33 minute read
Shards, Time, Resonance, Risk
JARED MEZZOCCHI + PAULA VOGEL IN CONVERSATION
Jared Mezzocchi is a two-time Obie Awardwinning theatre artist who works as a director, multimedia designer, playwright, and actor. During the pandemic, Mezzocchi was a perspicacious advocate for the creation of multimedia productions for online audiences, many of which he created with his team at Virtual Design Collective (ViDCo). His credits include co-directing, with Elizabeth Williamson, Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm, a 2020 site-specific play for the internet; and writing and performing Someone Else’s House, which was directed by Margot Bordelon at Geffen Playhouse in 2021, about his family’s true-life haunting inside a 200-year-old New England house (audiences were sent “haunting kits” with items related to the house’s history in advance of the performance to help set the scene). During the 2021–22 and 2022–23 seasons, Mezzocchi and his team filmed and edited eight readings for Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate series of overlooked or never-produced plays that deserve a wider audience.
This conversation took place not long after Mezzocchi returned from his most recent season at Andy’s Summer Playhouse (a youth theatre in New Hampshire that produces original works by professional artists from across the country, where he is Producing Artistic Director), and shortly before a workshop for Vogel’s newest work, Mother Play, which will open at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater in the spring.
PAULA VOGEL | When I think of you and your work, I feel like I know you as a digital storyteller, a director, a performer, an actor, a writer, a designer, an artistic director, an educator—both as Associate Professor at University of Maryland, where you teach the MFA Design program’s projection and multimedia tracks, as well as running Andy’s Summer Playhouse. That’s a lot of hyphens for work that comes out and feels totally one-of-a-kind and, as we like to say in the trade, organic. Which is interesting because one thinks of organic as organism, and yet you’re using technological tools to produce this sense of wholeness. Does this make sense?
JARED MEZZOCCHI | It does.
PAULA | All of the hats are present, but I don’t detect voices behind the voice; rather the thing in itself has a voice, has the sense of organic wholeness. In this present moment in time, how do you describe yourself?
JARED | At the end of the day, I’m a storyteller. Everyone has their tools. Some people have pencils, some people have fabrics; my tools, very intentionally, live inside the gaps between forms. I believe that when you live between disciplines, you are forced to make your own process—you can’t fall into the systems that are in place, and that is both exhausting and also so rewarding. At the end of the day, people say, “How did you do it?” and I can’t really answer with a standard sentence. I have to actually walk through the whole process of how I did it. Russian Troll Farm is a perfect example; there was no way to explain it except to go frame by frame, because it’s the only way I can explain the organic thing that was in front of us.
To the point of organic, it’s also that I was an actor first and foremost, and so the stage is the canvas. As I jumped into digital art and multimedia, specifically design, the process really dictated that we were in front of computers and then presented the work on a stage. I was greatly privileged to be launched into 3-Legged Dog in downtown New York and a club, Santos Party House in Soho, and HERE Arts Center, all of which demanded that everyone be in the room all the time and make the decisions. I’m immensely influenced by that joy, and I don’t think I can let go of that.
For me, the organic nature is in front of us. It’s never compartmentalized in different design and production meetings or in rehearsal reports. It’s always best discovered when all eyes are in the room chasing the ghosts together. We have to respond; we’re all barometers. Does this move us? And then also having started as an actor, to me, technology as character as opposed to as tool—
PAULA | I love that.
JARED | —now makes me say, “Well, what does the media want? How does it get what it wants? What is its super-objective? What are its objectives in every scene? What are its tactics? Does it change to saturation because it got something out of the character on stage?” Somebody read the note that Iago left and now everything becomes saturated, because maybe the media is corruption and paranoia and is Iago’s sidekick. Saturation is no longer an aesthetic choice, that’s a character-driven choice. At that point, I’m not making the decisions. The stage is making the decisions, the actors’ impulses are making the decisions. In class and in professional collaboration, I call this “Mediaturgy.” It’s a process that, to me, demands being in dialogue with the technology as a scene partner in an acting class. And to be honest, that leads me to hop very organically between design and directing because I feel like I’m doing the same, I’m listening and responding to the stage in front of me with the characters telling their stories, and I just add technology as a character, as part of the cast. It’s all character analysis to me.
