Theater Kids Revisited

 

[Last June, I posted “Theater Kids,” devoted entirely to “How To Tell If You’re a Theatre Kid,” an excerpt from John DeVore’s memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applause, Theatre & Cinema Books, 2024), published on the American Theatre magazine website.  This past January, a New York Times article caught my attention, so now I’m going to revisit the topic of “theater kids.”  I think the titles of the individual articles I’m reposting pretty well reveal what this collection is about.

[In the introduction to the 23 June 2025 post, I define what a theater kid is:

a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows.

[I go on to say, “I wasn’t a theater kid,” referencing my autobiographical post “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010)—though I acknowledge that that label did fit me.

[The three articles below are the New York Times report that started off a little brouhaha in the theater world, the Playbill article that called attention to that to-do, and a management association article that lays out the insiders’ response.  If you were a theater kid, or you knew one, you might find the exchange interesting—perhaps even touching.] 

“HOW ‘THEATER KID’ MORPHED INTO A POLITICAL INSULT”
by Sopan Deb 

[The New York Times article ran on 8 January 2026 in “Arts” (Section C).  It was posted online on 21 December 2025 as “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult.”]

Used as a pejorative, usually by the right, the phrase tags ‘the outsiders, the weirdos.’

Move over Karen and snowflake. There’s a new go-to political put-down: Theater kid.

Last month, the comedian Tim Dillon referred to New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, as a “theater kid,” arguing that Mr. Mamdani’s victory speech was “a little cringe.”

[Tim Dillon (b. 1985) is a stand-up comic, podcaster, and actor known for his unrestrained satirical humor and social commentary. He hosts the popular podcast The Tim Dillon Show, which covers news, politics, and culture and airs at 9 a.m. (Pacific Time) Saturdays on YouTube (video) and Spotify (audio). The referenced show about Mayor-Elect Mamdani was broadcast on 8 November 2025, four days after Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election.]

After Mr. Mamdani appeared in the Oval Office for a surprisingly cordial meeting with President Trump [Friday, 21 November 2025], Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, wrote on X, “Theater kids always crumble if you actually press them.” (He also released an episode of his podcast titled “MAGA vs The Theater Kids: Do You Want Drama or Do You Want Victory?”)

Mr. Mamdani, a former improv student, actually is a theater fan. But he’s not the only target.

When Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, was forcibly removed from a news conference in June after trying to question Kristi Noem, the [now-former] homeland security secretary, The Daily Caller [right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. and founded by political commentator Tucker Carlson and political advisor Neil Patel] published an article with the headline ”Democrat Theater Kid Learns He’s Not Above the Law.”

Weeks later, the conservative publication American Thinker [daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a politically conservative viewpoint] ran an article saying that Mr. Padilla and a Who’s Who list of prominent Democrats were, you guessed it, theater kids. After a group of Democratic lawmakers released a video last month reminding troops that they could refuse illegal orders, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center [U.S. government agency responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts], described them as ”theater kids encouraging an insurrection.”

You get the picture, which raises the question: What did theater kids do to attract so much scorn?

It depends on whom you ask.

For Scott Jennings, a conservative CNN commentator, the increased use of the term is a result of “performance-based radicalism” on the left. As an example, he cited a video from 2019 that resurfaced in the final weeks before a special election for a House seat in Tennessee. It showed the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, in tears, being dragged out of Gov. Bill Lee’s office during a sit-in protest, which called for the removal of a state legislator accused of sexual assault. (Ms. Behn lost by 9 percentage points in a district that Mr. Trump carried by 22 points last year.)

“These people are a sandwich board and a megaphone short of the loony bin,” Mr. Jennings said in an interview. “They think it’s actual politics. They think this is something good, and the rest of us are looking at it going, ‘Man, there go the theater kids again.’”

It’s not clear when the term gained currency, but an early example of its use as a pejorative dates to the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign when the conservative operative Matt Whitlock said on social media that Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was “just a theater kid performing a sketch.”

