‘It doesn’t have to be good; it just has to be.’
I spend a lot of time thinking about stories that have stayed with me, and why. Sometimes these are films or TV shows. More often, the stories that have lingered are plays or musicals or art events that demanded something of me as a viewer, that gave me the space to draw parallels between what I saw and what I have experienced in my own life. How can we take these kinds of lasting experiences and give news consumers more opportunities to connect to real-life events on a deeper level? What’s holding us back as journalists from sparking the kind of experimentation we see in the arts?
In 1998, I spent a month in the United Kingdom, seeing as many plays as my student budget would allow, including “Closer,” an intense relationship study written by Patrick Marber. Twenty-one years later, I find myself in a black box theater at Stanford, onstage as Alice, Marber’s stripper-turned-manic-pixie-dream-girl, thanks to an acting class I’m taking during my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship.
This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about “Closer” since I saw it in London. I’ve brought the play up in conversations about theater, storytelling and technology many times over the years because, despite his characters saddled with yuppie ’90’s stereotypes, Marber thought about incorporating technology onstage in a way I’d never seen or thought about before, and in a way that would prove far more timeless than his characters. The original staging used an instant messenger conversation between two characters in a chat room as a plot device (the play came out a year before Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had a lighter take on it in “You’ve Got Mail’). The innovation written into the play — using projection screens to show the conversation in place of the actors — put our computer screen-focused reality on stage in a revelatory new way.
Back then, the joke was that the anonymity of the internet could let you be anyone you wanted; you could even pretend to be your own girlfriend and set up a tryst with a stranger. Revisiting the play now it seems almost quaint.
Last month, I attended the Immersive Design Summit in San Francisco where creative teams working in immersive theater as well as virtual reality and augmented reality came together to explore and share ideas. We’ve come a long way from projection screens.
Immersive space leader Meow Wolf, a sponsor of the conference, got its start subverting the Santa Fe art scene and taking visitors on a wild ride through a converted bowling alley. The collective has now found commercial success, opening venues in Denver, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., and creating a VR experience and documentary. What started as a way for an artist collective to bring people together has grown rapidly and found a way to make money; like many startups, they hit on a space that was ripe for disruption.
“Sleep No More” costume designer David Israel Reynoso presented his unique San Diego-based project “Walking La Llorona,” in which he takes visitors into a reimagined optometrist’s office and transports them on a journey that retells a Mexican folktale from a newly feminist perspective. It allows one-on-one conversations using both immersive technology and live theater, bringing an age-old myth to a new audience.
The Design Summit featured extensive talk of how people are prepared to go into an experience — VR or otherwise — for example, the holding cell that visitors to Alejandro Inñáritu’s groundbreaking “Carne y Arena” must sit in with their shoes off before entering the VR portion of the experience and the opportunities they are given to experience interviews with the film’s subjects afterwards. VR artist Michaela Holland noted in her diary of the event, “I believe that any and all experiences should have the correct preparation for its guests to feel safe and to become embedded in the story.” Summitgoers debated whether visitors and creators need a bill of rights to set expectations for the safety of both theatergoers and performers. Clearly, the immersive theater and design space is only becoming more creative, more expansive, and more intense.
So how can we import some of this theatrical staying power to journalistic storytelling? I am moved by the willingness of these artists to experiment. The fearlessness of throwing things out on stage or into public space and seeing what works, the taking from everyday life like Marber did in the ’90s and putting it out there, the lack of adherence to tradition. These are the things we need to think about in journalism.
We’re all prone to overthinking, but only through experimentation and pushing our limits will we figure out the best ways to reach people and help news consumers cut through the overwhelming amount of content to find and present stories that stick. Like my theater professor Kay Kostopoulos says nearly every class, “It doesn’t have to be good; it just has to be.”
