our lives, folded in on one another.

Make interactive work that – like our most meaningful interactions in life – bonds

collaborators together.

While achieving moments like the one I just described is admittedly an impossible ideal for interactive narrative pieces (in which creators and audience members will often not have rife pre-show history between them to draw upon), I do think this moment is something of a gold standard in that the interactive elements the group used with Kirk were utterly necessary to the telling of that story . . . and to making that story personal, to both audience and teller.

7. Testing Nimbleness: Introducing Muzzle Tough

I don’t believe that there are stories (or narrative worlds) that work better as Play-type plays, or movies, or digital media, or immersive experiences. I look at a franchise like Star Wars that tells its tales in film, video games, theme parks, immersive hotel experiences . . . and it makes me seek a nimbleness between forms. Can I put my inquiries into these various storytelling forms to practical, athletic use? Can I make this thesis less of an exercise in abstraction and more of a launching-pad into a new way of working? Can I take one story idea and present it in three different forms, and ‘lifting’ what each form does best within each implementation? Can I then use those experiments to develop a way of writing that holistically blends the forms together? I will put these questions to the test using Muzzle Tough – an in- process play I am working on, as of this writing, in Liz Engelman’s Playwright’s Gym course.

Muzzle Tough is a deeply autobiographical piece about a Boy – the grandchild of

Holocaust survivors – who grows up in a small city in the Rocky Mountains and grapples with various “imprints” on his identity from his family, the culture of his town, and the hopes and fears that grow within him. I think this is a good piece to conduct this experiment with because the main thrust of the story is still in flux, yet with a definable-enough container (main characters, settings, general thematic material). This will allow me some flexibility to put story- beats in one form that aren’t in other forms (so I can maximize what is best that each form brings to the table), while also ensuring that the three experiments won’t yield three entirely different story experiences.15 I will present these three “versions” in outline form, which will allow for a

15 Another potential route would be to start with a finished piece and adapt into immersive theater/VR forms – which I imagine would resemble what Punchdrunk did with The Scottish Play for Sleep No More. I take a generative route here, instead of using a completed play of mine, because as an artist I wish to cultivate thinking in all these

bird’s eye view of the story (while necessarily leaving the texture and tone of the pieces as open questions). I will preface these outlines with a brief consideration of what strengths are inherent in each form, when I apply this story to them.

forms from the moment of facing the blank page . . . to think of writing Play-type and playable plays holistically, from the very beginnings of the writing process.

8. Testing Nimbleness: Muzzle Tough as a Play-type Play

What immediately appeals to me about Muzzle Tough as a Play-type play is how much potential motion lies in the constellation of relationships that spider out from the central Boy character. There are a variety of familial, platonic, and romantic relationships to be built, interrupted, heightened, and (in many cases) cut off by death. My narrative work in this form, then, will be to bring Boy closer and farther and closer and farther to his own sense of belonging: to his religion, to his family, to himself. As a Play-type play, the audience will be able to experience these story vacillations without any consideration of how they might behave; it centralizes Boy in his own story, which acts as a strength, given how peopled this narrative world is.

This story is a personal one, and – because of this – the narrative control that the Play- type play form allows for is another strength. While I hope this thesis is working to disrupt the notion that interactive forms can’t have well-crafted narratives, bringing audience interaction into a story means that they will be allowed to change it. In the case of a piece based off one’s life, there is a real possibility that interactivity compromises the very thing that inspired the piece in the first place: to write from a place of deep emotional connection, and thus to precisely serve the dialogue and characters and impulses that are borne out from that connection.

Lastly, I want to note that the work of carving this idea into a Play-type play outline also serves as foundational work for the two other immersive forms I will explore. I think of puzzle video games like Tetris, which are enjoyable but offer absolutely nothing in terms of story. It is impossible for interactivity alone to reliably replicate the feeling of a surprising and affecting

narrative. This speaks to the Playable play I am aspiring to in this thesis – and that moving an audience internally will always be a harder fight than moving them externally.

Muzzle Tough – Play-Type Play – Outline

• Boy, 13, lives in Ft. Collins with his parents and Aunt.

• Boy’s grandparents come to Ft. Collins from Florida for his Bar Mitzvah, officiated by the charismatic Rabbi Jack, and decide to move there permanently.

• The painfully-shy Boy (at his grandparents’ demanding) becomes more involved in the local synagogue, Har Shalom, and befriends a girl named Johanna; Boy goes to Shwayder, a Jewish summer camp, for the first time with family friend Corinne, and falls for her and for the place; Boy finds out his Dad has been cheating on his Mom, and promises him he won’t tell her.

• Boy’s mom finds out about the cheating without Boy telling her, and his parents split; Grandma and Zeide move back to Florida; Boy’s mother moves into Corinne’s family’s home, and she views him as a brother; Boy falls deeper into summer-camp community and retreats from school friends and family (distance and resentment for his father grows); the Columbine High School shooting occurs.

• Boy’s Aunt wants him to stay in Colorado for college; after heart-to-heart with Rabbi Jack, Boy decides to take out loans to go to school out-of-state; Boy’s grandparents pass away, and he drifts out of touch with his family and all things Jewish (stops going to Shwayder), throws himself into college life; estrangement from his father.

• He re-connects with Johanna through Facebook, who is enrolled at a nearby East Coast college; finds out about Corinne’s suicide; he and Johanna start dating.

• Johanna dies in a school shooting; Boy’s Aunt receives a cancer diagnosis; Boy chooses not to attend either funeral.

• Boy reaches out to his estranged father, and they have a conversation.

• Boy visits Shwayder on Visitor’s Day, and sees all his former campers as counselors.

9. Testing Nimbleness: Outlining Muzzle Tough as Immersive Theater

I could potentially make this version of Muzzle Tough an immersive theater piece in the

Sleep No More vein – in which the performed story is not co-created by audience – but I want to challenge myself to give the audience agency in the narrative-making. I have set myself a challenge in that the “immersed” spaces I want to create in this piece are Jewish, but my audience will certainly not be entirely Jewish, and in being a good collaborator with my audience

I want to attend to any feelings of discomfort that might arise from those of other faiths participating. My solution to this is to empower the audience to create characters, settings, etc. that exist outside of themselves: potentially in the form of story points, generated characters, pieces of the set, and so on. I will ensure that the material that delves deeper into matters of

Judaism and Jewish culture are provided by the “set” sections of the script.

The nature of the choices I’m drawn toward making is that many of them necessitate time for the audience to prepare things that the story then inhabits. This begs a structure where audience members are parsed out to locations before there are scenes there, as well as a means by which they can still be meaningfully involved in what is happening in the story while they are preparing. I would propose that, in each location, there is a wall that has a live-feed projection of whatever scene/story the Boy is involved with in other locations . . . and that the choices that are made in one place are dynamically impacting the possible choices in another. For example, if we see Corinne telling Boy that earrings are stupid, all the earrings in the gift-making pile in

Corinne’s home will be removed.

I imagine an opening section in which the audience is united in front of a house – alongside Boy – as he receives his grandparents, arriving from Florida to attend his Bar Mitzvah.

That is an initial choice of having the story move toward the audience.

Then – in service of creating good motion within this question – I’d like to have the audience move toward the story. I envision the house (in which this performance takes place) having four levels: the basement being Corinne’s home, the first story being the synagogue, the second story being the summer camp, and the third story being a less-defined open space. At the end of the synagogue Mad Libs section, the words you chose are analyzed to see which emotional direction you were trying to sway him and, based on that, you are either kept in the synagogue or sorted into the basement or the summer camp. As mentioned above, I envision a means (via projection) of audience in each area being tapped into what is happening in the greater story – and I want the sections leading up to Boy’s leaving for college to feel largely influenced by the audience themselves. There is one “track” that the Boy goes on in these opening sections, and the audience experiences the play responding to their own choices when the actors enter their area, as part of this “track.”

It seems to me, though, that the nature of the collaborative influence should change, as

Boy leaves his childhood communities behind to start out on his own – especially because of how we’ve defined community through immersive collaboration in this piece, thus far.

Maybe Boy goes up to the undefined third floor, when he leaves, and our entrance to that area is locked. Maybe this is a section that allows for individuals wandering around the space as a whole – with a live feed in each of the other main areas of what Boy is doing, allowing us to explore the nooks and crannies of the home while still being engaged in the story. And scattered in these nooks and crannies are three red buttons – one for Corinne, one for Johanna, and one for

the Aunt – and the moment the equivalent button is pressed is when Boy finds out that the respective character has passed away.16 This is collaboration on a lonely, individual sort of basis

– which I think reflects where Boy is in the story. When the buttons have all been pressed, and the necessary story beats transpired, the door to the fourth floor is unlocked.

I see the final moments of the play (the conversation with Dad, and the returning to the summer camp) as happening on this fourth floor. I see it containing everything that the audience had generated in the previous sections, and actors playing grown-up versions of the summer- camp “outline people” from the first sections of the play. I see this last section as one in which the audience’s in-the-moment collaborative influence is little, but that the combined influence of all of their choices in the experience come to bear.

Muzzle Tough – Immersive Theater – Outline

• (AUDIENCE TOGETHER) We greet grandparents, visiting from Florida, with Boy (and his family) on eve of his Bar Mitzvah

• (AUDIENCE TOGETHER) We enter into the synagogue on the first floor of the house and watch the Bar Mitzvah ceremony; we see Boy meet Corinne and Johanna.

• (AUDIENCE SPLIT OFF) The audience is split to the basement or the second floor, where they begin creating the gift for Corinne (in the basement) and the world of the summer camp (second floor). ON PROJECTION is Boy and Dad, on the fourth floor, and the dissolution of the Boy’s parents’ marriage.

• (PART OF THE AUDIENCE) Boy and Aunt have moved into Corinne’s basement; Boy gives Corinne the gift the audience made.