PAULA | It seems to me that in this present moment, you are making art with other people and technology in a room, and it demands that everyone be makers.
JARED | Yes.
PAULA | It feels to me that institutional theatre has demanded that we not make art, but that we specialize in one facet of artmaking. So there’s a kind of separation of our artistic impulses as storytellers, performers, designers, when we go into a more hierarchical institutional process.
JARED | For me, everything I’ve done is actually me building a sandbox, teaching everyone in the room how to play in that sandbox, and then improvising through the text and being surprised. And suddenly, the word organic comes to the foreground. It’s about building the sandbox and then teaching everyone how to be completely comfortable. Yes, there’s a wire over there, but let’s get comfortable with it and mess around so that the actor feels really good with the technology as prop or as costume or as set in the way that they do a couch from the rehearsal room, where we all know that’s not going to be the couch on stage, but we know how to use it.
I realized in the pandemic when I started building things that were formally digital, where everything had to be through technology, that the ego sits to the side at that point because you’re all just truly players. I have such confidence in technology because it’s what I’ve used my whole life, and I feel a need to lower the anxiety in others so that we all know, “Oh, it’s just a metal box that can do things.” Then it is just so joyful. The joy is there. That is why I’m not a filmmaker. That is why I don’t choose to go alone in a room to make work, and I make it this way.
PAULA | Right. So basically, every room becomes a company that you’re entering. I feel very nostalgic. Once upon a time—when we did theatre in the Elizabethan Age or even the Medieval Age—we pulled a wagon into the center of the town square, and we had to be everything. We had to do it all: props, performance, selling the tickets, doing promotion, directing it, all of it. There’s a similar excitement that I feel watching you making every room into a company, where everybody is bringing all the skills that we have been taught to isolate, it seems to me, in the name of professionalism.
I watched the TED Talk about the death of your father that you did in 2014, and one of the things that really struck me, and I think it’s your presence as a performer, is that within the first five minutes, the camera showed people in the audience weeping. They were already so hooked simply by the presence of your body and the power of the words that you were creating. Talking about the death of your father and how in that moment in time, it created a sense in you of the storytelling you needed to do. And we watched that moment in time—45 seconds where you did not know, and everyone else in the family knew that your father was dead. And what we see is images of your mother’s face, silent, about to have to tell you at the end of 45 seconds that he’s not alive. You just drove down through a blizzard to get to the hospital where he is, and you capture something visually through the camera with the immediacy of your body. Can you describe the epiphany of that performance?
JARED | When I close my eyes and remember that moment in the hospital, I don’t remember a full body in front of me. I don’t even remember holding the phone when my brother-in-law called. I remember his goatee, even though he was halfway across the country calling me. In reality, I did not see the goatee, but I could feel it scratching his phone. All these different sensorial moments occur as if flipping through the memory in a non-sequential way, as if there is an emotional linearity to it. It makes sense as emotional landscape, it’s very close up and time stops and starts; it’s like scrolling through footage and adding filters while editing a movie. And that’s grief to me. I think to overcome grief is to figure out how to press play and not feel the anxiety of it moving at a normal speed again. I wanted to have the audience not track the seconds and minutes that I was going through but clock the jigsaw puzzle that I was trying to put together in that moment, in which you will never see the full event. It is up to you to put it together.
