This thank you note was written by Nathan Baron Silvern and included in his final "director's book" that he turned in at the end of this class, reflecting on the ways he's come to terms with directing on Zoom. We include it here as an index of ways we feel Zoom actually improved our directing abilities (as little as we like to admit it).
A thank you note to Zoom:
Thank you for not allowing me to use a script as a crutch. Thank you for making me realize that “doing justice” and “being faithful” to a script and to a playwright had become excuses for me to not push myself as far as I could go and in fact was preventing me from doing justice and being faithful to the radical, beautiful and challenging visions of the plays I’ve directed.
Thank you for reminding me the power of composition. For reminding me the way a single image can stay with you forever. Thank you for reminding me how much story can be told in each little moment.
Thank you for teaching me the power of metaphor.
Thank you for showing me that sometimes intention is more important than execution. Simultaneity is impossible over Zoom, watching actors fight against that and try to move in sync, to speak in sync and fail and fail and fail was beautiful and heartbreaking and inspiring. Thank you for making me work from a point of trust with the audience instead of distrust.
Thank you for being so flat and so impersonal. Thank you for throwing beauty, intimacy and community into relief by your artificiality.
Thank you for your little boxes.
Thank you for making us adapt, for making us more resourceful. Thank you for making us scavenge. Thank you for giving our bedrooms and kitchens new meaning. Thank you for including our parents and pets. Thank you for background noise.
Thank you for new types of risk. Thank you for actors who don’t realize they are muted. Thank you for freezing. Thank you for moms and dads who can’t figure out how to click out and are freaking out because they don’t want to mess up the show. That is real.
Thank you for reminding us how fragile everything is. Thank you for never allowing us to forget what is happening in the world around us.
Thank you for making me lean forward and making my heartbeat. Thank you for making me laugh.
This letter was submitted as a final paper to Wesleyan lighting design professor Calvin Anderson by Liz Woolford, in response to the theater department's production of The Method Gun (on Zoom and directed by Prof. Katie Pearl). We include it here as a first-hand account, from an actor's perspective, of coming into a sense of place, even within the Zoom-sphere.
Dear Calvin,
I sit down to write this paper with the full knowledge that I cannot provide an objective critique or even an analysis of this show. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, as it is always challenging to try to place yourself on the outside of something you are in, but I find the extremity of this dynamic to have been heightened for me in Method Gun. Usually I can at least find distance from work I am in when I am offstage, able to watch my fellow actors and technicians. Or I can judge the reactions of the audience--how the salience of particular moments echo back to me in the form of laughter, silence, and uncomfortable shifting. In Method Gun, my offstage consisted of frantic moments of dragging extension cords, fighting with my Eunice apron, and hurriedly opening the zoom video settings panel so I could adjust the tilt of my laptop screen to frame my body perfectly. And even when I was in scenes, I hardly ever spent time looking at the whole screen. My eyes were glued to my own picture, making sure I didn’t totally cut off all of my forehead as I learned forward at my desk, or staring directly into my camera. And the audience? A total void. No laughter, no silence, no uncomfortable movement. So empty, in fact, that as we started the show every night I would consistently have the thought “what if there is no one watching.” And we would have no idea.
It is from this particular place of un-knowingness that I find myself, a week after the performance, attempting to write this paper. But here is the strange thing: Method Gun exists for me as it was. No judgement. Limited opportunities for comparison or “what if-ing”. And so, I have nothing to pin this performance to, or against, or with. Rather, I have a strong sense of completion. Of pride in that completion. Of a breaking and a putting back together.
Perhaps these things describe total artistic honesty right now. Or the intense love I hold for that team of people. Or maybe just a descent into the absurdity of digital translation.
My dear friend Michayla wrote me the series of three letters I opened from Stella for every show and I just read them in their entirety for the first time yesterday. One feels particularly relevant to this sensation I am wading through.
“Elizabeth,
I think it’s funny that you’ve asked me this question because you already know the answer. You know it because you are a performer- a true performer, and so you know that when a bucket is filled to the brim it does not stay full while the faucet runs-no! It overflows, it bursts, it gurgles and wets itself and turns inside out as the new after displaces the old-you see? Perfection is small-it is made of sugar glass so thin you catch your breath so as not to disturb it. Tell me, if you were preoccupied by trying not to break things, what would you do on stage when the music came on? Well, you wouldn’t break anything. And where is the fun in that? I've dedicated myself to this work and I've dedicated myself to you for this very reason--theater is a constant shattering, a breaking, an overflowing of ourselves and that is ugly business. If you are worried about being beautiful you should leave right now and never come back. Because the most powerful you will ever be is when you are on stage and you peel yourself, bloat yourself, wound yourself. When you are ugly. Everything else is cheap.
Stella”
And so instead of an analysis or a critique, I am choosing to write about how Method Gun was able to make place. To the point that we were all able to break things together when the music came on. A particular kind of shattering that is challenging to evoke in a rehearsal room, let alone over the internet. And while place feels tangential to light design, I have determined that you cannot light the void, and therefore in some ways place is a prerequisite for the existence of light.