• (PART OF THE AUDIENCE) Boy goes to summer camp for the first time, and makes friends/enemies with the various (projected) characters the audience has ‘outlined.’ He sees Johanna here, and depending on his mood they connect, or don’t connect.

16 This could be controlled to harmonize with specific scripted moments through various means: improvisation, a fade-away cut into a different scene, or even a plastic guard over the button that’s programmed to lift up only during the moments that specific button-press revelation would work best.

• (AUDIENCE TOGETHER) In the first-floor synagogue, a memorial service for the grandparents is held; Rabbi Jack and Boy have a heart-to-heart, and he decides against his Aunt’s wish to leave out-of-state for college.

• (AUDIENCE DISPERSED) The audience is empowered to move freely among the space. ON PROJECTION is Boy living his life in college, on the fourth floor, behind a locked door. Three red buttons are hidden in the house, one for Corinne, Johanna, and Aunt; when each is pressed, their death ‘happens’ in the narrative.

• (AUDIENCE TOGETHER) After the three buttons are pushed, we are given access to the fourth floor – where we see Boy and Dad have an interaction, after their long estrangement.

• (AUDIENCE TOGETHER) We have a final scene on the second floor, where the summer campers are all grown up now (and played by actors) and greet Boy with delight.

10. Testing Nimbleness: Outlining Muzzle Tough as a Virtual Reality Narrative

What jumps out to me about putting Muzzle Tough in VR is that it is a coming-of-age story – which necessarily has much to do with how one grows into themselves, their bodies and ways of perceiving – and that VR can be a form that alters one’s relationship to their own bodies and perceptions. Thus, I am drawn to having the audience be inside the Boy for (at least) a significant portion of the experience.

I am also drawn to the fact that the story might contain a lot of indecision on Boy’s part; he is a passive experiencer of the events around him at times, and the choices he makes are often to not make a choice at all. I’ve found that this is a difficult (but not impossible) thing to make interesting onstage – but VR allows the viewer to enter into such moments of indecision, and explore (perhaps abstract) representations of them, in a way that is alluring to me.

What the audience is able to do once they enter is an essential question in VR, as it asks one to first define which tools are at the audience’s disposal in the virtual world. This could mean anything from having a headset and passively looking at content to standing on a platform with motion-tracking cameras and having an entire “language” of hand gestures to move through a virtual world (a la Meow Wolf’s The Atrium).

Because of Boy’s passive nature, I am less drawn to the idea of being able to move one’s feet within this virtual world . . . but I do want there to be means by which the viewer can interact in various ways with virtual content. My solution is to have each viewer wear motion- tracking gloves – so that actions such as grabbing, pulling, pointing, waving, etc. can be registered and used as “signals” by which effects on the story can be made.

I am interested in using VR in Muzzle Tough to underline the narrative thread of being in control. I imagine the viewer, as Boy, at first being able to move around in the locations the story is set in by “pulling” on thin web-like threads that run through the locations in various directions.

I also see being able to communicate with other characters through intuitive hand gestures that are immediately augmented by spoken dialogue from the boy’s point-of-view. For example, if a character at summer camp asks, “Wanna meet behind Cabin 8 after Evening Program tonight?” and you give a thumb’s up, Boy will say “I’ll be there” and at the appropriate time a movement- strand will glow red to direct you where to pull to get where you need to go.

I also wish to use the VR form to emphasize being out of control. I want at first to tie that to moments of ecstasy and connection in the story. For example, at a raucous song session at the summer camp, the movements of your arms to dance might start being echoed by everyone present, and by making certain motions you might be able to connect people to one another and pull them into the middle and become a single hundred-armed dancing camper. (These are choices in service of telling story through the “body map” of the audience member.) Then – when Boy goes to college and leaves his communities behind – I want the viewer losing the physical (movement strand-based) control they had over Boy in the earlier sections, but maintaining the abstracted controls at various important moments (e.g. being able to dance with a hundred arms during a drunken college revel, but nobody present sees it or understands it). There could also be a world where, in Boy’s final return to the summer camp, the viewer controls time on their body: that the Boy looks around and sees his campers grow up and do various things according to the speed and level at which the viewer moves their hands around the space. These are some possible solutions for how to utilize what VR provides for in a motion-ful, story-centric manner.

I’d like to set myself the challenge of creating branching possibilities in the Muzzle

Tough VR experience, if for no other reason than I created a non-branching story for the immersive theater iteration (on the level of plot, at least) and I acknowledge that making stories that are shapeable by the audience member is one of the great opportunities presented by immersive forms. The “choice-space” for the viewer will largely exist in the pre-college part of the piece, based on how they’ve communicated and behaved to each of these central characters.

In the college section, the number of times you engage in out-of-control movement choices tied to each of the characters (e.g. the hundred-hand dance and Corinne) will augment how your character feels about that person.

There are a bevy of choices related to how the relationship-states between Boy and each of the characters are communicated – which ties into the question to what degree is the audience immersed in the experience? Because I want these branching possibilities to grow out of a more organic, experiential VR story, I am tempted to let these changing relationship-states (and their implications in the story) exist at a high level of immersion (e.g. if you’re falling out-of-touch with Corinne, there won’t be a bubble saying “Connection level: 2/10” floating over her head; she just won’t want to talk too much with you). It’s more important to me, in this particular story, that the viewer is present and engaged in the experience (and that the experience forms itself in some ways around that presence) than having the viewer try to win the experience, and strategize around it. That is at the heart of these collaborative choices.

Muzzle Tough – VR – Outline

• (IN CONTROL) As a tutorial, you use your movement-strands to climb up to the altar at Congregation Har Shalom, and then use a yad (ritual pointer) to read the Torah out loud. Your Dad, Aunt, Corinne and Johanna are in attendance. You hug your grandparents after, and they ask you how you plan to be a Jewish adult.

• (IN CONTROL) You pull a wall down. You’ve grown (your sightline is higher from the ground), and you’re at Shwayder Camp. Both Corinne and Johanna are there, and how your relationships with them evolve are noted in the system. You get a letter from Dad that him and your mother are splitting up. You have an ecstatic moment on a dance floor where your body-map controls are abstracted.

• (IN CONTROL) You pull a cabin down. You’ve grown again, and you’re in the basement of Corinne’s house – where you and Aunt have just moved. Based on the noted level of affinity with Corinne from Shwayder you either become close friends, have a first kiss, or stay distant from one another. In all cases, your body-map controls will become abstracted for a moment again (from joy, longing, or rage).

• (IN/OUT OF CONTROL) A memorial service for Boy’s grandparents is held at Har Shalom. Boy starts making small motions out of your control, during the ceremony. Afterwards he has a conversation with Rabbi Jack and decides to move away for college, against his Aunt’s wishes; this is a choice outside the control of the player.

• (OUT OF CONTROL) A manic run through the college years of Boy’s life, in which you only have control during moments of ecstasy that mirror the ones you experienced in Corinne’s basement/summer camp. Corinne, Johanna, and Aunt all pass away during this section; depending on established affinity levels for the three of them, Boy may or not return to the synagogue for their memorials, which we will also experience.

• (POTENTIAL OUT-OF-CONTROL SCENES) The memorials for Corinne, Johanna, and Aunt; if Boy comes to two or three of these, in line with his affinity levels, he will decide to move back to Ft. Collins. If not, he will stay in school.

• (IN/OUT OF CONTROL) Boy and Dad have a conversation after their long estrangement; while you are not in control of the conversation, you able to pull things out of your body (and conjure other things with your ecstasy-based movements) to populate the empty space around you with various pieces from summer camp, synagogue, and college life.

• (IN CONTROL) You are allowed to wander the space, which is populated by grown-up versions of the young campers you met in the earlier Shwayder section. When you pull on the sky, you are either back in Corinne’s basement or back at school, getting ready for bed, depending on whether Boy chose to move back to Ft. Collins or not.

11. A Playable Play: One Muzzle Tough, Three Forms

Imagine buying tickets for a play and entering a proscenium theatre. The play starts, and we see a Boy receive his grandparents outside his house, the day before his Bar Mitzvah. He tells them he is nervous, that he gets deeply nervous in front of people, and his Grandfather laughs and tells him to just rehearse it in his mind, over and over, and if he does it enough then nothing will surprise him.

As the scene ends, every audience member puts on a VR headset/motion-tracking gloves, and we are in the boy’s POV, reciting the torah portion he will be reading the next day as part of the ceremony. By pulling his tongue in different directions, his words will be mangled – and, if you pull it in the direction of specific people in the audience (his family members, or Corinne, or

Johanna), he will tell you how they make him feel.

When you take off the headset, the actors in front of you are gone, and there are clear paths for you to get “onstage” from the audience and enter the house. The house is not just a set, after all: there is a long hallway that leads to the chapel of a synagogue. Along the walls are tables lined with bagels and various members of the Har Shalom community. They guide you to your seat in the chapel, give you food/offer information about the synagogue and Ft. Collins, and give you some small pointers on motions they make when they pray – if you wish to do them as well. We watch the Boy read torah from his Bar Mitzvah (incorporating the slip-ups the audiences most had him do, in VR). We then have a silent prayer at the end of the experience, in which audience members put on VR headsets and – by using the hand motions taught to them by the (actor-) congregants – are transported from inside Boy’s POV to a desert landscape, in which

we can grab sand from the ground and fashion it into any shape we can think of . . . building freely, together, as an entire audience, with no regard for gravity.

When it’s time to remove the headset, we find ourselves in another proscenium-type audience-performer relationship, where we learn about Boy and Dad’s relationship. The summer camp is through another door on that stage, and we play a Color Wars game there, and when we have a quiet moment before bed (and after watching Boy and Johanna share a kiss?) we pray again and continue to build in that nameless desert. When Corinne and Johanna and Aunt die in the play, they appear there . . . and when we’re in college we can go to the desert, but we can’t build and shape with the sand.