The power of theatre is imagination and the uncanny tapping into the uncanny valley. The power of film is something else. For me to be standing on that stage in the TED Talk, I have to think of how to order the story I am trying to tell. I need those images to pop up in response to my emotional cue, not cause an emotional cue. When my emotional status on stage cues the video, I want you to understand that you are watching refractions of what’s going on inside of me, as opposed to watching a movie behind me. There’s something about control, there’s something about puppet-puppeteer there. There’s something about the jigsaw puzzle of the emotional landscape. Those to me are the epiphanies that I have as a maker in multimedia because it’s not making a film and it’s not making theatre, it is actually taking the strength of both and making sure that neither are compromised.
"Some people have pencils, some people have fabrics; my tools, very intentionally, live inside the gaps between forms." —Jared Mezzocchi
PAULA | It feels to me that not just that TED Talk, but all your subsequent work achieves what German expressionists always aspired to, which is how can we see the emotional reality and not just the objective physical reality? There is a warping of time and a fragmentation of what looks like a solid exterior, but it becomes fragmented in a great way.
JARED | I appreciate that, Paula, because to me, that’s why the actor’s journey is important when talking about technology on a stage, because the director doesn’t say, “I need you to cry here.” We actually need to jigsaw puzzle something that will evoke that amount of intensity inside the storyteller, so even if they don’t cry that night, that truth is still there, and they know how to navigate that. Similarly with technology, we have to piece something together to make the audience…it’s like those old Magic Eye books where you have to ask the audience to cross their eyes when they’re looking at the thing and then they achieve the completion of the image or thought. That to me is expressionism, the thing you’re talking about. You’re examining the threads underneath the carpet, and how they are woven together, so that the audience is the one who is asked to complete the overall design of the carpet or whatever the analogy is, the metaphor is. I don’t want to complete the picture for you, that’s your job. And if multimedia design starts to look more like a film, well, then I’m giving you the full idea on a screen. I don’t want to deliver that to you because then you’re passive and you’re not going to feel the same things as the actor on stage is feeling. The total theatrical event is an audience combining three things: the fractured images projected, the live actors and actions onstage, and whatever is being glued together in an audience’s imagination to complete the idea. If there isn’t activity between those three things, I just don’t find it as compelling.
PAULA | Yes, yes. Let’s see if we can come at this from a different angle. It seems to me that another really important facet of the work that you’re making is that it kind of slices in different ways what I perceive as time, so that there is the present moment in time in which I am watching, say, Someone Else’s House. The present moment in time is the act of me as an audience member watching. What happens then when you start giving me the fragmentation of images that are specifically about the past in the present moment? How does that morph time? What is the difference between me watching your body on a stage, in that presentation of time, versus having me go through a house where the 19th century is very much present and the uncanny, the unseen?
JARED | It’s a great question and it’s a really complicated one. I actually think I don’t really know the answer to that on a macro level. It’s sort of what I ask myself in every show. I’ve rewatched Someone Else’s House and there are certain moments where I’m like, “How did we get to that decision?” And that to me is the product of a group of people being in a room with chisels and just getting at the thing, being like, “I don’t know, on paper this should be working right now, but it’s not.” And then I tinker and suddenly a kind of mishap happens with the technology and someone else looks at that and says, “That. Wait, that thing. Hold, hold,” and then we’re there. I just don’t think those discoveries can happen in silos, in different rooms, separated from the entire team of collaborators on and off stage.
PAULA | It seems to me that cinema is the American art form because it’s on an endless loop. And I feel that we as Americans are terrified of death, terrified of the past. We want everything to be not just in the present moment, but an ongoing, glorious future. And therefore, theatre belongs to much older cultures that are still around fireplaces, knowing that the dead are still here and that we have to embrace death, the past, and keep retelling it so it relives, if this makes any sense at all.
JARED | It makes total sense to me because I am constantly interrogating the state of grief that I’ve been in ever since my dad died 20 years ago. When you lose people who are deeply close to you, you will never un-grieve. In Someone Else’s House I talk about my dad, and yet that’s not the moment in the piece where I get smacked with his presence when I’m making it. It’s somewhere else that in the rehearsal room felt so innocuous, but as I watch, I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s my 19-year-old self, scratching at that thing again.”
