Cason Murphy

This chapter explores the intersection of theatre and video gaming during the pandemic, in particular the development of what I am calling “game/plays,” or pieces of live theatre developed by professional theatremakers within video game worlds during lockdown.  Using two game/play case studies—Celine Song’s "The Seagull in Sims 4"; and Samuel Crane’s "Grand Theft Hamlet"—I aim to articulate some unique characteristics of this new form, in particular to distinguish it from other hybrid forms on the current theatre/gaming spectrum. Then, using impressions gathered from personal playthroughs along with interviews with creators, I will examine the creation and performance of each game/play against the impact of the social and material conditions of each phase of the pandemic during which they emerged. I will also consider how each game/play’s repurposing of its chosen game successfully transmediated their original theatrical texts to engage new digital audiences. Finally, considering the current state of live performance, I will consider the future of game/plays and the impact they may have on the praxis of theatre.

Theatrical training has always been dictated by the notion of “presence,” considering that a shared space is one of the fundamental elements of live theatre. Shifting to online instruction in the latter half of the Spring 2020 semester required instructors of theatre to essentially redefine the practices and means of production that have been the bedrocks of the discipline for millennia. Inspired by an urgent need for flexibility, student agency, and autonomy in online coursework, the Department of Music and Theatre at Iowa State University devised and deployed “class menus” in several of our classes—a means by which a selection of relevant outcome-based assignments are presented to students to choose from to demonstrate achievement through personal choice and autonomy.

This essay uses as a case study perhaps the most difficult class to transition online in Spring 2020—THTRE 355: Musical Theatre Auditions and Performance. a practice-based studio class for up to 18 students. Herein, I will examine the efficacy of the provisions of choice and student agency in settings that prioritize face-to-face coaching sessions and in-person presentations, while articulating how my students continued to develop musical theatre performance skills even at a distance.

Director Sam Mendes makes no secret of the fact that he made “a Beckettian war movie” out of William Broyles Jr.’s screenplay for his 2005 movie "Jarhead." The film's nihilistic view of war played well in Mendes' native England and Continental Europe, but received a tepid response from American critics and audiences, used to a more patriotic presentation of combat. Of this transatlantic difference, he said, “I feel they've understood in Europe. In America, it's like talking about a different movie.” By exploring the director’s visual realization of four Beckettian themes—the passage of time, the breakdown of language, the uncertainty of past and future, and the presence of absence—found in Jarhead’s narrative, this paper will consider how Mendes made a successful absurdist war movie, if an unsuccessful “American" war movie.

In this paper, I am proposing an in-depth examination of the notion of, as I call it, “Shakesperimentation” through the "Fixing Shakespeare" series created by the Austin, TX-based theatre collective, Rude Mechs. First, I will locate and illuminate the legacy of historical attempts to “fix” Shakespeare in order to better contrast them against the Rude Mechs' project. Second, I am also interested in The Rude Mechs’ decision to use the term “fixing” as the key verb for the project. It suggests both a means of repairing and fastening something in place, but it also calls to mind the notion of underhandedly influencing the outcome of an event. In either case, it acts as a distancing force, encouraging for a disruption in “traditional” performance modes in order to forge a new dastardly fun Shakespearean aesthetic. But most importantly, perhaps beneath all of this, I can uncover the unique quality that Shakespeare alone possesses, which can captivate the imaginations of even the most vehemently anti-establishment theatrical collective—and along with it, our own.

Augusto Boal wrote that, “Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.”  Boal’s belief system was codified in his book Theater of the Oppressed—where he emphasized that social and political change can occur only when boundaries are broken down between audience and performer. By staging “interactions,” the performers are able to free the audience to think and act for themselves, causing a transformation of the spectators into “spect-actors.” 

The Leftovers concerns itself with the citizens of Mapleton, NY, three years after a Rapture-like event, in which two percent of the world’s population disappeared. In the aftermath, one of the groups that formed is The Guilty Remnant—an ascetic organization which stages silent interactions with other Mapleton residents in order to “make them remember” the Sudden Departure.  By clearly delineating themselves from the other aspects of the community, the Guilty Remnant successfully create an environment in which they become the “oppressed”—allowing for them to enact concepts from Boal’s ideology.