The scenes in college mostly happen in a Play-type play set-up . . . beyond our control, beyond our ability to be present with him. The playing-space in the theatre gets smaller and smaller, as the walls move in every time we complete a cycle of going into VR and then taking the headset off. Finally – in the smallest space, the narrowest space – Boy and Dad are amongst us, in the middle of us. Boy confronts him as an adult for the first time. And when Boy still can’t find peace from this climactic sequence he speaks with his Rabbi, who tells him the best he can do is to find his own personal Holy Land, the one within himself, the one that he builds with people who love him and that he can keep sacred from people who don’t. And then one last door opens, and the audience enters it, and it is a room that is an exact replica of the Holy Land that was built throughout the play in VR by the audience members . . . including the actors who play

Boy’s deceased loved ones. The exit to the theater is out that last door, and the audience is permitted to stay as long as they want, eat more bagels, drink some wine.

This would be a play in which family narratives, communal ritual, and individualistic internal experience are wound tightly together; in which each of these are augmented by using

the forms of Play-type play, immersive theater, and VR, respectively. The forms move against one another, mix and meld unexpectedly – just as the narrative itself should. And just as a playwright might use a story move – or an unexpected reveal of information – these narrative forms, and their ability to enlist audiences as influential forces in the story-world, become fruitful cards to play in this paradigm. It is the paradigm of the bartender, listening to three strands and hearing a braid. It is a Playable play.

12. Conclusion

In her book on game design, Empathy Engines, Elizabeth Sampat puts forth this idea:

“People put themselves at a distance from whatever stories we hear, unless extraordinary measures are taken by the storyteller.” She goes on to suggest that game systems allow audiences to make a leap from responses of sympathy to those of empathy. As she puts it:

By placing you in [a] circumstance instead of describing my own feelings, you’ll have feelings of your own. And at the end, you won’t feel sympathy – you’ll feel empathy, because you have a small taste of what it’s really like.17

Why can’t we build those “small tastes” into the very fabric of our plays?

This thesis has been a personal experiment in constructing a flexible process for doing just that. It was by no means a comprehensive examination of how a playwriting-centric view of storymaking could be expanded to include elements from immersive forms, but I hope it to at least be a good start: for myself as an artist and hopefully for you, the reader, as well.

Writing a play is incredibly hard. The attention and investment of an audience is a volatile thing, and for these past three years I have been training in methods to hook, sustain, deepen, and reward that attention. I have also worked to inculcate a sense, in myself, of what words on paper might feel like when they are enacted in time and space. It is my belief that these qualities make playwrights ideal for working in immersive forms – in which the audience’s physical presence (or the simulation of it) is itself a medium. From the immersive work I’ve encountered, I also believe that storymaking has space to be “lifted” within these pieces, and

17 Elizabeth Sampat, Empathy Engines: Design Games that are Personal, Political, and Profound, pg. 8.

provoke exciting new work in which the viewer is simultaneously sensually engaged, as well as engaged in the question of “What happens next?”

I came to UT Austin (and, truth be told, started writing this thesis) believing that Play- type plays, immersive theater, video games, and VR were all separate forms I wished to work in.

While I still believe that, I finish this thesis believing that they are all one form – united by their live-ness and necessity for collaboration. At the end of the day, I am a playwright – I will forever be a playwright – and I am a playwright whether I am writing Play-type plays, Playable plays, immersive pieces, or whatever else. I only care that I tell stories to move my audiences . . . in all senses of that word.

Loverboy by Drew Paryzer

Characters

Mom Mid-Late 40s Loverboy Early 20s Daughters Teens

Cast diversely: performers of ethnicities reflecting the demographics of your city, region, country, world.

Setting

The basement of a two-level home in suburban Denver. At first blush, it’s a dusty storage space for furniture, winter coats, and sundry odds-and-ends. But it used to be a bedroom, and most everything from that bedroom is still there. Plus a mismatched kitchenette area. And a feeling that this space is too vacuous to have been a bedroom. There’s an entrance onto a staircase, leading up to the house’s top floor. And a door out to a backyard/porch area.

Time

Thirteen days. Early winter. Which – in Denver – is a manic pastiche of frigidity, brisk fall, snowstorms, sunshine, slush. Sometimes all in the same day. Sometimes all at the same time.

Playwright’s Note

The language hiding behind the dialogue and stage directions is an open gift to each production process. I only ask you honor the foreground-background relationship, in how you present the text as a whole.

(1)

Day one. Morning.

Mom rushes in from the stairs, wearing a vest with a lot of pins on it. A Hobby Lobby cashier sorta thing.

She puts some scrap fabric in a box, and is on her way back upstairs when –

There’s a knock on the door.

Mom is frightened.

MOM Hello?

VOICE Delivery.

MOM For who?

VOICE Mom.

She opens the door, and Loverboy is there.

He has a backpack with a sleeping-bag attached.

LB YouI ammake delivered. me love the invisible layer of tiny innocent bones that I mustMom hugscrush Loverboy. in Painfullyorder tender. to walk in this world.

Then she play-hits him.

MOM You stinker! Think about my blood pressure!

LB Just, like, think about it generally?

MOM We have a front door, you know.

LB This one was mine. I can go around, though –

MOM No no no. You’re right.

He is beckoned into the room. Looks around.

MOM I like this style. It suits you.

Pause.

YouMOM seem like you’d have an app for memorizing poetry on yourI’m sorryphone about my that last Email you feel guilty about whenever you see it, but It was self-indulgent. youMy don’t back’s much delete better, recently. it or even put it deeper in one of your phone I thought I’d – never hear from you – folders because you want to feel guilty about it until you LB actuallyBelch. start using it, and at least you have that thought patternMOM memorized and repeatable and that’s as beautiful as a poem,What? if you’re asking me.

LB Like if there was a huge vacuum cleaner hanging down from the ceiling, with tubes in all directions, and it sucked all my old stuff into a pile and then belched out all the dirt. Belched.

MOM Let me make you something upstairs. Let you sit down.

LB I’m okay.

MOM I didn’t throw away your wall photos. The scotch tape tore a few corners coming off, but. I tried.

LB What’s your vest?

MOM Oh god, I forgot I was wearing this.

LB Where do you work?

MOM It’s nothing, really.

Just some greeting. Which, turns out, isn’t the same as talking. You were probably able to forget your prom date almost LB immediately.How much do you make?

MOM There’s a chair around here somewhere.

She pulls out an old, cheap video-game rocking chair.

Loverboy laughs.

LB I’d roll back on that and crush my fingertips. To see how much I could take.

I betMOM the sound of your exhale when you sleep is the sound of a Where are you coming from? birthday candle extinguished in honey. LB Denver.

MOM How long have you been back?

LB Oh. No. I am always coming from Denver. I’m sorry.

MOM No need for that.

LB I was just on a Greyhound. I have an unlimited pass.

MOM From what city? You don’t have to answer.

LB Will you be late for work?

MOM (checking her watch)

I don’t care. You’re home.

LB You should go to work.

MOM Will you – I know you don’t like phones, but will you –

LB I’ve got a great sleeping bag. YourI’ll set smile up at the istop an of the archangel’s stairs. diagnosis. In the secret nook.

MOM

I’d open my door and you were the first thing I’d see.

LB You should get to work.

MOM Oh my dearest, dearest one.

Pause. She takes a couple steps.

MOM

Will you tell me if you’re leaving? Because if it’s going to be another – Few years – And I’m not forcing you to stay. I – I just want to be able to say goodbye properly.

LB I’m sorry.

MOM Please don’t. You can just leave me a note, too.

If you don’t want to speak it. Just . . . Tell me?

LB I have a ticket out tomorrow morning. I am a jar of giggle-snorts for you to tap on with your tiny Pause. rubber mallet-nose. MOM Thank you.

LB I don’t want to get you fired.

Pause.

MOM I wish I’d saved a sick day. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

She leaves.

(2)

That evening.

The room is a little cleaner. The bed is stripped.

Fluffy dogsLoverboy probably is at the laptop. wag at you every morning, instead of an alarm clock.Mom enters. Sits in the video-game rocking-chair.

MOM I’m so sorry, sweetie. So much traffic. There was an accident. Today! Of all days! I wantI almost to cried. make you come so hard you call it ‘staying.’ I did cry. God, my feet.

LB You are healed.

Loverboy presents the laptop to her.

She studies it.

MOM Is this your blog?

LB You’ve already got a guest for tomorrow night.

MOM What do I have?

LB And they’re paying that much. To be your guest.

Mom takes the laptop. Loverboy exits out the stairs.

MOM “Air-buh-nuh-buh” – how do you pronounce –

LB (offstage) Airbnb.

MOM Is this an old picture of your room? And my face? Just out there for the entire world?

Loverboy enters with bedsheets, starts making the bed.

LB They don’t know our exact address until they book.

MOM So Akiko Hamada from San Jose knows our exact address.

LB You can quit your job. No more thinking about sick days.

Look! Even its own entrance! This is perfect. I’ve stayed in enough of them to know.

MOM How do I delete all of it forever?

LB Just try it? Just one?

Pause. Mom looks at the laptop, again. You could probably build a fire by leaning back in a chair and MOM whisperingThat’s the? the word ‘plaid’.

LB Per night.

MOM This really became such a popular neighborhood. No no no. This house is only for us.

LB And this is my room and my room can help you. Even if I can’t.

Pause.

Loverboy reaches for his backpack.

MOM Can you make it feel that way again? Like when it was all yours?

Loverboy nods.

MOM Then okay. We’ll try one.

Loverboy immediately starts cleaning the space.

MOM

But no more saying you can’t help me!

Loverboy looks inside a box.

LB I wantDecorations! what I feel about your body to be the only thing history remembers about me. MOM

I think we need to be reasonable. Neutral colors.

Loverboy holds up an item Mom has crocheted.

LB This one on the wall?

Pause.