PAULA | Yes.
"The thing that I think is extraordinary about your work is the way it makes me aware that time is broken in some way, it’s not linear.... The past is with us, our ghosts are with us." —Paula Vogel
JARED | And there’s an addiction to that. I like feeling those shards, and I said this in the TED Talk. It thrusts myself back into that moment right before my mom told me, “Actually, the last eight hours of your life were a lie. He passed yesterday.” And in that moment, I think that’s the last time in my life I was purely unadulteratedly present, and I haven’t ever been able to be that raw in my life. I don’t wish that moment upon anyone, and yet that’s the most human I’ve ever felt.
Maybe it’s what you’re saying right now; we run from that thing our whole life so when it confronts you, you are the rawest you can be. Theatre is the closest thing to that in the world for me, and so every project I do slips time because actually my intent is truly to slice time and create a mosaic, a quilt that allows me to slide however I need to in this moment, to examine grief and mortality, life and death, in new ways through time and space. That’s why I love making the work that I make, whether it’s directing, designing, writing, performing; they’re all with that intent.
PAULA | Right. Whenever I sit down to write a work or create a work or be present in the making of a work, I’m sending a message to my brother. For those of us who’ve experienced that loss, time is forever wounded going forward. There’s a huge rupture in the notion of time.
The thing that I think is extraordinary about your work is the way it makes me aware that time is broken in some way, it’s not linear. The past is never going away. The past is with us, our ghosts are with us.
One of the things that was extraordinary to me watching Someone Else’s House is that your work defamiliarizes my present self in an amazing way. I was sitting around my dining room table with friends from the neighborhood during the pandemic with the candles that you’d sent me in my little kit, and we were all looking at the computer. As I turned off the computer, I realized that sitting in my dining room, I was in someone else’s house. That I was already gone, that this was already a historic site. That generations yet born were going to come through this space and I was going to become the ghost, like the ghost you had just shown me. You present fragments so that the audience makes the wholeness, and I think that’s why your work resonates. So many works complete it for me, they cut up my steak into bite-sized pieces, but as I withdraw from your frame, I’m the one that basically has to complete it, and that causes a huge and lasting resonance.
JARED | Thank you, Paula. That means the world to me. Whether I’m conscious about doing that or not, I love that and I want that. I want people to walk away not chewing on the complete deliverable I gave them but chewing on a thing that’s going to mean something different to them because maybe they’re going to digest it tomorrow slightly differently. I want that choice in my students with what I teach them. I want that choice for the kids at Andy’s, I want that choice for audience members. You know—where the receiver of the fragmented information has a sense of autonomy and agency to walk through their life differently after consuming the thing I gave. That’s so important to me.
PAULA | It seems to me that laypeople think of digital work and film work as giving us a completed picture that is already consumed for us, and your work is showing us—no, it’s not, it’s exactly the opposite of that. I’m wondering if some of the resistance we’re feeling in terms of the theatrical process, and those of us who consider ourselves theatre artists, is that we have a static idea of what media gives us, that it’s complete and chewed for us and processed instead of, to use your words, shards to interrupt us as we’re trying to complete the picture.
JARED | Totally, totally, totally. I think a lot of audience members thought I made a huge pivot in my work during the last three years. But I used the same software, I used the same thought process, I used the same tactics—I was just taking the screens, which are usually upstage, and putting them in front of the stage! But making them scrim-like and something that is porous. You’d think it’s a movie screen now, but it’s not; it’s actually still a three-dimensional thought process with live performances and live multimedia in a new site-specific configuration.