I argue that over the course of the first season, The Guilty Remnant’s theatrical demonstrations move from passive recruitment to increasingly active confrontations in the mode of Theatre of the Oppressed. By situating Patti Levin as the Boalian “joker” and analyzing the GR’s actions as tactics of Theatre of the Oppressed pedagogy, this paper will trace the transformation of the Mapleton citizens into ideal “spect-actors.”

This paper was given at the 2016 Texas Educational Theatre Association Academic Symposium in Dallas, Texas.

In 1981, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman radically recut Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House as part of his “Project” at Berlin’s Residenztheater. In order to “dismantle the naturalistic superstructure” of Ibsen’s play, Bergman’s adaptation Nora cut nearly a third of the original text as well as those characters he regarded as “unnecessary” (including the porter, the maid, and the Helmer’s three children). Bergman believed that through his reductivist approach, “you make it easier for [Ibsen], you make it easier for the actors, and you make it easier for the audience to grasp what he means.” In the process of excising many of the linking points of Ibsen’s realistic plot, Bergman unexpectedly unlocked the biggest, but heretofore unacknowledged, strength of his adaptation. I’ve found that in his ‘dismantling,’ Bergman actually exposed a far more complex substructure supporting Ibsen’s work—which neither men seemed to know was there.

Using Bergman’s project as a template, I will use this paper to develop my own ‘theory of dislocation’ in the emergent field of “critical reinterpretation of the canon.” This term can be best understood as a combination of these two notions: 1) The adaptive function of works like Nora serve to literally “dislocate” the original temporal and spatial coordinates of their canonized source texts, which are traditionally associated with specific times/periods/places/movements, in order to free them of the associations therein. 2) Works like Nora also “dislocate” their source texts like a shoulder popping out of place. By exposing the joints, sinews, inner workings of an object we all recognize as something that ‘works,’ we are able to diagnose how it works, and by what means. When we pop it back into place, it either has been fundamentally altered (i.e. we never see it the same again); or in some cases, the dislocation serves to paradoxically, make the original function work far better, by virtue of the fact it was broken open.

This paper was given as part of the "TV Performances" panel at the 2015 Popular/American Culture Association National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Augusto Boal wrote that, “Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.”  Boal’s belief system was codified in his book Theater of the Oppressed—where he emphasized that social and political change can occur only when boundaries are broken down between audience and performer. By staging “interactions,” the performers are able to free the audience to think and act for themselves, causing a transformation of the spectators into “spect-actors.” 

The Leftovers concerns itself with the citizens of Mapleton, NY, three years after a Rapture-like event, in which two percent of the world’s population disappeared. In the aftermath, one of the groups that formed is The Guilty Remnant—an ascetic organization which stages silent interactions with other Mapleton residents in order to “make them remember” the Sudden Departure.  By clearly delineating themselves from the other aspects of the community, the Guilty Remnant successfully create an environment in which they become the “oppressed”—allowing for them to enact concepts from Boal’s ideology.

I argue that over the course of the first season, The Guilty Remnant’s theatrical demonstrations move from passive recruitment to increasingly active confrontations in the mode of Theatre of the Oppressed. By situating Patti Levin as the Boalian “joker” and analyzing the GR’s actions as tactics of Theatre of the Oppressed pedagogy, this paper will trace the transformation of the Mapleton citizens into ideal “spect-actors.”

This paper was given as part of the "Practice/Production" Symposium at the 36th Annual Mid-America Theatre Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.

“The Approach is bullshit. And Stella is bullshit. And everything we’ve done is nothing.”
              —Shawn Sides as Elizabeth Johns, "The Method Gun"

The Rude Mechs’ devised performance "The Method Gun" concerns itself with five disciples of theatre guru Stella Burden. Attempting to reconcile the fact that their teacher spirited away to the jungles of South America in the mid-1970s, the ensemble continues a nine-year leaderless rehearsal process to bring to life Stella’s dream production of "A Streetcar Named Desire"—that is, without the principal characters of Stanley, Stella, Blanche, and Mitch. Burden’s “Approach” is a Method send-up said to center on the noble concepts of Beauty and Truth. However, the dual impulses that Stella’s students pursue in her absence are instead Risk and Tension—vestiges of the teacher’s reckless personality that have imprinted on her pupils.
In its 2001 review of the piece, the New York Times identified the theme of "The Method Gun" as “the importance of teachers.”  However, I argue that the Rude Mechs are using their piece to make a far more subversive statement—the necessity of the artist to insulate and protect their creative practice from the inevitable removal of the teacher figure. As the Rude Mechs operate through a consensus democracy, then the vestigial Stella Burden Company acts as a bizarro version of the company, allowing for a dialectic interplay between the merits and foibles of “guru-based” teaching strategies.
Through interviews with the Rude Mechs’ six “co-PADs” (co-producing artistic directors) and investigating "The Method Gun’s" “autobiographical” impulses,  this paper will explore the (lack of) pedagogy within the nature of collaboration, the absence of the “teacher,” and the means of finding effective creative inspiration therein.