MOM Definitely a blanket.

She puts it on the bed. Takes another from the box and puts it on the floor. You are prepared to think of any article of your clothing as an apron.

MOM A rug? What do you think?

LB I wantTrue artistry. to drink a lot of water and exhale real heavy until I make a cloudMOM that’ll go rain on your adversaries. Remember the beanies I made you?

He doesn’t.

MOM So many beanies. Less and less little. You do have a huge head.

LB Do you not have money for a real rug?

MOM Sweetheart. Please.

Pause.

MOM I’ve got more of these around here somewhere.

She exits up the stairs.

Loverboy moves the furniture into a specific configuration.

Mom re-enters with a large plastic bin.

MOM That was the middle-school spot. For your bed.

LB I got work with a moving company.

LB (cont’d) For a day. I mean, no, more than a day. Many days. But I can only think about the last one.

Pause.

I’mMOM like a hungry gerbil when I look at your earlobes, I wanna What else have you done? nibble nibble nibble. LB Is there a real rug in there?

MOM No. I’m curious.

LB I can go on Craig’s List and find a free rug. I’m good at that.

I wannaMOM take every person you’ve ever slept with and I wanna More manual labor stuff? putSweetheart? them all in a little room with me and I wanna lay them I won’t judge you, I – down in a row and I wanna rub my face against every one of LB theirSold my interests. sperm. Mostly selling sperm. Of my own.

Small pause.

She opens the bin.

MOM That sounds much less stressful.

She makes a discovery.

MOM Oh! Sweetie! A bunch of your old things!

LB Photos? I don’t need to see my old photos.

MOM Even younger!

She holds up a piece of sidewalk chalk.

MOM Remember how you’d trace our hands? Yours inside of mine?

LB You should change the Airbnb password to something you remember.

MOM

You know all my passwords, anyway. Some combination of my initials and the year I graduated –

LB I don’t want to know this one. I don’t want you to tell me.

Pause.

MOM Okay.

Mom moves the bin into a corner.

Something small falls out.

MOM Can you pick that up for me?

LB I thinkI’d rather we not. could discover a new color together.

MOM I don’t want to bend over too much. It hurts to.

Loverboy acquiesces. Picks it up. Studies it.

Then puts it in his pocket and resumes cleaning.

MOM What was it?

LB Nothing.

MOM You mean ‘everything’?

LB No. I don’t.

MOM

Remember?

Sometimes you’d ask me what’s wrong, if my eyes were puffy. And I’d say nothing. And you’d say EVERYTHING. YouBecause are you the were result learning about of crystal.opposites. And we’d laugh. It cheered me up so much.

Pause.

LB takes the toy out of his pocket.

LB My old Tamagotchi. Hubert. Do you remember Hubert?

MOM

The digital toys were all your dad’s idea.

Stillness.

LB He’s dead.

YouMOM give batteries performance anxiety. How? You were staying with him?

LB What?

MOM Your dad – you said –

LB Hubert. Hubert is dead.

MOM Oh!

LB He’s not even Tamagotchi dead, like with wings up in the clouds because I didn’t feed him enough, he’s like just a forever blank screen, nobody would ever even know his name was Hubert except for me. I’m gonna take Hubert. If that’s alright.

MOM You can do whatever you want. This is your home.

They clean.

MOM I haven’t heard from him, either.

They clean.

MOM Having your toys down here feels right. Maybe a family will come through next. With some kiddos. Maybe we have a family-run bed and breakfast. You and me. Can you imagine?

LB I imagine way too much, Mom.

They clean.

(3)

A few hours later. The place looks pretty good.

MOM We should get some rest. Say good night.

LB Love you.

MOM You can sleep in here, you know.

LB Don’t wanna make any more laundry.

TheMOM palm of your hand is a grocery cart’s parable. I’ve got time for a load before she arrives.

LB Don’t wanna add to the burden. Wanna earn my keep.

Pause.

MOM

Sleep in your bed tonight, sweetheart.

MostLB canneries don’t keep it together as well as you. My sleeping bag is incredible. I wasn’t lying. It really is.

MOM Then at least lay it down here. In your room.

LB Fine.

MOM And I’ll take the bed.

LB Why?

MOM Just because.

LB Is it the stairs? Does it hurt, to –

MOM Just in case you need me.

LB In the middle of the night?

MOM Or whenever.

LB I’m fine.

MOM Come on. Humor an old lady.

LB You’re not old.

YouMOM have five distinct pules, and two more that are actively I remember when you were crawling. Crawling in diapers. Crawling in a pile of Legos. Crawling through theorized.the back yard into your room, at three in the morning, thinking you were sneaky.

LB I did it so close to the wall! Out of the porch sightlines! How did you know?

MOM Please? Let me stay with you?

LB You don’t have to ask me.

MOM This is all still yours.

LB Okay. Sleep away.

Mom crawls into bed.

MOM You can come and go as you please, you know. Sightlines be damned.

LB YouI don’t are know your anybody own here anymore,fence, Mom. and the entire world is your good neighbor.MOM You can use my car without asking.

LB I’m leaving in the morning, Mom.

Pause. You move your hands like an opera sandwich. LB Maybe I will sleep in the nook.

MOM You always have choices, here.

Pause.

Loverboy gets in his sleeping bag.

(4)

Late that night.

Loverboy crawls out of his sleeping bag.

LB Mom? Mom?

Mom.

She awakens.

MOM You’re safe. You’re safe.

LB WhenI’m sorry. you You’re put sleeping. your weigh on one leg, I completely lose my balance.MOM Are you okay?

LB Of course. You must be tired.

MOM Were you out?

LB No, Mom. I don’t do that anymore.

MOM Are you hurting? Come here.

LB This mattress is so different.

MOM You used to wake me up after going out with friends.

LB I’m sorry.

MOM I asked you to. So I knew you were okay.

Remember?

LB I’m sorry.

MOM Why do you apologize to me?

Pause.

LB You taught me how to love.

And every time I’ve had a feeling of love And didn’t express it – They’ve piled up in me. WhenOh god. you smile at me, I forget the small questions I’ve cued If I had up,A group and of remembertotally empty people the big one. To tuck all those feelings inside of Under their skin

I could make a little utopia. You taught me how to love You taught me right I’ve got it all stored up It just started Choking me a bit and now I’ve YouI’ve jusmovet – gotta like – gotta bubbles – on a razorblade.

MOM You are my sweet dream.

LB I am a burden. All the meetings and therapy. The jobs you lost.

MOM You are my child.

LB And then I abandoned you, Mom.

MOM You have no say in that.

Mom closes her eyes. Your irises have an ancient yearning to be the broken time capsules they are.

(5)

Day two. Morning.

Loverboy has his pack. They’re at the door.

MOM Thank you, sweetheart.

LB Did you think I’d end up better? With all the AP credits I got?

MOM You always wanted to travel.

LB Well. My sleeping bag is sub-zero. And locks shut from the inside.

They embrace.

Mom tickles Loverboy.

MOM I’m the Tickle Monster!

They get into a tickle fight.

Mom is winning.

LB Stop! Stop! You’re better! The earth’s molten core considers you its tiniest moon. It continues.

At the height of it:

LB I WANNA PRESS A PIECE OF PAPER TO YOUR FACE REALLY HARD AND THEN BURN IT AND TAKE THE ASHES AND SNORT THEM AND SNEEZE REALLY LOUD AND HAVE YOU SAY GOD BLESS YOU AND KNOW THAT GOD TOTALLY JUST DID.

Pause.

LB That was really weird. I can’t say things like that. People will think I’m unsafe. People will fire me. I can’t fucking talk like that! When I think things like that I fucking can’t fucking –

MOM That was – hey –

I have to think normal fucking questions and professional fucking presentation and –

MOM Look at me. Look at me! Those words made you shine. You should write them down!

Loverboy feels safe. He had forgotten the feeling. It changes his body.

A knock at the door.

YouMOM are the stuff inside of a telescope that makes me feel less Akiko! distantShe’s early!

LB I’m staying.

I want toLoverboy rub bolts burnt up the stairs.rubber down your spine and ask for a piggy -backMom is ride. moved.

Another knock at the door.

Mom takes a deep breath, paces, practices her greeting.

MOM Welcome. Welcome! Welcome.

(6)

Day three. Morning.

Mom is cleaning, post-Akiko Hamada.

She picks up a few hairpins.

Loverboy enters, with something in a bag.

MOM Should I message her about these? If she wants me to mail them? Too nitpicky? She did give us that big tip.

LB I read her review.

MOM It’s up???

LB Over and over and over, it was so beautiful.

MOM What’d it say?

LB My voice can’t do it justice. But we got five stars!

I wantMOM to pinch all your tummy skin into little tents and have a Five of them! big Outol’ of camping – how many stars time. are there –

LB Five!

MOM Five!!! We’re perfect!

Loverboy reveals what’s in the bag:

A goldfish.

MOM

Oh! Wow! I thought you were getting the Lysol.

LB Our guest tonight! Andy! He’s from the ocean, right? Not from the ocean – Miami! Close to the ocean! So I got this for him.

MOM Oh.

LB I wantWe’re soto inland. lick all your stamps and replace them and then apologizeMOM to you about it so extravagantly that I sweat the That’s true. purest adhesive and then wipe my body all over and use it to LB coatIs it everything– you’d ever want to say. Is it weird –

MOM Where should we put it?

LB Please tell me if it’s weird.

MOM I won’t be the judge of that anymore. By the sink? No. That’ll make him think the wrong thing.

Mom finds a place for the fish, then goes to her laptop.

ThatMOM eyebrow -wiggle is powerful enough to scoop a pumpkin. What should we name it?

LB Hubert.

MOM Oh! Like your Tanna-what’s-it –

LB Or whatever he wants. It’s entirely his fish. But if he asks you for a suggestion, I would suggest Hubert.