The resistance is not only from the audience, but also from makers. Some makers I think went into this moment thinking, “I guess I’m a filmmaker now,” and I just want to shake all of them. I want to shake their shoulders and say, “No, you’re still a theatre artist. Use the things that you are good at and use these tools in the same way as when you get a new prop on stage that you’ve never used before.” Know that in your heart and at your core, you’re a theatre artist. I’m a theatre artist. I haven’t changed one bit. And to me, theatre artists can embody writing, directing, designing, performing. I just want stories to be told in new ways on a stage in front of people. Even now, as we pivot back to in-person performance, I’m still making work with the same tools and using all the discoveries of the last few years to inform why I make what I make no matter what stage it is on.
PAULA | If we can take a little bit of time here, I want you to talk about the impact and the influence of Andy’s Summer Playhouse. What age were you when you first went?
JARED | I was 11 to 18, and then I came back as a staff member, as a director, and then as a playwright-director when I was 22 or 23, and I’ve been there ever since. It has been a part of my life for 22 years; it’s an incredible place where professional artists from all over the country come and make new work, working eye to eye with children ages eight to 18 to generate new types of performance for audiences of all ages. I say it that way because many people call it a children’s theatre, and all of a sudden that stigmatizes the thing. It’s not that. It is actually removing age range from the vocational access points and saying, “We all can learn from each other.” But the key is that it’s new work, so it demands trust in the room.
I need to look at that eight-year-old and say, “Why isn’t this working? Is it my text? Is it the action I’m asking you to do? Is it the way you are saying it?” And sometimes the actor will be like, “Actually, I would say it this way,” and the playwright’s like, “That sounds so much better. Let’s do it that way.” It creates a space where, if you read a transcript of what was spoken, I don’t know that you could tell the difference between the eight-year-olds and the 40-year-olds. And I think that reminds the older artists what playfulness actually means and reminds the younger ones of the capabilities that they have when they’re looked at as an accountable citizen in the room, and everyone is better because of that.
PAULA | The thing that always excites me is that you take terms that I feel have been static—theatre educator, education—and that we see as a divide between ourselves as artists versus theatre educators, and you make a fluidity that’s always been there. There’s a fluidity to playfulness that we forget and have forgotten, and part of the problem is that we put it in a category where if you’re an educator, you’re not an artist. I don’t see how we could be an artist without being an educator. I don’t see how that’s possible.
JARED | I would add to that, “Oh, you’re a student, therefore you’re not an artist. Oh, you’re a teacher, therefore….” There’s the siloing of that. I’ve seen a slip in the definition of what we are doing at a school to a kind of “SAT prep” to become an employer in the industry, as opposed to the true research and development for our industry. I worry when we start to, as educators, fall back on our laurels and say, “Well, I just need to teach them what to do to get the job,” as opposed to, “There’s someone, there are many people in this room who will take over the American theatre with a new idea. Who is it? And how can I facilitate that?”
You know what’s really magical? Having 20 children on stage singing gorgeous new music in front of you in a musical about dementia. That’s what we did in 2018 in our Summer of Legacy—we had a whole rap about the hippocampus; it was educational, and it was arresting. It rocked me to watch children talk about their great-great-grandfathers not remembering their names and holding the same amount of memories in their 100-year-old heads as the eight-year-olds have in their heads, so what’s so different between us? Having an eight-year-old ask that, that’s magic, so let’s not talk about children’s theatre just opening up the kid’s head and dumping information in.
PAULA | What you’re describing is making us responsible for our own making of art, and that involves finding joyfulness and being uncomfortable. I’m seeing an eight-year-old’s point of view and it’s really shaking me to the core of what I thought I knew. That doesn’t exist anymore. So that sense of discomfort that I feel whenever I’m exposed to younger artists is a precursor to creating something completely new.
JARED | My dad, who was a behavioral management consultant for special-ed needs, always used to say, “Take what you are pointing at and say, maybe that’s not the diagnosis, but that’s the symptom of a much-larger diagnosis. So therefore, what is that symptom?” To me, it is a symptom of the fact that we don’t trust that our adults are able to deliver solutions to kids that are in the best interest of that community, and we don’t trust that if we give a blank slate to kids, that they will make a good decision. So therefore to me, how do we build not the work, but the environment to play so that then when the work happens, everyone in the room can say, “Oops, I don’t know how this got here. Interesting.”