Caricaturing political opponents with simple insults has become a hallmark of Trump-era politics. Think “Low Energy” Jeb Bush. Republicans, led by the president, have elevated name-calling to an art form, but Democrats have dabbled, too, with mixed results.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called Republicans “weird” and turned it into a calling card of his candidacy. More recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a leading Democratic critic of Mr. Trump who has worked to position himself for a possible 2028 presidential run, has taken to mimicking the president’s approach — calling him “Dozy Don,” among other insults.

Social media has made such put-downs catch on faster.

“In politics, just like in journalism, you’re always trying to make 10 words five, five words three, two words one, right?” Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, said. “The way to do that really effectively, and we’ve seen this for generations, is you find ways to short-circuit that through connotations.”

Using “theater kids” pejoratively is a way of tagging opponents as dramatic and performative without having to use those words, Mr. Gorman said.

Theater kids became an indelible part of the culture when television series and films like “Glee,” “High School Musical” and “Smash” [see “‘What I learned from Smash (if I didn’t know anything about theater)’” by RonAnnArbor (9 June 2013)] hit the airwaves, though the popularity of those shows set theater kids up as the subject of parody.

“We are a ton of energy and we can be chaotic, but I find that that’s not actually the qualities that people are pointing out when they talk about the theater kid,” said Zhailon Levingston, a director of the upcoming Broadway production of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” “What they’re talking about is the person who refuses to stay silent in the face of something that needs to be spoken to.”

For the last half-century or so, it hasn’t been considered “cool” to be a theater aficionado, said Julia Knitel, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the musical “Dead Outlaw” [2025].

“‘Theater kid’ being the bullied party is a tale as old as time,” Ms. Knitel said. “We’ve always been the outsiders, the weirdos. It’s a quick cultural shorthand to treat us as the underdog.”

Some see a more harmful motive for deploying the moniker as a political insult.

“My initial reaction was just that it feels homophobic,” said Jacob Kerzner, an assistant professor of musical theater at Syracuse University. Mr. Kerzner added that theater is an unusual art in that “you couldn’t replace theater with any other art form in this context.”

“‘They’re all painters now’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it,” he said.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a recent biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda [Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025)], said that using the term was part of a larger culture battle.

“A lot of kids playfully adopt the ‘theater kid’ moniker, even with its tinge of attention-seeking excess, because theater offers a space for performing a wider range of emotions and identities than much of our society allows,” Mr. Pollack-Pelzner said in an email. “Since right-wingers want to crack down on exploring gender, race and sexuality in schools, it’s sadly not surprising that they’d try to wield ‘theater kid’ as an insult to discredit progressive politics.”

The dings against theater lovers have come mostly from the right, but not exclusively so. Dhaaruni Sreenivas, a data scientist who has worked for Democratic consulting firms, wrote on X that the perception of the Democratic Party “as a safe space for rule-following theater kids is really bad for our image.” She followed that up with a Substack post [Substack is an online, ad-free platform that enables writers, podcasters, and creators to publish content directly to subscribers via email, while offering options for monetization through paid subscriptions] titled, “Theater Kids and Playing Risk.”

“You know the kids in ‘Glee’? Super cheerful and go-getters?” Ms. Sreenivas, who was a delegate for Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said in an interview. “They’re kind of despised by their peers. And it’s a problem because Americans kind of are nerdist. They do not like nerds.”

To Ms. Sreenivas, theater kids are “desperate for the approval of authority figures” and “really want to follow the rules and get rewarded for it.” Basically, she added, “they want to perform being good kids.”

Not everyone minds the moniker. Theater kids, Ms. Knitel said, are emotionally intelligent, empathetic, communicative, charismatic and in touch with their feelings. Those qualities, she said, don’t align with the “current administration.”

