Lockdown Togetherness: Bard College and Theatre for a New Audience’s Mad Forest
I have repeatedly stated that I think the four-way love-drugged lovers’ fight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream will never work on a Zoom format with socially distanced actors. I may have been wrong. New-York-based Bard College and Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) streamed live performance of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest: A Play from Romania, directed by Ashley Tata, pushed the edges of what is possible in Live Online Performance.
The format is much as we have seen before — actors in their own homes, on a Zoom call, streamed to YouTube (although in this case the stream was to an IBM feed). However, TFANA added an extra something. Discussing the technology fix, Eamonn Farrell, the production’s video designer, noted that whilst Zoom is a clean, stable, flexible interface, it wouldn’t allow them to mix the feed in real time. He engaged a hack: a bespoke Zoom OSC, controlling the Zoom feed in real time to allow the him to run the feed through Isadora (Mac software that allows real-time film editing) and transform Zoom into an online TV studio. The effect was complete control over the Zoom feed, placing actors in exact controlled positions on screen. Using a mix of actor-operated virtual backgrounds and real-time editing, the production felt more filmic than any of the other made for lockdown theatre productions I have seen.
Sadly, this production existed for only four live streams — and (as yet) there is no accessible recording. But as I watched the final performance, I was struck by how much live streamed theatre has developed in just over two months. The production was slick and professional — I have previously noted that we forgive an element of roughness in these strange times, that we accept where virtual backgrounds glitch or internet connections aren’t perfect. However, Mad Forest was a finely tuned, micro-controlled production. There was no real margin for error — indeed, when the stream opened, there was a time delay for one of the actors, and the Zoom interface became briefly visible as a result. However, TFANA didn’t push on and just dismiss the glitch as ‘one of those things’ — the production paused with a ‘technical difficulties’ screen and music evocative of 1980s television, in keeping with the production’s aesthetic. The live chat informed viewers that there were technical issues and Zoom wasn’t playing along the way it should. The production then restarted with a new Zoom call underpinning the action.
Mad Forest was Baz Luhrmann-esque in its creation of a ‘heightened reality’. We knew the actors weren’t together but were working with green screens in their own homes. However, rather than embracing and exploiting social distancing as, say, Ctrl-Alt-Repeat have done and place the action into a socially distanced world, TFANA sought to create an illusion of togetherness. Afsoon Pajofar, Mad Forest’s set designer, notes that her designs for the streamed production drew heavily on film production using framing devices ‘to give the audience a sense of continuous action, making it seem as though this sequence is happening in one location’[1]. She created a floorplan of the Antonescu family apartment to allow her to track and chart the characters’ (and actors’) positions relative both to the space and each other. The accompanying live chat revealed that actors had been sent a package containing identical props — lamps, vases, crockery — together with the green screen, webcams and wireless headphones they needed to film themselves.
Where the production excelled was in creating a sense of shared space — the actors rarely looked into the camera, instead looking ‘towards’ the other actors — or rather, towards the space that actor would have physically occupied in the imagined space. The live chat revealed that the actors relied heavily on post-it notes placed with painstaking accuracy to create the necessary sightlines. The effect was an illusion of togetherness, enhanced by the shared props (placed not identically but in accordance with the shared space). Similarly, engaging the now ubiquitous Zoom handover where one actor ‘passes’ a prop across feeds a sense of shared space was created — most noticeably where a wine bottle was repeatedly passed between friends: on each pass the bottle held less wine, the attention to continuity creating a heightened sense of reality.