This paper was given as part of the "New Classical Considerations" panel at the Texas Educational Theater Association's 2015 Academic Symposium in Houston, Texas.

Since 1995, the Austin-based theatre collective Rude Mechs have been generating edgy, contemporary theatre from a uniquely collaborative praxis. As the Mechs tout on their website, “We don’t produce the “old chestnuts” or even new chestnuts by other people.” Last year, however, this dynamic altered drastically with the introduction of their “Fixing Shakespeare” series.

“Fixing Shakespeare” was originally intended to be a bi-annual counterpoint to their “Contemporary Classics” series (of which the watershed production was a re-enactment of The Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69). After an inaugural performance of Fixing King John last November, the Rude Mechs expedited development on their next installation—Fixing Timon of Athens, slated for two public readings this November.

I argue that this active return to the Bard marks the group’s maturation in three ways: a temporary re-centering of the locus of power on the singular figure of the playwright (both Shakespeare and Mechs “co-pad” Kirk Lynn); a movement toward a subversive recognition (and deconstruction) of the “old chestnuts”; and a Rude Mechs-styled inversion of the “traditional” theatrical alliance with Shakespeare.

Through interviews with the Rude Mech “co-pads,” along with a combination of critical reviews and my own personal experience as an audience member, this paper traces the development of these three impulses within the “Fixing Shakespeare” project and situate it as the beginning of a distinct new era in the Rude Mechs’ oeuvre.

This paper was given as part of the "Game of Thrones" panel at the 2014 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Whether you’ve read the books or watched the TV show, when “Game of Thrones” is brought up, chances are that the first thing that comes to mind is not the “cultural performance styles of the Westerosi.” However, in both series, there are myriad references to and examples of bards, troubadours, fools in motley, court musicians, traveling troupes, mummers, and grotesqueries seen in the Seven Kingdoms, the Free Cities, and beyond. From Moon Boy to Marillion the Bard to the Mummers of Braavos, the interactions between certain performers and the primary characters in Martin’s storyline have yielded substantive narrative consequences.

Through a careful analysis of the five currently-published novels in the Song of Ice and Fire heptalogy, as well as the first three seasons of HBO’s "Game of Thrones," this paper locates the performance traditions in Westeros and Essos on performance theorist Richard Schechner's "entertainment-efficacy dyad." By evaluating how each culture's performance preferences contribute to shaping the history and reflecting the cultural values of the worlds Martin, I will also isolate instances in our own canon that influenced Martin's appropriation of performance styles.

After all, as the Kindly Man says to Arya, “Why use a spell, where mummer's tricks will serve?”

Finally, any assessment of this book must also note that Lev-Aladgem makes a special contribution to the English-language literature on participatory theatre projects in Israel. There are others who have written about such projects—notably Aida Nasrallah, Lee Perlman, Sonja Kuftinec, Chen Alon, Shifra Schonmann, James Thompson, Michael Balfour, and Jenny Hughes—yet Lev-Aladgem’s book greatly broadens the existing literature, with an eye to many more of Israel’s marginalized communities. Most of the existing literature focuses on theatre projects that address the tension between Jews and Palestinians in Israel, an area of scholarship that is important and intriguing, but an emphasis that fails to capture the wide array of the applied theatre work happening in Israel. One of Lev-Aladgem’s chapters, in which she analyzes some joint Jewish–Palestinian initiatives, contributes to this specific body of literature, but her other eight chapters invite theatre scholars to better understand many more of the social–political tensions in Israel, with an eye to other marginalized populations.