“They don’t want us to be empathetic and they don’t want us to care about those around us,” she said, “and they don’t want us to be open to expanding our horizons and feeling things deeply, because then we’re not as easily going to fall in line.”

[Sopan Deb is a New York Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.]

*  *  *  *
“IN RESPONSE TO NEW YORK TIMES,
EDUCATIONAL THEATRE ASSOCIATION LAUNCHES
PROUD THEATRE KID CAMPAIGN”
by Diep Tran

[Playbill, the National Theatre Magazine, picked up the story with a report on 23 December 2025 revealing that the Educational Theatre Association had taken umbrage at the content of the Times’ article.]

The campaign is in response to an article that said that “theatre kid” is the new conservative insult.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article with the headline: “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [that's the online title; see above]. It attributed the rise of conservative pundits using “theatre kid” as an insult, to denote a “performance-based radicalism”—such as a conspiracy theorist calling incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani a theatre kid (though Mamdani has said he listens to Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen in the car).

In response, the Educational Theatre Association has launched the Proud Theatre Kid campaign to celebrate theatre kids everywhere. Said Dr. Jennifer Katona, executive director of EdTA, “This weekend, our members made it clear that the New York Times article touched a nerve. We felt it was important to stand up as leaders of the theatre education community and affirm what ‘theatre kid’ really means: creativity, discipline, collaboration, and empathy. The response today has been overwhelming, and it underscores the pride and unity of this community.”

The Association asked its followers to share why they are proud theatre kids. One respondent, who is a reverend, wrote: “My son is 14 and is confident, kind, and creative. I couldn’t be prouder! What a wonderful life both of us have found in the theatre. The world needs more of what theatre creates.”

Another respondent wrote: “The best description of theatre that I’ve ever heard is ‘the gym for empathy.’ It strengthened my ability to listen, to express complex ideas, and to put myself in others’ shoes. I can see why that’s threatening to certain politicians and pundits.” 

The Educational Theatre Association is a nonprofit focused on theatre education, serving as a professional association for theatre educators. EdTA is the parent organization of the International Thespian Society, a student honor society that has inducted more than 2.5 million thespians since 1929. Additionally, EdTA operates the Educational Theatre Foundation, the organization’s philanthropic arm dedicated to increasing opportunity and access to school theatre.

Said a representative from EdTA: “At the heart of this campaign is a simple belief: if even one student misses out on the life-changing impact of theatre education, we are all worse off. We want our community to stand together and refuse to let anyone else define what ‘theatre kid’ means.”

EdTA and Playbill are currently collaborating on a new Content Creator Scholarship that will send three students to the 2026 International Thespian Festival.

[Diep Tran is an arts journalist and editor based in New York City.  She is currently the Editor in Chief of Playbill.  Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, New York magazine, Time Out New York, Backstage, CNN, Salon, Primetimer, Broadway News, New York Theatre Guide and other publications.  Her previous day jobs include being features editor of Broadway.com and senior editor of American Theatre magazine.  In 2023, she was named on Gold House’s A100 list as one of 100 most impactful Asians.  She loves musical theater, period dramas, and sci-fi/fantasy TV shows.]

*  *  *  *
“TEACHERS’ GROUP LAUNCHES
EFFORT TO RECLAIM ‘THEATER KID’”
by Mark Athitakis  

[EdTA’s position and its response were laid out in Associations Now in a 13 January 2026 post.  Associations Now is a daily news platform of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which serves professionals in the association management field.]

The Educational Theatre Association’s #ProudTheatreKid campaign caught attention on social media, providing a boost to its advocacy message. 

A national theater organization launched a pop-up campaign to push back against the increasingly pejorative use of the term “theater kid,” galvanizing its member base in support of its advocacy goals.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article titled “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [see above]. The story showed how the term has been used to criticize New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), and other Democratic lawmakers.

The story naturally caught the attention of the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA), which represents theater-education professionals and supports middle- and high-school theater students through its awards and foundation programs. 