MOM (from reading her laptop) YouScroll are scroll a scroll specific – one review potion – Akiko – Sanfrom Jose –the Pacific Ocean. Oh! I’m friendly! I’m a friendly host! Which means it’s okay to chat, right? It must be? It’s something I can offer. To the experience. My conversation is a selling point. This is so exciting!

LB I want you to get every single star. I want you to get all the stars there are.

(7)

Day five. Afternoon.

Somewhere in the space is a chalk depiction of a bunch of balloons. It plays with your sense of perspective and, although drawn with a simple hand, is beautiful.

Loverboy and Mom are cleaning. Lots of toys on the floor. They take care to not smudge the chalk.

The fish presides.

MOM WhenThere’s you a lot of walk bending by, down cabbagesover here, so whenever grow you’re necks. at a good place to transition.

Loverboy helps, but not very effectively. Mom goes to the laptop.

MOM Great. You finish that up.

Loverboy picks up a dog toy.

MOM

That was for Andy’s dog! He forgot!

LB And his fish, too.

MOM He was at his animal maximum, sweetie. I could practically hear his poor pup’s wheezing from my bedroom. Dogs can also have trouble with the altitude. It’s true.

LB I hope it made him feel a bit more at home. At least.

MOM You know who loved your balloons, though?

LB I knew those were right for Alejandra. They’re the shape of her face.

MOM I wannaHer parents rub were all even my bigger ladles fans, truth on be told your. kneecaps so you’ll bless me with good potluck.

LB But the fish? Maybe the family tonight will connect with Hubert.

MOM I’ll type him in under the ‘Amenities’ tab.

LB You figured out the site!

MOM Your mom is hip. Your mom is ‘with it’. And hey we have fifteen stars now! Soon our page will be covered in them!

LB It doesn’t work like that, Mom. It’s an average.

They clean.

YourLB discarded fingernail clippings all firmly believe that they hadBut a they person are your stars. clipped off of them, but are also grateful for the You went down here and got them. separationI’m just a person because upstairs. they were growing further and further apartMOM from you and it was getting much too painful to stay I must have a face that brings out peoples’ life stories. attached and they still have you on their Facebook feed. LB What are they? Their life stories?

MOM Well. Her mom was wearing this purple and gold coat and it turns out she has a lot of work in Seattle, which got me excited of course, and it was nighttime before we knew it and bitter cold and they weren’t in a touring mood so we actually had a really nice meal together, and another this morning, and then I found out her dad and I both had crappy jobs in finance in our twenties –

LB YOU ARE A VERTICAL TIGHTROPE THAT A WISE TECTONIC PLATE USES TO STAY CONNECTED TO ITS – ASTEROID COUSIN AND YOU ARE A SOLID SURFACE VERTICAL TIGHTROPE – CONNECTED –

Mom backs away, which causes Loverboy to stop. He takes out pen and notebook, and writes. MOM I didn’t mean to stop you –

LB Almost done.

You turnHe me finishes. into Rips offa apuddle section of the that page and was puts itmade in a different from pocket. three thousand yearsMOM of lustful panting directly outside of an ice castle. That analyst job was like walking a tightrope –

LB So you had a nice time. Conversations with guests are totally allowed. Seems like?

MOM Yes.

Now you’ll have money and you won’t be lonely. That will make me happy to know.

MOM Please get these toys up for me, honey? I can’t clean this place without you.

Pause.

MOM If youShnookie? held a mushroom in one hand and a pile of moss in the other,LB your face would be my tombstone. I don’t wanna look at my old stuff. And Tamagotchi Hubert is dead and nobody cares about living Hubert.

MOM But we have to clean.

Pause.

Loverboy gives in. Starts picking up the toys.

He holds one up.

LB My Game Boy.

MOM She thought it was a chew toy, obviously.

LB No. That was me.

MOM

Oh. You make me wanna lie down and pant so hard you could LB pogoI’d, like,-stick grind it offagainst my the caroutbreaths. door. In the back. When it ran out of batteries. Or when dad was talking.

He tosses the Game Boy in the bin.

He then holds up an ‘80s electronic voice-recording toy called a Yak Bak.

LB What in god’s name.

I wantMOM to know the most difficult experience you’ve ever put in It still works! Press ‘play’! your belly button. He does. It’s a six-second recording of Alejandra singing a made-up song with one repeated lyric:

“I LOOOVE MY FAMILYYYY”

MOM Record something!

LB I don’t remember this at all.

MOM Well, if you liked it, it’d be broken by now, too. Try it!

Loverboy tosses it in the bin.

He then picks up a stuffed animal.

LB No way!

MOM Oh! I wanted to ask you.

LB Bimpie!

MOM Safe and sound.

LB I still hear Bimpie’s little song in my head sometimes. Like, between the second and third snooze alarm. (the song) Bleep bleep bleep bleep.

MOM That wasn’t from him. His music gadget died right after we got him.

No no no. That tune is deep within me.

MOM I would hum the song when you squeezed. And you would laugh and laugh.

LB No.

MOM Yes.

LB squeezes the bear.

I bet youMom could sings the nap bleep -onsong. grappling hooks.

LB You’re right.

LB walks off with Bimpie.

MOM Sweetie –

LB Just dropping him off at the sleeping bag. I’ll get the trash in a sec.

MOM Alejandra’s gonna stay another night. And wants to play with Bimpie. And I told her she could?

Pause.

LB Oh. Okay.

LB puts Bimpie back.

LB Did they miss their flight?

MOM No.

LB YouOr? are a sweetwater genie.

MOM Maybe sometimes we’re innkeepers. And maybe sometimes we can be . . . More than that. It’s one roof, after all.

Pause.

MOM Maybe we can all have tea together? If you’ve had enough alone-time?

LB I want Bimpie tonight. Is that okay? Can I hold something important to me? For just one second?

MOM Of course, sweetheart. Of course.

Pause.

LB I’m ridiculous. It’s fine. Whatever.

They clean.

MOM I promise . . . She’ll be very respectful with him.

(8)

Day seven. Morning.

Loverboy, cleaning, alone. You are a brine that preserves the fresh vegetable of joy. He picks up the Yak Bak.

Records himself.

LB Dear Alejandra Gurriel: You deserve a –

He stops. He can’t say it out loud.

He plays it back. The toy works.

He tries recording, again:

LB Dear Alejandra Gurriel: Young – batteries –

He stops.

He records silence. When you smile I feel like someone is pressing cotton candy He plays it back. A mechanical silence. against my esophagus while holding me upside-down over a He almost breaks down. garden of giggling roses. He pulls out a handful of slips of paper.

He chooses two, and puts them in the bed. Secrets.

Mom enters.

MOM Can you do me a favor, hun? Go up into my bedroom and make a ton of noise? I wanna see how much bleed there is.

LB Okay. I’ll scream until I taste a little blood.

He exits up the stairs. You have a tail, and it is an invisible coil of potential picnic Mom strips the bed, and finds the slips of paper. She reads them. baskets. They’re weird.

(9)

Day eight. Afternoon.

The video-game rocking-chair is gone. Replaced with a chalk drawing of the chair.

Loverboy is upstairs. Mom is on her phone, reading.

MOM (reading) ”I had a wonderful stay here. Only an hour and a half to the slopes, door to door. Located in a quite residential neigh--” – oh she meant quiet, “quiet residential neighborhood. The landlords were very respectful, great communication. Best part were the chalk drawings, which” –

Your LBtrue (offstage) name has no defined number of syllables – the I wanted her eyeballs to sit down and relax. sounds that make it up are like an accordion that stretches and contracts,MOM (reading) so that you might respond to anything from “The chalk drawings, which were so cute and gave it a real arist—” wow, she’s kind but not ‘Constantinople’much of a speller, bless to her a heart sneeze. – “a real artistic feeling.”

Loverboy comes down the stairs.

LB I didn’t mean cute.

MOM (reading) “One of them had my name drawn into it, so maybe they’d make one for you, too!”

LB I meant majestic.

MOM Five stars.

LB Can I respond to their review? On the. Site.

Pause.

I wannaMOM fit your entire body in my mouth and then ask you to breatheSure. out my nostrils for me.

LB I want them to know I care, and attention to detail, even if I don’t greet.

MOM I know how much you help. You make me want to massage grape jelly on an upside-down LB mouseBut they belly. don’t.

MOM We should go over them together, make the reviews together, post them together. Don’t you think?

LB I don’t understand.

MOM It’s just so we can have a project together, not because I think people will get scared or anything –

LB Scared?

MOM No no no, I don’t think scared, I –

LB I won’t think about the reviews anymore.

MOM I mean that – sweetie, look at me –

LB I’m done with the reviews.

They clean.

MOM We should have more fun. We should go skiing! If skiing didn’t exist, this wouldn’t be a living. Thank you, skiing.

They clean.

MOM I wantDid to you zipreally youhate it thatup much in aas acocoon kid? full of hand lotion and whisper Or was it an act? to youPumpkin, about please how – I want to get a tattoo on my face of what my face will look like when I unzip you and then I want to unzip LB you andMy clothes watch were too you hot and smooth the air was tooeverything cold and at the end out. of the day it’s just a lot of long slipping.

Loverboy finds a dog toy.

MOM I thought it’d be good for you to know it as an adult. Because I had to learn after I had you. And it was hard. But god, I got good. You lookDid you at know a that?raging snowstorm and see a hormonal Sno-cone.

Loverboy squeaks a dog toy in Mom’s face.

MOM I couldn’t find work. I took a few years away when you were born, and . . . So you and your dad would stay back at the lodge and I’d do double-black diamonds. The steepest grades. The deepest moguls. I expected myself to break something, eventually. Snap a ligament. Do you ever go? As an adult? I want to know about you.

Loverboy squeaks a storm at Mom, which drowns out her next thought.

MOM Do you want to know about me?

More squeak-storm.