the hbo series The Leftovers is set in motion by an incident called Sudden Departure, a rapture-like event in which 2 percent of the world's population (or 140 million people) has disappeared. In both the series and the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, the event is unable to be framed in either a scientific or a religious framework or even a political framework. For the residents of Mapleton and Jarden, which serve as the backdrops for the first and second seasons of the HBO series, respectively, the question of why someone "departed" is simply unexplainable and unknowable, as is the question of who went. One character, in trying to wrap his head around those who have mysteriously vanished, casually remarks, "The Pope I get, but Gary fucking Busey? How'd he make the cut?" ("Pilot"). With no answers or accountability forthcoming, the leftover population has spent the three years since largely attempting to reestablish a sense of social normalcy.Between 1964 and 1988, tens of thousands of people in South America "disappeared" as well. Here in reality, the questions of why and who were much clearer. The overwhelming majority of los desaparecidos ("the disappeared") were critics of the right-wing military juntas that had been consolidating power in many Latin American countries. Despite the answers being terrifyingly clear, most of the citizens preferred to act simply as if nothing was happening. It was in this environment that Brazilian activist and theater-maker Augusto Boal developed the Theatre of the Oppressed (known today as "TO"), his most effective strategy of confronting his country's fearful apathy.Theatre of the Oppressed is a theatrical and theoretical form focused on social and political engagement that concerns itself with providing any group of "oppressed" people the means by which to identify the source of their oppression and actualize real-world strategies to change the power dynamic. Colloquially, Boal referred to the form as "the rehearsal for the revolution" (Boal, Oppressed 3). Consistent with the ideals of liberation pedagogy by which he was inspired, Boal resists defining specific oppressions or connecting oppression to any ideology because he believes that such "limiting categorizations . . . mechaniz[e] . . . actions and reactions and eliminate the possibility of change or individuality" (Oppressed xxiii). Although those participating in Theatre of the Oppressed approach the work from their own understanding of oppression, the form itself is more concerned with the circumstances of oppression than with the idiosyncratic sufferings of individuals. This malleability allows Theatre of the Oppressed to be understood in many separate contexts in many separate communities-precisely the type of political theater that can be wielded wherever an "oppressor" and "oppressed" can be identified.If there is an "oppressed" in The Leftovers, it is the Guilty Remnant (known as the "GR")-an ascetic cult that was organized in the wake of the Departure in order to combat the "so-called Return to Normalcy." The Mapleton, New York, chapter of the Remnant is shown to be made up of former citizens who have disengaged themselves from the oppressive (and now-meaningless) social institutions of the "Old World" and who are engaged instead in the practice of being "living reminders" of what happened. The aesthetics of the Guilty Remnant appear to link to the cult-like features of organizations such as People's Temple, Heaven's Gate, and Westboro Baptist Church-which serves to drive a wedge between the group and the rest of the Mapleton citizenry. Between the two factions is the show's de facto protagonist Kevin Garvey (played by Justin Theroux), who attempts to use his unique position as Mapleton's chief of police to maintain an uneasy truce between his fellow restless citizens and the instigative Guilty Remnant. Under the direction of Patti Levin (Ann Dowd), the group achieves this by employing strategies of both "civil disobedience and political theater" (Perrotta 23). …

In 1981, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman radically adapted Henrik Ibsen’s classic stageplay A Doll’s House in order to create his own theatrical work, Nora. Through cutting much of Ibsen’s text and many of his characters, Bergman focused his adaptation on the figure of Nora Helmer, a naïve 19th-century wife and mother desperately trying to avoid the consequences of her past actions. This thesis examines the process undertaken in bringing Bergman’s play to its November 2015 performance run at Baylor University, with explorations of playwright and playscript histories, of directorial analysis and production concepts, and the creative collaborations established between director, designers, and actors

gesting that Lachenmann had put words into Nono’s mouth deliberately to alienate Nono’s colleagues. Nono’s absence, both in 1975 when he and Lachenmann were not on speaking terms and in 1992 when he was dead, is perhaps significant; as Lachenmann observed in July 1992, ‘Metzger had fifteen years in which he could have asked Nono himself about this’. It is hard to think of another example, in recent musical history at least, of a similarly sustained correspondence between two such major figures. The Boulez–Cage letters offer us a snapshot of a period in both composers’ development, but it is only a snapshot, the shutter opening in May 1949 and closing in August 1954. The exchange of letters, telegrams and postcards between Lachenmann and Nono is no snapshot; instead it presents a complex, rich, many-layered narrative in which we can follow these two great composers as they steer between the cliffs of a 30year relationship which, like them and their music, is by turns passionate, contrary and inspiring.