“We absolutely felt like there was no space to not respond,” said EdTA Executive Director Dr. Jennifer Katona.

According to Katona, the organization has two million alumni across its 97 years of existence. “That’s two million theater kids,” she said. “The theater kid is our brand. It’s who we are, it’s who we care about, it’s who we talk about every day. We take a lot of pride in that, and we truly believe that a theater program in a school is not just about the performances, but about all the skills that are developed for students’ involvement in that, and also what that program does to the school and the community at large.” [See the post on this blog “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).]

Though EdTA’s staff was largely off for the holiday break, it developed a rapid social-media response, using the hashtag #ProudTheatreKid on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. “Theatre kids are academically strong,” the posts read in part. “They are emotionally intelligent. They are collaborative leaders and creative thinkers.” Readers were encouraged to share their own theater experiences growing up.

The posts struck a chord with EdTA members theater fans in general. The Broadway industry bible Playbill covered the campaign [see above], and the posts drew more than 1,200 shares on Facebook and more than 7,700 likes on Instagram. “If it wasn’t up by that evening, it was the next day,” Katona said. “It’s probably four or five times the reshares, if not more, that we usually get,” she said.

More than just attempting to blunt the use of “theater kid” as an insult, the campaign has given EdTA a platform to promote its advocacy work entering 2026. Last week, EdTA used the term “proud theatre kid” as a way to encourage registration for its annual March advocacy summit, which includes a visit with legislators on Capitol Hill and workshops on how participants can promote theater education in their own communities. 

“This comes at a time of years of their craft being under attack, with no-drag bills, the slicing of budgets, and the way some of our states and teachers have been censored,” Katona said. “So this felt like a line in the sand for everybody. This is really propelling us into action. It goes beyond just asking people to change your Facebook status. It’s: Let’s try to come together and go to DC and talk about the value of what we do. That’s where we’re taking it.”

[Mark Athitakis, a contributing editor for Associations Now, has written on nonprofits, the arts, and leadership for a variety of publications.  He is a coauthor (with Mark Lasswell) of The Dumbest Moments in Business History (Portfolio. 2004).]

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Introduction & Article 1

 

[About nine months after I established Rick On Theater, I wrote a post called "Theater and Computers" (5 December 2009).  It was a bit of the history of the use of computers in theater and a speculation on where that might someday lead.  A little under seven years later, American Theatre, the monthly magazine published by the Theatre Communications Group, put out a Special Section on “Design & Tech,” which the editors intended to become an annual feature. 

[It will probably come as no surprise to ROTters that computers are an important part of 21st-century theater design and technology.  They’re not all the writers covered in the Special Section, entitled “The Magic of Design,” as you’ll read, however.

[There are nine articles, plus a brief editorial introduction to the section, in the series, mostly published in the July/August 2016 issue (vol. 33, no. 6), which I’ll be posting singly or in small groups at three-day intervals.  The articles cover several kinds and applications of technology and stage design, some which don’t rely on computers.  This first installment includes the unsigned editors’ foreword, followed by Diep Tran’s report on six shows in which tech took center stage. 

[(I should remind readers that because these articles were published in 2016, the productions addressed below and in any of the subsequent articles all ran five years ago and more; other facts will also date to that year or earlier and may no longer be current.  You might want to keep that in mind as you read.) 

[I’ve posted two other series from AT that deal with aspects of theatrical design and tech: “‘Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design,’” 24, 27, and 30 October, and 2, 5, 8, and 11 November 2018; and “‘Hear, Hear: Spotlight On Sound Design,’” 25, 28, and 31 March, and 3, 6, and 9 April 2021.  ROTters who haven’t read those pieces but are interested in stage tech may want to go back and check them out.]