MOM If I’d learned to ski younger, it could’ve meant something.

More squeaks. Mom grabs the toy.

LB You said we should have more fun. Huckie would have fun like that. Bite it bite it bite it right in front of you.

MOM I should message Andy about this. We have that new opening tomorrow! Maybe his wife and kids are still on their cruise and – I could message him and see if – Would that be wrong?

LB What kid of name was Huckie, anyway?

MOM Our dog’s name was Huckleberry.

LB I bet I called him Fuckie once. Accidentally. And you looked over at me, shocked, but I was just playing an innocent rhyming game so you didn’t say anything. “Huckie Huckie bo-Buckie.”

MOM I know you loved Huckleberry, sweetheart.

I know it was hard to say goodbye.

“Banana-fanna fo-“ – I want you to tape me to a flashlight and stop believing in dark MOM corners.I’m gonna message Andy. I’m just gonna do it.

She takes out her phone and does it.

Loverboy scrubs at a few blotches on the wall.

Mom finishes, and notices him.

MOM Those aren’t stains, sweetie. They’ve been there forever.

LB No.

MOM You didn’t like night-lights as a baby. But you didn’t like the pitch-dark. So I bought a few of those glow-in-the-dark planet things and stuck them to that little patch of the wall. And you slept sound.

LB I bet I pointed at them. With my tiny tiny finger.

MOM You weren’t much of a pointer. Unless you did it in secret.

LB points at Mom. She holds his finger in her hand.

MOM

Do you remember? Your baby secrets?

WhenLB you pick up steam, the steam has never felt safer. I stopped talking again.

These past years. Not just to you. To anyone. Until I knocked on that door.

MOM What happens, pumpkin? When that happens to you? I want to run my fingers through your hair over and over until LB there’sI went enough to job interviews, to rakebut I. up. I wanted to say things loving things to the, like HR people and I knew I couldn’t and And so I went to. Banks. For Sperm. Because they saw my SAT scores and IQ score and I just pointed at my throat like “I lost my voice from something” And if I went to different states, different towns, I could Make it work.

MOM But what does it feel like?

Pause.

LB It wasn’t just about money. It means Even if I go silent again and I never Find Love It means your lineage will live on. Your legacy. I can take a piece of my body and make something beautiful.

Pause.

LB The thought of my kids worries you. I can tell it worries you.

Pause.

MOM (soft) It doesn’t.

Pause.

LB This gift will be for you.

Loverboy draws a daisy, in chalk.

Mom gets a message on her phone.

MOM Andy’s gonna come back! He needed a break!

They clean.

I wantMOM to surround you in memory foam and eat all your Our family’s not as small as it looks. mirrors.Isn’t that right.

Pause.

You’reMOM so cute I want to shrink you and put you in my coat We should raise the rates! pocketGo onand vacation! then shrink myself and put myself in your tiny You know I backpacked in Europe? Just before I got married? shrunkenSlept in hostelspocket and took and double then-decker we’ll buses and live got so, in so mylost. big comfy coz coat Where would you go? In the whole world? pocketWhere together do you see yourself, for the in your rest wildest of dreams? our lives.

He keeps drawing.

MOM Sweetie?

He keeps drawing.

MOM It’s a tough question. You can think about it.

LB I’d go right here, Mom.

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(10) I want to bottle your scent and sell it to the clouds. Day ten. Morning.

Loverboy checks to see if Andy has left.

Then goes to the toy bin, digs around, pulls out the Yak Bak.

Then takes a slip of paper out of his pocket.

He records his voice, reading off the slip:

LB (recording) Dear Mr. Andy Srinivasan: I want to hold a surfboard between my teeth until global warming puts me underwater so you can plop your tummy on it and be safe and rub my head and tell me I’m a good boy.

Somebody stirs, under the pile of sheets on the bed. Loverboy tosses the Yak Bak down, makes to leave.

It’s Mom, in the bed.

MOM What time is it.

They see each other. I want to rub your hands together in between mine until the deadMOM skin flakes off so I can collect it and sprinkle it over my Oh god. I slept in. spaghetti like parmesan cheese. A long silence.

MOM He has a family. It went too far. I went too far. He’s not coming back.

Pause.

MOM What are you thinking? Did I lose you?

LB Dad cheated on you.

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I want to Pause.draw every line, curve, and angle of your face over my faceMOM and find a mirror and stare at the you on me until the I know. end of time. LB A lot.

MOM I know, sweetheart.

He made me promise to never tell you. I like when you laugh sometimes but most of the time it MOM BLOWSYou told MY me rightMIND. away. You don’t remember?

LB He said it was because he was a lover.

Too much love to give.

Pause.

MOM That was wrong of him. To make you think that.

LB My love is no good. It’s a burden. I wantAnd to self -talksufficiency. to Isyou the goal. until For a child.all four of our ears fall off and then I wantMOM to lay down with our ears and be so full of each other. He said that. Not you. I want your voice. As loud as you can make it. Fill up this house. Fill up this city. This is your world, too. You belong to it. Show me?

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(11)

Day eleven. Morning.

A noticeable amount of damage has been done.

Something like: a hole in a wall, where a door handle would contact it. But bigger than it should be.

And at least two examples of that sort of thing.

Mom cleans around one of the pieces of damage. Doesn’t try to repair it.

LB Are you okay? I picked up all the toys. How was last night? Who came? Did you have fun?

MOM If I didn’t, it’s okay.

LB No. What do you mean? No, I’m sure you had a wonderful time.

MOM.

If staying here is more about everything looking normal, or expected, and less about sharing the home of actual complicated human beings, then I can be okay with not having a wonderful time.

They clean.

LB I wasn’t lying to you.

MOM You don’t have to explain.

It’s that I know stuff breaks really easily so breaking it before the guests do will keep them from feeling bad when it happens, I know it, I lived it, you’re just walking and thinking or whatever and your elbow, or your backpack, or something – it swings out, and –

MOM They left a – stern review.

I want the shape of your face as a waffle maker.

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LB I was helping them!

MOM We lost a star.

Off our entire score.

They clean.

Loverboy hits her with a pillow.

MOM Hey! I want you to tell me “Thank you” for no reason over and over LB until I I’llcry. clean up after!

They have a pillow fight.

Mom is half-hearted about it. It dies off.

MOM I got hurt during a lot of our pillow fights. I wantWhen to youwhip were amy kiddo. wet hair down on a sidewalk so I can give But it was a good way to get you to blow off some steam. you a walking foot-bath. LB I remember you laughing a lot during them.

MOM I don’t, really. We need to sweep.

LB I can do it.

MOM You feed the fish. I don’t do the fish, you know that.

Mom takes out the broom. There’s a note attached to it.

LB You can throw that paper away. It didn’t work like I wanted it to.

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Mom reads the note.

LB I just meant that if they wanted to tap a message, with the handle, on the ceiling, I’d be listening. And I could tap a message back. But to explain what different taps meant, that would be way too long a message to put on a broom, and then I realized they might not see the broom so I put it in the bed.

Pause.

I wantLB to hug you until your bones look like scrambled eggs. I just meant I’d be listening if they wanted to try to tap something.

MOM I remember how that’d wake your father and I up.

LB Which one of you was it? That did it back?

MOM Him. Always him.

Silence.

MOM Can I ask you a favor, sweetheart? Can I prepare for Alejandra alone? Can you just relax for the rest of the day?

Silence.

Loverboy leaves up the stairs.

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(12) I want to grow kitten fur so I can butt my head against you as Day twelve. Morning. hard as I possibly can and it will have the intended effect. Neither of them are cleaning.

Mom’s holding a seriously fucked-up Bimpie.

My irisesLB want to write a book and the book is called “Your I couldn’t stop thinking that Bimpie’s insides were broken. FaceAnd for Alejandra Dummies”. deserves better insides. Than what I got. And I thought I’d know what the new heart was when I took out the broken one. But I didn’t, and I don’t know how to sew, And then I realized I didn’t wanna hide it from her I believe in transparency with children So I thought it’d be best she know the situation right away So that’s when I saw that nail sticking out from the wall outside And hung it up there So it was the first thing she saw. Just to get the shock out of the way and the healing process Going. That was the.

Pause.

LB Of course I see now how it’s stupid. I’ll talk to them! When they come back. Where’d they go? Breakfast?

MOM I wantGone. to get in your car and have you drive me directly to crazy. Pause.

LB I’m gonna do something amazing for tomorrow’s guest. I’m gonna get us the perfect review.

MOM Nobody booked. Take a break.

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(13)

Day thirteen.

Nighttime.

Loverboy is cleaning.

Mom enters, wearing a green vest that has some sort of Amazon-like logo on it.

MOM I’m running out for a bit.

LB You turnWhat are my you brainwearing? into the fizz of an over-poured soda.

MOM It’s not a problem.

LB Where are you going?

MOM It’ll just be a couple hours.

LB What is that vest?

MOM I’m just helping a few people out.

LB Doing what?

MOM I wantI’m to just betelling your you so youtornado don’t worry. potato.

LB I’m worried.

MOM It’s just errands.

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LB I can run our errands.

MOM For other people.

LB Friend people?

MOM That’d be nice if they became that.

But I don’t expect it.

Pause.

MOM It’s a safe app. Millions of people use it. Look how hip your mother has become!

LB Who do we have for tomorrow?

Pause.

MOM You don’t have to worry about all that, and the cleaning. Put your pictures back up on the walls. If I threwThis is your stardust room, sweetheart. right in your face, you wouldn’t even notice.

Pause.

MOM I love you. Has my love been hurting you? All along?

Pause.

Mom aches up the stairs, and out. I want your eyeballs in a jar on my nightstand, so I’ll always Loverboy is still. have reasons to open mine. He puts old photos of his on the wall . . .

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And starts pouring the fishbowl into the sink . . .

When:

A knock at the door.

He freezes.

More knocks.