What is exciting across the board for all ages is how do we build a risky, uncomfortable room that is safe for everybody in the room to arrive at new thoughts that could be transformational to everyone who takes them in? That’s scary for the leader, too, because it might not be what the leader wants. And so therefore, again, it goes back to the actor’s journey. Let’s not walk into a room and say, “How do we make everybody laugh or how do we make everybody cry?” How do we name the tactics so that our intentionality is clear, and we can arrive anywhere?
Andy’s has been the place that has been my calisthenics. It’s a community that trusts me, I grew up in it. I know its impact for kids because I was a kid there. Now I’m the theatre educator and I’m the leader of artists who are dealing with scary moments of wondering, is my work going to be good? And so I have to help guide them through those thoughts, I have to guide the kids through environments where adults are also scared. It’s not me holding their hands; it’s just me protecting the space so that they can do whatever the hell they want. That’s a great calisthenics to then go into a much larger academic institution, to go into an Off-Broadway theatre, to go into a commissioned work and pitch an idea.
PAULA | Yes. Gorgeous. I would hope that you might take me by the hand and guide me through a specific project that you’re already in the act of making with your collaborator on Russian Troll Farm, Sarah Gancher.
JARED | Totally. Sarah Gancher is one of my favorite people to work with, and she too is a multihyphenate. She’s a musician, she’s a writer, she’s a thinker, she’s a creator. Annie Hamburger of En Garde Arts came to each of us individually and said, “I want to give you the opportunity to make a dream project. What would you want? We both, without talking to each other, said, “I don’t know what it is, but I want to be with”—and I said Sarah and Sarah said me. And so it was like, “Well, let’s do it!” [According to the En Garde Arts website, the Untitled Red Hook History Project, co-commissioned with Vineyard Theatre, is a multimedia site-specific piece inspired by the history of the Red Hook watering hole and music venue Sunny’s; it will be produced in the Fall of 2024.]
Sunny’s Bar means a tremendous amount to Sarah—and through Sarah, means a tremendous amount to me. Sarah uses a term called “deep time,” which I love. We are looking at a building on a piece of land, and really slicing that piece of space on Earth through hundreds if not thousands of years, and we are inviting an audience to meet us at a space down the street where they learn the history of it. We have cameras and we’re recording each of them taking on slices, fragments, shards of the history of the place. Then we’re taking those files and when we walk, we almost parade to the bar. We will be doing outdoor projections and once you walk in, miniature projections all over the bar that are remixing the things we just filmed of the audience so that they see themselves as refractions of time inside a space, and then we have a drink, and we play some music.
The goal of it is to understand a very beautiful, challenging, deep story of the bar, of the family that owned the bar, of the new owner of the bar, of the people in that area, of the communities that that bar stitches together and weaves together. But also— going back to everything we’re talking about—hopefully it will ask you to say, “Boy, I’m now inside this history. I’m now a thing that has placed a flag down here. I exist.” I’m curious what that will do to a participant when they leave. Does that happen to them back at their house as well? Can we reverberate the thing to be like, “What is time?” I read Slaughterhouse 5 right after my dad died and the idea that time is like the Rocky Mountains where every peak is always there, it’s just that humans can only climb one at a time—that to me helps me grieve my dad. I’m still hugging him then, it’s on a different peak.
And so in a way, that kind of epiphany is very resonant in this idea that Sarah and I are working on with Sunny’s. But we also talk about how we could go anywhere in the world and use this rubric almost like creating loop pedals as a musician would of different strands of music, and then when you reach the event, which is entering the bar, the loop station is totally activated and you’re seeing all of time. And perhaps someone from 1920 is doing something that almost looks uncannily like they’re interacting with someone from 2021, that you’re starting to see time in a very different way.