*  *  *  *

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can either have amazing stage effects or you can have story, but not both. For the inaugural edition of what will be an annual Design & Tech issue, we’ve set out to dispel that myth. From magicians becoming storytellers to technology taking centerstage, from designers seizing the means of production to playwrights making work with robots, there’s more to the work of stage visuals and their technical realizations than creating beautiful surfaces or whirring machines.

Design and technology, in short, need not be an afterthought or a gimmick. As projection designers, technical personnel, magicians, and sound designers could tell you, it’s clear that the sweat and labor that go into creating stage effects may be invisible to the audience. But when done with deliberation and purpose, it is as integral to a play’s essence as the text.

*  *  *  *
“TECH + TEXT”
by Diep Tran

[On 9 May 2012, I posted an article, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” in which I discussed the concept Williams introduced in his production note to The Glass Menagerie.  “Plastic theater,” as Williams proposed it, is “a truly multi-dimensional theater, integrating all the arts of the stage to create its effects,” as I framed it in “‘Sculptural Drama.’”

[“Williams wanted all the so-called production elements traditionally added by the director and designers to be co-equal aspects of the play and part of the playwright’s creative process,” I wrote.  “Instead of merely composing the text of a play and then turning it over to a director and his team of theater artists who will add the non-verbal elements that turn a play into a theatrical experience,” I contended the dramatist “envisioned a theater which begins with the playwrights who create the theatrical experience in the script because they aren’t just composing words, but theatrical images.”

[I went on to draw an analogy between a playwright and the builders of manufactured creations: the wheelwright, shipwright, millwright, and cartwright.  In other words, Williams envisioned a playwright who was a builder of plays “from all the materials that were available in the theatrical lumberyard.”  Today, of course, that would include all manner of state-of-the-art technology.

[One difference between what I saw as Williams’s ideal modern playwright and the artists Tran is describing is that the latter aren’t just writers, but multi-media creators—often a collective.  Their works weren’t just plays, but performance pieces, as you shall see.

[Tran’s article appeared in American Theatre’s July/August 2016 issue with the above-listed title; it was also posted on AT’s website, https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/the-magic-of-design/, on 6 July 2016, as “6 Shows That Perfectly Combine Tech and Text.” 

[As I pointed out above, all the productions about which Tran writes here have closed—though the points she’s making are nonetheless still valid.  Some of the pieces may have been revived elsewhere recently or may be part of some theater’s upcoming season.

[AT has created hyperlinks to some of the theaters, companies, and people mentioned in some of the articles in this series.  I have left them intact so interested readers may connect to the sites; be forewarned, though, that some of the websites may no longer be active or may have changed their URL’s.]

From face tracking to augmented reality, stage artists put new apps in service of an ageless goal: storytelling.

Most of us walk around with a computer in our pocket—one that’s able to take and filter photos, capture and edit video, find us a date on Tinder, and look up the nearest sushi place (and call people too, if you’re feeling retro). It’s a kind of magic at our fingertips that we now take for granted. But if you regularly use technology to make theatre, you may have more appreciation for new breakthroughs that allow you to incorporate tech into your stage productions more easily and cheaply than ever.

“When we first started it was, like, so unbelievably analog; we had to haul these TVs around, literally!” explains Marianne Weems, artistic director of New York City’s 22-year-old Builders Association, recalling how difficult it was to use multimedia onstage in the ’90s. “Now we can run everything off basically one computer . . . [.] The fact that it’s become so available and accessible, and everyone can make a movie with their phone now, has made it even more fluent than when we began.”

As troupes like Builders or the Wooster Group demonstrate, incorporating technology into stage work isn’t new. And video design is now as ubiquitous onstage as sets and lights. But when The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time made waves on Broadway last season [2014-16; Best Play Tony, Outstanding Play Drama Desk Award], it wasn’t just the story of a boy on the autism spectrum that sent critics gasping; it was also the immersive use of projections on four walls, which interacted with the actor [the production also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Projection Design].