Knock knock knock knock knock knock –

And he answers.

A small group of young women enter.

Thank god.

LB Hi

There’s no TV? That’s alright.

Alright for you, maybe.

God my back is, like –

I think it’s the altitude. It, like, gets in your lungs.

I think it actually keeps shit away from your lungs? Like, oxygen?

LB Do you have a

We don’t need a TV. We have each other, and this chair is hilarious.

Who’s sleeping in the bathroom?

I call bed.

LB Maybe a confirmation or

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Did I just make this hole in the wall?

LB I don’t have access to the – account –

A stream of young women enter.

Did you see that backyard?

We all just walked through it.

I didn’t even look. I was like, ugh, home, finally.

It’s crazy how quickly we feel like somewhere is home.

I’m not a part of your ‘we’.

Even somewhere we’ve never been.

Can I sleep in the bathroom? That’d be so weird.

We were just talking about that!

Where are we going tonight?

I thought we’d start in the neighborhood.

We’re tired. Let’s start tomorrow.

There’s a coffee maker. Let’s start now.

I love like cheap Folger’s can coffee.

Ew.

I love coffee I can just drink without having to think about how good it tastes because then it lets me go about my day and my thoughts without constantly, like, calling attention to itself.

I like things that are delicious.

Point. Counterpoint.

Where is everybody?

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(to LB) Do you have anything to eat?

We’ll find something when we’re out.

No seriously, where is everybody? Did they get lost?

Let’s like keep the door open.

(to LB) I’m not saying, like, make us something to eat, I mean if you offer then sure, but I need to eat pretty close to immediately.

A flood of young women. Around 50 in total.

I’ve been knocking for like

You are a soft knocker

Soft knocker soft knocker soft knockerrrrrrr

We were just like trying to lock the gate

I’m just gonna get in this bed right now

The latch was being weird it like wouldn’t shut

Let’s do double scoops so it’s super-caffeinated

Aww this fishy is so weird

I don’t get how people care about fish

HOLY SHIT. LEGGOS

Are we gonna knock door-to-door

We’re starting tomorrow

Who decided that?

Check it out, it totally thinks my finger is, like, also a fish

Ow! Fuck!

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I’m starting door-to-door tonight

My foot’s bleeding from your groady sharp Leggo weapons

I don’t think we can know what a fish truly thinks

God I LOVE the SMELL of COFFEE

Strands of their conversations become harder to parse.

Every corner of the space is filled with life.

Then: they all go silent at the exact same moment and look at Loverboy.

LB Do you need Help?

(to LB) Yeah so we’re looking for our dad.

That’s not completely true.

(to LB) Have you seen him?

I don’t give a shit about him, I’m just along for the ride.

Some of us are trying to find him.

Some of us are just bored.

Some of us wanna bore a hole in his head and scream into it until his brain shrivels.

I love him. And I want to know him.

And I’m super hungry.

Do you know where he is?

We’re gonna go door-to-door.

Only, like, the religious do that.

We’re better off texting random numbers with this area code.

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Area codes? Um, those are meaningless. Everyone please shut the shut up!

That’s not how you say that.

(to LB) Do you know where our dad is?

You know what I meant.

I totally forgot how AWESOME Legos are

I’m starting to get kinda pissed off

This fish is wiser than all of us combined

Nobody’s listening to me

The cross-talk becomes incomprehensible. Angry.

They start yelling at each other. Then hitting each other with things.

One of those things is a pillow from the bed.

When it makes impact, hundreds of slips of paper come flying out.

High into the sky, then a soft flutter down.

They all scramble to pick up as many as possible.

They read out what’s written on the slips.

“Fountains regularly apologize for interrupting you.”

“When we’re in the same room together, all the skin on my body turns to eyelids.”

“You make me wanna swandive into a hairpin.”

“Young batteries have posters of you on their walls.”

“I wanna open your cheek and rub your molars until they’re dry and then I wanna bite off a fingernail and floss you with it until all your little foods are on it and then I wanna chew up that fingernail and get it all between my teeth so you can do the whole thing over to me.”

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“Most of you is a brand new ocean.”“You are a cross between an industrial-sized vat of hot sauce and a clean conscience.”

“I want to thinly slice an owl and then put photographs of you laughing in-between each slice and then put the owl back together and wait for it to go HOO HOO HOO so I can go YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHO.”

“You are a vertical tightrope, and we’re all falling off.”

“I wanna make a clone of you and have it fall in love with me and get married and have babies and a mortgage, and then I wanna ruin my life by leaving your clone for you.”

“You make me so committed, I should be committed.”

Silence.

I felt that when she touched my hand as she dropped off the check.

I felt that when the elderly man held the door for me, even as his arms trembled.

I felt that when I woke up on the Greyhound and the little girl was furrowing her brow at me.

I felt that when I opened the window for fresh air and you looked up to see what the sound was.

I felt that as you asked me if I’d like to schedule the follow-up right then.

I felt that when you asked how you could help me today.

I felt that when I asked you what kind of fish I should get and you smiled.

I felt that when you trusted me to watch your computer when you went to the bathroom.

I felt that as you delicately peeled a slice of turkey from its paper.

(to LB) Are you my dad?

The room is a fucking mess.

Mom comes back down the stairs.

Mom doesn’t see the Daughters. She makes the bed.

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MOM Oh god, they wanted no mayo but forgot to put that in so I had to drive back and –

The Daughters express Loverboy’s language.

LB you were born in a faded photo hospital, sweet hospital tiles and salty grout and your mother father felt their eyes scraped by god’s front incisors and you began in orchal brown swaddle milkfire and then like a steam-powered caterpillar spitting out a long carpet, your parent’s four eyes were the dot dot dot dot trailing off into the rest of your life, you were a baby and i see you as a baby and i want to hold you as a baby and wrap our lives together like the skin of an apple, and i take a huge bite and the juice drip drips on the carpet, and then you were a, then you were a,

MOM I was a toddler

LB and you are a caterpillar crawler steam-cleaning it up and then on hind legs speaking a first word,

MOM A noisy toddler

LB red-hot metal in your mouth flicking out the sound of NO and MINE and ANTELOPE and THUMBTACK and and and you are a distillation of play, toy joy toy joy toy joy, you are a soft metallurgy on the block-stacks and portal boxes,

MOM My first memory was a lemonade popsicle

LB and wind-up Wendys and cards and jacks and chains and twirling sounds of Uncle Upside-Down and your mother freezes popsicles out of powder-mixed lemonade and the ice flakes off your teeth all uneasy and you knew you’d make them for me, too, you knew as the platform side of your pointer finger got all sticky that you’d make them for me, too,

MOM I was a nerd in elementary school

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LB and you chalked the air with your thoughts and all the eardrums opened early that year and grades so good they turned the dunce-cap inside-out and carried you from class to class inside it, pencil-sharpeners spun their metal arms in tune to your gum-chew, recess registered on the Richter scale and you dangled upward on the monkey bars and your knees loved the gravel, your skin loved the gravel, your scabs were born from the gravel, your blood, your blood, you made your blood for me, too, and your band-aids would later give interviews about your collaboration with them on nationally-syndicated trash-can television,

MOM Nerdy in junior high school also

LB and ALSO out of your mouth you flicked out ALSO enough times that the ALSO sunk back into your bones and you started stacking inches like blocks, your words developed hairline fractures, your skin breathes in and your body screams and the eardrums closed early that year and you knew a tall tall silence but i heard you, you made your blood for me, too,

MOM Thought I was in love with English-class James

LB and a cute boy at a locked locker with hair like chain-link entrance-fee shag carpet made you cut an overripe archangel into seventy-seven creamfire needles,

MOM Started listening to sad music

LB and your first love was the dot dot of twin tear ducts, seventy- seven creamfire needles flung down with wrath wrath brath grath onto the vinyl, tree-ringed vinyl for ages and ages, you made music fit itself with elastic bands so it could wrap around

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all of you just right, and I see you as a teen and love you as a teen and wrap our lives together like the skin of an apple,

MOM Channeled it all into schoolwork perfectionism

LB and you ran your tree-ring finger along the drip drip tiles of a high school wall like a snap snapped singer-songwriter museum diorama case test bubble answer setting the curve, each hair of your eyebrow was the apprentice of a chalkboard, your classmates stacking their assignments atop the ends of your yawns, and you hardened the tender with papier-mâché’d acceptance letters,

MOM And I left my childhood home

LB and you spat out a long concrete and your mother watched you go, your mother watched you go, your mother watched you go for me, too,

MOM For college

LB and you beaded an apron of sweat from the first August of your first true independence and your volcanic pores screaming sweet from half-digested ramen and piggy-back beer and possibility, damn shit cuss cuss fuck cuss however whenever, you chose your major by boiling book covers and studying the broth, test takes and mistakes, bite into an Adam’s apple and an Adam’s apple and an Adam’s apple,

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MOM Economics degree

LB and i see you as a graduate and i hold you as a graduate and you are a steam-cleaning tassel on a cap on a brain-bulging brow on a neck craning fifty stories high on good shoulders on dry armpits on full stomach on hind legs on tip toes on grass on rock on dirt on mud on crust on carbon diamond molten fucking fire and you are the whole slice, top to bottom, rotating the planet as you walk to your first job, rotating the planet for me, too,

MOM Entry-level research analyst

LB your tree-ring fingers firing at one hundred fifty words per minute, suited, every sunset a dotted line for you to sign and low-rise offices rise high as you walk by and you miniaturize the corporate ladder and use it to stir in your cream, so well-suited, every day is a spongy funnel and you pour in the aggregate deliverable client service thumbtack advisement with the condensed suited focus of a newborn diamond,

MOM Got a big promotion and hired an associate

LB for double time, double black diamond skiing speed demon, double decker european bottle-service glitterbomb three-a.m. disco daze, double knitting needles weaving the fresh money and the aging parents and, and,

MOM And the associate I hired was your father.