It is worth pausing for a moment on the creation of the world of the play. I’m struck by the different approaches that creatives are taking in lockdown and also that there doesn’t seem to be a ‘best way’. The Ctrl-Alt-Repeat approach to date is to re-situate the plays in lockdown — the characters as well as the actors are socially distanced, communicating by Zoom. As I noted in my consideration of their Midsummer Night Stream, ‘choosing to embrace the idiosyncrasies of video conferencing added strength to [Sid] Phoenix’s world of the play’ — this approach made sense of the disconnected actors and avoided any potential sense of dissonance. In contrast, Creation Theatre’s approach has been to embrace the disconnection — the created reality being something that they self-consciously undermine. In Creation’s Tempest, imperfections of a Zoom virtual background were played with to create the physical comedy — Trinculo’s arm and wine bottle ‘magically’ disappearing and reappearing highlighting the artificial nature of the world of the play. A similar device was in play in Big Telly’s Operation Elsewhere — by way of example, Dave (Keith Singleton) and Colin (Rhodri Lewis) acted against each other in a scene set in Dave’s kitchen. Both actors used virtual backgrounds — however, the kitchen wasn’t Dave’s, it was the kitchen from US sitcom The Golden Girls. Also, the actors used different images of the same kitchen. Embracing the disconnect drew attention to the make-believe — I didn’t have to work to create and maintain this world, it owned and displayed its own artifice. In a third approach, Fresh Life Theatre’s Helena: Ugly as a Bear turned to Twitter to create the sense of reality. Characters live-tweeted the premiere of the production, offering their internal thoughts and acting as a paratextual device to aid my reading of the production. A sense of realness was injected by allowing the characters to walk off the screen and develop a depth of character the heavily cut production could not offer.
With split screen, fast cuts, and filters, Mad Forest at times felt closer to film or live television than it did theatre — the audience were not on the same Zoom call and I felt a little distanced from the action. This not to diminish the impact of the production. I found Act Two particularly poignant: the unemotional personal accounts of the 1989 Romanian uprising coupled with Dan Safer’s choreography that passed from actor to actor just as the never-ending narration passed from voice to voice to voice evoked a powerful sense of the universal. The simplicity of interchangeable actors performing repetitive movement, interspersed with archive footage of the period, put the horror of civil unrest into sharp focus. Being new to this play, I cannot now imagine a stage version carrying the power of this filmic approach.
The audience were actively encouraged to interact with the production through the live chat functionality with the artistic team and director Tata answering the audience’s often technical questions. The audience were reminded via chat that messages were being passed onto the actors and were part of an essential feedback loop — an attempt to create a sense of audience influence over the production. However, the effect was, for me, more analogous with a Twitter watch party where a creative team add commentary to an already established film or TV show. The effect of an encouraged live chat interaction is that it takes my attention out of the world of the play. However, the reality of watching theatre at home is that I am always a tap away from distraction — as I noted in respect of Helena: Ugly as a Bear, the effect of a clearly mandated chat is to control my inattention and providing acceptable parameters to my distraction.
With Mad Forest, I’m not clear on whether I saw the pushing of boundaries of virtual theatre or something more similar to the rebirth of live television, and quite frankly it doesn’t matter. This new genre of entertainment is in flux and there is a sense that each new production pushes at the edges of what is possible. As for my impossible lovers’ quarrel, Mad Forest offered a wedding brawl complete with a completely believable knockout punch. Shakespeareans, the gauntlet has been thrown down, the challenge set…
Production Details:
Mad Forest: A Play from Romania
Presented by Bard College and Theatre for a New Audience via Zoom (streamed via IBM feed), 10 April; 22, 24 and 27 May, 2020. Directed by Ashley Tata. With Phil Carroll (Bogdan/Translator/Vampire), Andrew Omar Crisol (Grandfather [Bogdan’s]/Angel/Boy Student 2), Lily Goldman (Ianoș/Painter/Old Aunt), Tim Halvorsen (Radu/Boy Student 1), Mica Hastings (Flavia/House Painter), Azalea Hudson (Grandmother [Bogdan’s]/Scribe/Someone With a Sore Throat), Ali Kane (Lucia/Girl Student), Gavin McKenzie (Mihai/Doctor/Wayne/Soldier/Patient/Ghost/
Soldier 2 [of Rodica’s Nightmare]), Taty Rozetta (Irina/Rodica/Waiter), Violet Savage (Florina/Student Doctor), Yibin (Bill) Wang (Gabriel/Grandmother [Flavia’s]/Toma/Bulldozer Driver), Charlie Wood (Priest/Securitate Officer/Soldier 1 [of Rodica’s Nightmare]).