For Kevin Cunningham, artistic director of 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan—which produces and presents technologically driven work, as well as provides training in multimedia—Curious Incident is a mainstream manifestation of work that was pioneered by independent designers and collectives. And most don’t need a Broadway budget. “You can build a really large-scale complex show on your laptop with software that costs $350,” he says.

Most of this work doesn’t ignore performers or audiences; instead it connects those bodies using multimedia. Call it interactive, responsive, or immersive technology; whatever it is, it’s cool.

Cool but not chilly, Cunningham emphasizes. “Technology in the performing arts has to be responsive, because in the live performance, everything has to work, and the human body has to be able to interact seamlessly and smoothly with technology. So the first thing that has to go by the wayside is the idea that technology is unnatural and cold. It’s just another form of human expression.”

The six projects featured here represent just a small cross-section of the brave new world of interactive technology onstage. From creating virtual worlds on smartphones to live moviemaking, from wearable tech to immersive projections, high-tech and low-tech, these productions blur the line between theatrical disciplines. Is it set design? Lighting? Video? Dramaturgy? All of the above?

Elements of Oz
The Builders Association

Imagine going into a theatre where the usual pre-show talk isn’t “Turn your phones off” but rather “Leave your phones on.” That’s what audience members experienced at Elements of Oz, a new work that premiered last year at New Jersey’s Montclair State University [September-October 2015] and will return to 3LD in the fall [December 2016]. Theatregoers were next invited to download an app onto their smartphones and tablets, also called “Elements of Oz.” And that’s where things got interesting.

The show follows the backstage story behind the Wizard of Oz film [1939], with the performers using live cameras, actors, and some iconic costumes to perform scenes from the film in the order that they were filmed in real life, using the real shooting script from the movie. According to Weems, who directed the show, Elements of Oz isn’t an adaptation of the iconic [L. Frank] Baum [1856-1919] tale [The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, originally published in 1900] but rather a story about the “physical labor of making a movie.”

But what about the special effects? How do you create a tornado onstage? That’s where the smartphones came in. Elements of Oz used a technique called augmented reality where the real world as viewed through a mobile device is then supplemented by digital imagery (think Snapchat lenses). Augmented-reality designer John Cleater and his team were able to design an AR app for the show using a game development software called Unity. The result created such effects as the tornado, poppy fields, and flying monkeys.

So during the tornado scene, for example, audience members could hold up their phones and see a tornado superimposed over the action onstage. When that tornado flew into the house, they could move their phones and follow it; every member of the audience had a different vantage point for the effects, depending on where they were sitting. Other AR effects from the app included Munchkin laughs that rippled throughout the audience. “It was kind of creepy and cool and everybody loved that,” says Cleater proudly. “In the end they wanted more [AR]!”

Apart from giving tech addicts an excuse to keep their phones on, AR enhanced the show.

“Everybody spends half of their time looking at their devices,” says Cleater, who admits that he doesn’t own a smartphone. “It just seems Shakespearean to put that onstage. It’s not the real world. It’s not like we’re doing some kind of abstract new media thing. We’re just putting reality onstage, in a way.”

ADA/AVA
Manual Cinema

Technology doesn’t necessarily mean a MacBook. Though Manual Cinema is only six years old, this Chicago company has already become well known for their unique blend of shadow puppetry, live action performance, and cinematic techniques, accomplished with overhead projectors. ADA/AVA, originated in 2013 and running at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Aug. 3-29 [2016], is about a pair of close-knit twin sisters; when one dies, the other must learn how to live alone. To tell that story, the company uses three overhead projectors, more than 300 paper and acetate puppets, two live actors playing the sisters, and a live band scoring the story. There is also a digital camera backstage, which shoots both actors and puppets and melds them together onto a large overhead screen. 

In short, every night, Manual Cinema makes both a movie and a play at the same time, using paper and projectors. The final product is a wistful, wordless mix of Alfred Hitchcock and New England Gothic.