--
When the pandemic began, I found it immensely challenging to deal with the spacetime of zoom. Here I sit, in the middle of my high school bedroom which is filled with the remnants and ephemera of a life that feels increasingly distant. See I even label it as such: “My high school bedroom.”
I clean and attempt to empty the entire space several times over, each time thumbing through chapters of a quarter century of life: poetry from my first love, pieces of spike tape from my senior performance, all the pink hair accessories I was mandated to wear that unfortunate year I played travel volleyball.
And then it’s time for rehearsal or class.
And I turn on Zoom and stare into the faces of folks who represent a distinctly different moment in my existence than the one that the blue walls of my bedroom were meant to hold. The dissonance between my the spacetime of my physical bodyself and that of my Wesleyan self (a self rather suddenly frozen in time and transplanted into soil with a different mineral content) left me feeling constantly out-of-sorts.
“I don’t know how to place myself within what is happening,” I would remark frequently to various classmates, lacking the language to describe the challenge of attempting to reduce all of my layers of time and existence to a single picture.
Imagine:
small squares,
Katie Pearl and at least two of my closest friends flat against the surface of my laptop
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::the edge of the screen::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
the blurrier background of an open closet,
the ladybug Halloween costume my mom hand-sewed for me at age four hanging just out of view.
“I think we should do that when we’re all together,” Katie remarks.
Together//with or in proximity to others//co-//co-existence//co-llaboration
Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, Singapore, Macedonia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington
“We’ll be using the normal rehearsal link! https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/482508997”
/j/482508997
Liminality, May 2020
And yet, somehow, within the expansive void of the internet, Method Gun was able to become its own place.
We danced together until the heart in my body was in sync with the breath of the people on screen. I got to know everyone’s internet speeds like I know the smell of their laundry detergent. From offscreen I would be able to tell you that the echoing always came from Will’s computer, the distant sound of a clarinet from Luisa’s.
I came to love Elijah’s green walls, Esme’s wonderful wallpaper, Max’s yellow sheets, Katie’s cat which apparently she calls “cat”(?), Penelope’s closet, the singing of Robyn’s birds, Miguel’s long hallway, Chapin’s wood paneling, Luisa’s chair, and Leon’s dark living room. I know how to assign the empty room in each square to its corresponding person. I feel almost as if I have been inside of each one.
And at some point, this simply became our changing set.
We created our own language of space: “click in,” “click out,” “Stella Burden spots,” “empty square,” etc.
We developed unspoken etiquette for the space: click out if you join the call and people are already working, mute yourself whenever you are not actively needed but always unmute in group conversations so as to indicate engagement, text Betsy in advance of rehearsal if it’s windy and your wifi isn’t happy so when you drop off it’s not a surprise, etc.
The link became the site of something. It gained dimensions as we excavated, constructed the boundaries for gathering until it actually felt like gathering.
And my blue room grew in parallel with this place. In the third week, after blocking a Streetcar scene with Will, everything came down off my walls. The calendar and whiteboards and bulletin board full of post-2016 political pins got hidden in the closet. Next to go was everything on my desk, the backpack hanging on the back of my door, the top of my bookshelf. Shortly thereafter anything I deemed visually extraneous moved joined them in exile.
It wasn’t long after that my desk suddenly became my desk and my Stella Burden spot. My door became the door and the site of plant climbing. My couch remained my morning spot of choice as well as Elizabeth Johns’. Somehow, my room became as much the place of Method Gun as tst001 or the CFA theater, Zoom the joints and the movement of bodies in space. The layer of timespace that this show represented was settling comfortably atop my furniture.
It is from the comfort and togetherness of this created place that we were able to do the work of breaking. Finding a rhythm as actors where we could unzip a part of ourselves we usually keep closed. My Stella Burden, the woman who first anointed me with the power of performance, describes this unzipping as an offering. It is as if to say to those watching “I am giving you this piece of myself.” A gesture not fabricated nor forced, but honest and reactive. This is always the hardest part of performance. It requires total trust in oneself, in those around you, and in what you are making. It is the epitome of public vulnerability. For us, that breaking meant being unconcerned with the ugliness of attempting to make theater in a way theater doesn’t want to be made. Forgetting the awkwardness of screaming incoherently with our families in the next room over. Presenting the crevices of our humanity without the feedback of an audience’s echoes. Without any sort of validation of the giving, let alone of the reception.
“It’s amazing to me that maybe the most vulnerable piece of theater I have ever seen at Wesleyan was done over the internet,” Nathan told me after he saw the show. “How on earth did you all achieve that over Zoom?”
But what he couldn’t fully see was that while yes, Method Gun happened over Zoom, somehow it also still inhabited a place full enough that we could stand next to each other as performers. A place, albeit jumbled and cobbled together, that felt like a ledge in an otherwise liquid space.
A place constructed from different paint colors and time zones, greenscreens and spiked carpets, that somehow managed to hold us all. All of it.
And then, each night, we welcomed people into our place.
And they layered our place into their place.
And if we were lucky, they found themselves somewhere totally new.
And the pre-show music came on.
And we broke, each night, together.
Because for an hour and forty minutes we channeled everything we had into that place.
And it was ugly sometimes.
But it never felt cheap.
Elizabeth