LB and a sugar tower snuggle mortgage hope alarm razor tickle pillow basement honey hammer furnished gut- check apple quilter cute adult a cute adult – a loverboy – and you made me you made me you made me for me, too, you made me for me, too.

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Stillness and silence.

MOM No one will ever know me like you do.

LB I have to leave, Mom.

Pause.

MOM But you’re finally settled in.

LB Exactly. I only have so many breaths to make into words.

Pause.

MOM Will you be safe?

LB How many stories can I hold? For people I haven’t loved yet?

Pause.

MOM You will find them, my son. And you will find joy. I am so proud of you that I lose my mind.

She kisses him on his forehead.

LB I’m gonna get my backpack.

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MOM Okay.

LB I’ll be back in a minute.

MOM Okay.

LB Don’t move?

Loverboy goes upstairs.

Mom, and the Daughters.

They stand with her.

She feels their presence.

The end.

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Intro to Being Here

An Interactive Play (Attached to a Video Game) by Drew Paryzer

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Characters • The Professor • Content 1 • Content 2 • Content 3 • Content 4 • Content 5 • Content 6 • Content 7 • Content 8 • Content 9

Audience • Nine audience members who have played the video game before the piece, and sit next to/are connected to one Content each • Up to twenty audience members who are ‘observers’ of the class

Place • A one-off class taking place in room 2.112 of the Winship Drama Building

Time • The exact moment it is performed, every time it is performed

Notes on Formatting • Boxed sections of text describe interactive audience moments, and are directed toward what the performers playing the Contents should do • Underlined text indicates things the performers should either elicit from their audience member, or moments when those elicited things should be remembered and used within the performance

A Note on the Professor • At the end of the document is a list of anecdotes that the Professor can sprinkle in- between improvised sections, as they see fit.

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Unit 1: Pre-Class Conversation

(The nine audience members who have Content find their assigned seats next to their Content. The audience members who don’t have Content sit amongst them, wherever there is space.)

You greet your Person as soon as they sit down. The greeting conversation has these components: • Introduce what form of Content you are. • Thank them for bringing you to life. • Ask them what they are. • Ask them if they didn’t quite know how to behave at first, either. o If ‘yes’, ask: when did they know what they are? And how? • Ask them if they’ve ever known any of your specific type of Content. o Get as much detail from them as possible, here! If your Person isn’t too talkative: • Ask them if it was strange for them to bring you to life, from The Platform. If so, tell them that it’s strange for you to be here, in the same sort of way. Remember one of these from the conversation: • When/how your Person knew what they were. o If this includes information that might be considered personal: ask them (without breaking character) if they’d mind other members of the class knowing about it. • An example of your type of Content that they describe to you (e.g. a weird cloud they saw once). Keep this in mind, throughout: • The Emotion level of your Content. This determines the level of empathy you have with what your Person tells you.

Unit 2: Professor Introduction

(The Professor enters the classroom.)

Professor Alright, we are met. Welcome, everyone. This is RL 301: Intro to Being Here.

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(The Professor rights “RL 301: Intro to Being Here” on the chalkboard, and the Content react strongly to it.)

Professor Yes, I can see that the use of chalk is quite startling to the Content in this room. I realize that you all have just arrived from The Platform, where all things exist only within digitized images and floating bits of information. Our world operates more complexly. Luckily, you have a Person. They made the choices on The Platform to bring you here. And now they will help you learn to make choices of your own.

By the end of class, you will exist as your People do, as I do . . . And as this chalk does. Which was in your very same in-between state, in this very class, just a semester ago. Chalk sat in your seat, actually.

(The Content sitting in Chalk’s seat reacts to this.)

Chalk was attentive. Chalk made my job easy.

Some of the People present don’t have Content. I’m afraid that means the transfer from The Platform was unsuccessful. There’s only so much space on our planet, unfortunately. But I’d like to engage you all as observers. 75% of education is observation, after all. So you will be the true students of this course.

The People present will not present or speak anything to the group, today. But we will see their impact on you, their Content. That impact has already begun. To that end, our first assignment: Can I have each Content introduce themselves and their Person to the group?

Unit 3: Content Introductions

You should introduce yourself with the following: • The category of Content you fall into (e.g. Baby, Cloud, etc.) • That you don’t know exactly what you are, yet, but you want to You should introduce your Person with some combination of the following: • Reiterating the moment the Person knew who/what they were

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• Describing the way they move, in great detail After the introduction: • Ask your Person how you did with introducing them

Unit 4: The Content Meets Itself

Professor Beautiful. It’s obvious the process is off to a great start. All the Content have A’s, in my book. So far.

Now! Let me bring us back for a moment to our dear friend Chalk.

Chalk was very reserved at the start of class. Told us it knew it had a use, but wasn’t sure what it was.

But when I started using an old piece on the board, to demonstrate sound – like this:

(The Professor taps the chalk on the board. The Content react.)

Alright alright, let’s regroup, class – when I did that, Chalk leapt up from its chair. It ran up here and introduced itself to the old piece, and it was apparent that they had a deep kinship. That Chalk was destined to end up in this classroom. And its experience inspired me to create the next exercise.

In a moment, each Content will see an image of itself as it appears in our world, fully-formed. You will be able to speak with this image. And this conversation will change you. Before that: I will give you a moment to speak with your Person. So they may help you prepare.

At this point: • Ask your person how they’d introduce you? (This is how you want to introduce yourself to your real-world Content!) • Ask your person “What’s a question I should ask them?” Remember from this conversation:

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• What they say about how they’d introduce you. Any sort of attributes or descriptive language. Tell them that what they say will have a profound effect on how they learn to be. Encourage, cajole them into being honest.

(After a few moments for this conversation, the Professor launches into the sequence of videos/presentation of objects that prompts each Content to have its unique interaction.)

When your Content sees the real-life version of its type: • Use how your Person would introduce you, to introduce yourself to the image. • (If applicable) Move the way your Person suggests you do (or how you feel your Content would) Have a conversation with the image of your Content. Through its (silent) responses, you learn more deeply about how your Content behaves in the world.

Unit 5: The Contents Interact

Professor Now, dear Contents: there is one more important step in this process. You have learned what it feels like to be you. But what are you to other things? What are other things to you? Chalk and Chalkboard get along. Chalk and Wall?

(The Professor throws the chalk against the wall. The Content react.)

Professor Yes yes yes, class, back here, please.

As you can see, the way Contents relate to one another can have profound consequences. Soon, you shall have your first experience with such a relationship. We call it ‘interacting’. And it is through interacting that our being here is truly made.

I will read out our pairs today. I don’t do the pairings. They are made by something greater.

(The Professor calls out four pairs of Contents, and that they’ll be practicing meeting each other for the first time in just a moment. [The Final Content, if necessary, tells their Person not to mention that they weren’t called up.])

Professor Now, I will give you one final moment to ask your Person for any advice they have to give.

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Ask your Person for how you should behave toward the other Content. • If something you’ve learned about yourself in this performance contradicts your advice: feel free to disagree with them! Remember from this conversation: • One key behavior/action that they suggest. If you are the Final Content: • Tell your Person not to mention anything. • Ask your Person about where they’re from and whether they like that place more than they like being here.

(After a few moments of this, the Professor calls up the four pairs of Contents, in succession.)

The paired Content scenes are performed. • Use the behavior/action they suggest, at the start of the scene • ALSO: consider your content’s Emotion level when applying this advice!

Unit 6: Goodbyes

(The eight Contents are all onstage.)

Professor And now’s the time, class. Our Content is ready to integrate fully. What you will be, Contents? How will we see you, out there?

(The Professor calls on the Content, one by one.)

• You say what exactly you are going to be, in the world, based on the interactions and conversations you had within this performance. o For example: if you’re Fire, will you be a forest fire? Will you be a candle flame? How did your Person lead you to this? • Thank your Person, and leave.

Unit 7: The End

(The eight Contents have all left the classroom.)

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Professor That just about does it, class. Thank you all. I hope everyone learned –

Final Content Excuse me.

Professor Oh. Oh! I’m – so sorry –

Final Content I didn’t want to interact.

Professor Why is that?

Final Content I don’t want to – become. I want to go back to The Platform.

Professor Thank you for your honesty. Could you join me up here, please?

(It does.)

Professor I’m going to show you a video.

(A video of someone playing the ITBH video-game. Badly.)

Professor What do you see?

Final Content It’s my home. But different.

Professor That’s how the Platform looks to a Person. It’s how the People in here saw it.

Final Content They look lost. Like they don’t know how to move around.

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Professor Sound familiar?

Final Content Yes.

Professor Your Person learned how to be, in that place. (The Professor turns off the video) What about you? Here?

Final Content [The Content answers with what they are, in the world – their goodbye language. They then leave.]

Professor Congratulations. You’ve passed. Everything passes. Once you’re introduced to being here, it’s impossible to fail. Class dismissed.

(The Professor shuts the door. End of play.)

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Works Cited

Lanier, Jaron. Dawn of the New Everything. Henry Holt, 2017. Ebook.

Mateas, Michael. “A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games,” from Digital Creativity, 12:3, 140-152, DOI: 10.1076/digc.12.3.140.3224

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Free Press, 2016. Ebook.

Paryzer, Drew. Notes and assignments from “Entrepreneurship in the Performing Arts” class. Austin, TX. 2015.

Paryzer, Drew. Presentation notes from “Professional Development Workshop” class. Austin, TX. 2017.

Sampat, Elizabeth. Empathy Engines: Design Games that are Personal, Political, and Profound. Elizbaeth Sampath, 2016. Ebook.

Samuel, Ben. Crafting Stories Through Play. UC Santa Cruz. ProQuest ID: Samuel_ucsc_0036E_11168. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5n638fm. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nw5x48d

Stardew Valley. Playstation 4 version, Concerned Ape, 2017.

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