“[The overhead projectors] became the defining factor of our aesthetic, and working in silhouette,” says co-artistic director Julia Miller, who played Ada in ADA/AVA while also puppeteering. “We really started with one overhead projector [in 2010], and each show we added another and another and another. Each time we added another overhead projector, it was essentially like adding another camera, because it doubled the number of shots.” She means shots in the cinematic sense: tight, medium, wide. To change scenes, puppeteers switch between projectors during the show.

Manual Cinema does all this in full view of the audience, who are able to see the band playing onstage, the puppeteers moving the puppets, and the actors putting their costumes on. Afterward, audience members can come onstage for a closer look. “It’s not a passive experience,” says Miller. “We’re kind of showing you all this stuff and asking you to watch this film but also wonder, ‘Oh, how are they doing that?’ Giving you agency as an audience member also became really exciting and important to us.”

Because the movie is being made in real time, it’s also easy to hide mistakes if the actors ever fudge a cue or a puppeteer doesn’t switch a scene fast enough. “We make 15 mistakes per show,” admits co-artistic director Kyle Vegter. “Performing one of these shows feels like you’re part of a living organism.”

A Very Electric Christmas
Lightwire Theater

New Orleans’s Lightwire Theater builds their family-friendly shows on a very simple foundation: electroluminescent, or EL, wires, which are attached to sculptures lined with black fabric. For their holiday show A Very Electric Christmas, about a young bird who gets separated from his family, Lightwire incorporates such sculptures as a nutcracker, a rat king, birds with flapping wings, and a Christmas tree. During performances, the house and stage lights are turned off completely, and the only things the audience sees are dancing sculptures made of light. Lightwire shows have no dialogue. More startingly, there is no light board; everything is controlled by the performers onstage. 

“You are your light,” says Ian Carney, artistic director of Lightwire. Each sculpture comes equipped with a mini light board on the chest, so that performers can turn themselves on and off, or dim the light as needed. This means the dancers have flexibility in how they use the technology in their performance. “For us, being able to dim the EL wire down, brighten it up—these (along with the dancer’s movements) give you this organic sort of thing. And so [the dancers] use their fingers on their chest like they’re playing a small piano. If they want to cower and be scared, they can dim themselves down… They can lunge forward and brighten up, add colors. They have multiple switches.”

All of the sculptures at Lightwire are built in-house with the help of the show’s cast. And it’s not a high-tech affair: Materials include aluminum rods, epoxy clay, PVC pipes, and duct tape. The lights are powered by AA batteries. But these humble materials don’t stop the Lightwire team from dreaming big. Previous shows have featured dinosaurs and 16-foot-tall birds. The theatre has been featured on “America’s Got Talent” and has toured worldwide. And while all the flashing lights may attract attention, Carney is adamant that every show also has a solid dramatic foundation.

“As much as we thought the medium was cool, the absolute most important thing is story,” he maintains. “Without good storytelling, it’s an hour and a half of tediousness. We like to say that coolness is going to get you five minutes, and after that you better be interested in a character. If we can make them forget about the coolness of the EL wire as quickly as possible, that’s the main thing.”

A Very Electric Christmas will tour the country Nov. 4-Dec. 30 [2016]. Lightwire’s current show, Moon Mouse, is touring in China through July 10 [2016].

Half Life
Cloud Eye Control

The Los Angeles-based collective Cloud Eye Control has interactive media and performance as part of their mission. Founded by three graduates of CalArts’s Integrated Media program (Chi-Wang Yang, Anna “Oxygen” Huff, and Miwa Matreyek), the company’s shows consider how human beings function in an increasingly tech-heavy world. Their newest show, Half Life, was inspired by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and had its world premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2015; the company is in talks for an engagement at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [April 2017].