PAULA | Right. You’re seeing it in a synthetic fragment rather than stretched out in a linear way. I can’t wait to go and experience this, and how sensational to be in the flesh.
What questions do you want to be asked in this moment of time, or what question do you want to answer or pose in this moment of time?
"We’re terrified of technology. My little sliver of making work is to say, “What would it take to not be afraid of that? What would it take to wield that in the most human of ways?'" —Jared Mezzocchi
JARED | I think we are in a risk-reward-fear cycle in the theatre. It’s interesting being a creator—particularly in the role of director— that is investing time in technology and new work. I’m a fairly new entity in the directorial landscape and so there is a large amount of unknowns with the work I’m exploring, but I absolutely love pitching it and finding collaborators who say yes to it. It’s a very interesting thing to confront, though, within the current state of theatre. As I’m finding with all of my playwright collaborators, creating exciting new multimedia works— with Crystal Skillman, with Sarah Gancher, with Sona Tatoyan, with Jen Tullock and Frank Winters, Jen Barclay and Hannah Khalil—I get to witness them for the first time be confronted by theatres with the tension of, “What do you mean all this technology is going to be used? We want an organic story.” And I’m like, “Oh, I’ve been answering that for about 15 years now. Let me show you how organic this can get!”
I now understand that this is a new question that is being confronted right now. What is most compelling to me as to why I like using technology is—well, I walk outside, and people are almost getting hit by cars because they’re on their phones. So if we are truly the art of holding a mirror up to society, then look at us! We are abusers of this thing, and we are afraid of it. Look at the AI. conversation. We’re terrified of technology. My little sliver of making work is to say, “What would it take to not be afraid of that? What would it take to wield that in the most human of ways?” That may not mean that we have to write work about technology, but using technology in the piece in an unwieldy and organic way can remind us, like socks can become puppets, that we can make magic with these things.
That’s the topic that I want to confront as we are exiting a two-year hiatus of being back in-person and everyone saying, “Screw digital,” because—you and I, Paula, we talk about this a lot—quite a lot of new audience members are coming to the digital platform because they are unable to make it for various reasons to the space. I’m wondering whose stories we’re missing because we aren’t making the room to make work that is using technology as a conduit to the stage. Bard at the Gate is doing that. The shows you are picking are not about technology, but we’re using technology to shine a light. So let’s just take a moment every morning and say, “What if we were able to have full control of the thing? What would that look like?”
PAULA | Yes. And you basically just answered the last question that I had for you, which is how can technology play a role in reducing our physical and spiritual isolation?
JARED | Here’s a little anecdote. My dad bought me my first guitar—I don’t play it publicly, but it is a form of therapy for me—and I remember when I first learned it, I played him a song and he said, “Jared, get your voice ahead of the strings.” And I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “Just get your voice. Don’t worry about the rhythm, don’t worry about that. Just sing.” I sang and all of a sudden, the guitar kept up, and I’m feeling that with technology right now. Just sing. Get over it.
When we did Russian Troll Farm, Sarah’s first question was, “What do we need to remove from the script so that it can be a digital piece? Let’s remove the make-out scene. Let’s remove the sex scene.” And I said, “Well, no. That’s really good in the story. That is the moment of collusion between two of these people. What if—?” And we solved it. That is getting your voice ahead of the instrument. So that’s what it’ll take—it will take a leap. Let’s do it, and let’s show everyone what we could do when our voices get ahead of the technology instead of the other way.
PAULA | I need to thank you for blowing my mind by working with me and creating the last two seasons of Bard at the Gate. I’m completely convinced that we have to use technology, which is the most democratic, accessible form we can use to bring new life to a form that has been all about a patron and the aristocrats having the best seats while the peasants can’t afford the price of tickets, and that is the American theatre. There is a way that you are reinvigorating the form, and I absolutely think of you as a theatre artist, and I can’t thank you enough for how your voice has reinvigorated my imagination.