In exploring how two women respond to an unnamed ecological disaster, the show primarily uses projections, with four movable scrims and two rear-projection screens. At various points in the show, the actors are completely surrounded by projections, peeking through the window of an apartment building, walking in a forest, or lost in the middle of an ocean. “So much of our lives are about screens and information that’s ephemeral,” says Matreyek. “So what does it mean for that to be an environment that you’re inside of, with projections?”

But because the actors were reacting to the images via preset cues from the live performance software QLab, the group wanted to add components to Half Life that could be controlled by the onstage performers. “Everything is this kind of pretend interaction,” says Matreyek. “It’s cue-to-cue, but it’s not being reactive, so we wanted to put in a few things that were actually reactive.”

Enter face tracking: Using a live camera onstage and facial mapping, audiences could see, for instance, boils erupt onto actress Anna Oxygen’s face. Cloud Eye Control ran preliminary tests using projections, then brought in video designer Jackson Campbell to build the face-tracking functionality. For Matreyek, it added an extra layer of interactivity that supported the dramaturgy of Half Life.

“It’s a nightmare moment of a hypochondriac,” she explains of the boil-erupting scene. “The audience doesn’t know if it’s her imagination that’s seeing it or she’s actually seeing it. She thinks she’s getting sicker and sicker.”

YOUARENOWHERE
Andrew Schneider

A one-person show can be a self-indulgent experience, as if it’s designed more for the performer than for the audience. So when video-designer-turned-performance-artist Andrew Schneider was creating YOUARENOWHERE (which can be read either as “you are now here” or “you are nowhere”), he wanted to stand out. The result—a meditation on existential angst, relative time, and multiple universes—won an Obie after running last year at Performance Space 122 [January 2015], and is now on a worldwide tour [October-December 2015]. And technology is the foundation. Schneider built a majority of YOUARENOWHERE using such software as Ableton Live and Isadora, which ensured that sound, lights, video, and text could be controlled simultaneously. He didn’t so much write a play as create the text in conjunction with visuals. 

“I don’t even like talking about technology as a separate thing,” Schneider says. “It’s the same as everything else. It’s the same as the text. We’re using all these things to tell the story at the same time.”

Not only are audiences listening to Schneider speak his monologue, they’re also witnessing quick flashes of light, feeling sound vibrations under their feet, hearing Schneider’s voice become more distorted as he speaks, and, in one remarkable moment, believing they’re in an alternate universe. Most of the light and sound cues are set on a computer timeline to maintain the precision; Schneider wears an earpiece that tells him when the next big cue is coming.

He can control some of it too by using the microphone attached to his face. “In different times during the show, the volume of my voice will affect the brightness of the light,” he says. At one point, the words he speaks are automatically recorded live, then played back.

It all sounds very complex and random. So what does it all mean?

“I’m interested in what technology can do to further narrative or sharing an experience in the room with people that we haven’t been able to do,” Schneider says. He explains that YOUARENOWHERE is intended to play with the audience’s perception of time and to overwhelm their senses. “The first half of the show is meant to be this sensory overload experience, and I can’t do that with traditional infrastructure.”

And it seems like audiences are responding well to technology-driven, sensory-overload experiences; both YOUARENOWHERE and Manual Cinema’s ADA/AVA were nominated for a 2016 Drama Desk Award for unique theatrical experience (the winner was announced after press time). [YOUARENOWHERE and ADA/AVA both lost to Dave Maiullo’s That Physics Show! from the Elektra Theatre.]

[Diep Tran is a former senior editor of American Theatre.  She received her degree in arts journalism at Syracuse University.  Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Time Out New York, Backstage, Salon, and TDF Stages.

[“Tech + Text” is the first installment of this series on stage design and technology.  As I said, I’ll be posting the nine articles from American Theatre at three-day intervals.  I hope ROTters will come back each time and read the whole series.  Part two, with “Sleight of Mind,” Zac Thompson’s fascinating discussion of how stage magicians have been making inroads into legit theater, will be posted on Sunday, 12 September.]