In the Spring of 2020 as a pandemic rose to take center stage, theatres everywhere shuttered in the face of clear evidence that crowding indoors with hundreds of people could cost us our lives.
So, what did we do, ever-resourceful artists that we are?
For the most part, we took our theatre to the Zoom box.
Only pretty quickly I noticed a problem.
Several times during the first 7- 8 months of Pandemic Pause I found myself attending a reading of a play written by a friend who I know to be extremely talented.
Yet the plays felt stale.
Without exception these Zoom readings of new plays were falling flat. Hardly a moment felt alive. In fact, I'd argue, plays were being killed by the Zoom platform.
Why?
It took me a few weeks before it suddenly dawned on me.
Eye Contact!
It's impossible to make eye contact on Zoom. And without eye contact, it's impossible to have a real scene that crackles with the electricity of two or more characters interacting because on stage, eye contact is a current. We feel its presence and its absence acutely. In Zoom, nothing.
I then decided that I wanted to do something to encourage playwrights everywhere to invest time and energy in making drama via the monologue.
If dramatists were going to be judged by our drama as presented in a Zoom box, then the monologue, as a self-contained form of theatre, would have to emerge as our last best hope.
Hope for what? For that electric thrill that's palpable when a writer at the top of their game has crafted dialogue being delivered by expert actors to a room full of active listeners. It's in these moments, moments of acute earned dramatic tension that scriptwriters are at our most powerful. When what we're delivering is being lapped up by the crowd just as swiftly as each new wave comes crashing down upon them.
Monologue alone stands as one of the few elements of theatre that cannot be degraded by the Zoom box.
If--as I'd heard myself complain repeatedly over the years--monologue was very likely the most overlooked and misunderstood theatrical device, what better way to get a whole bunch of writers to have another look than to create an opportunity for glory and cash. And so, the Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition & Labor Day Festival was born. We raised funds quickly and managed to received 400 entries from around the world. The call had gone out for writers everywhere to submit a monologue on the theme: Me & My Masks.
Labor Day Monologue Fest
One year later, we're now getting ready to present the second group of Finalist Winners. This year's festival theme is: borders. We received monologues employing "borders" of every type imaginable. Some focused on the borders that separate us from the people we love, from the people we fear and in some instances from our true selves. There were just as many pieces about land borders as there were imaginary ones, ones that we create without even noticing to separate Us from Them, Before from After, Love from Hate and Life from Death. The one thread connecting them all? Human beings in search of connection.
After the success of the first Labor Day Festival we decided there were two many excellent pieces of theatre in the form of one person speaking to just let them go so we started a monthly monologue series on the first Monday of every month (Oct-Aug) at which our audience gets to meet 5 characters through 5 monologues written by 5 fabulous writers. We call this Some1Speaking. And I hope you'll join us when we start up again in October.
The role of the audience.
Very early on it became clear to me that performing a monologue to a Zoomful of muted folk just wouldn't cut it. To the performer accustomed to audience response in the form of laughter, sighs, coughs, and other involuntary utterances, performing into the vacuum of a pure silent Zoom webinar is disorienting and demoralizing. [But it can be equally disorienting to the audience member; I remember the first time I was invited to a Zoom webinar after having enjoyed several Zoom meetings. It felt like I was watching pre-recorded video. And for all I know I may have been. No true interaction was possible.]
To playwrights, who sense how their material is or is not working by watching and listening to an audience taking it in in real time, it's equally strange. [see also: Social Distancing and the Power of Audience]
With the Audience "in the room" something comes alive.
And so we've arrived at a way of bringing the audience back into the theatre, the Zoom theatre.
In Zoom, the reason we're always being told to mute ourselves during a presentation of some kind is because of the really annoying and super distracting eruption of Zoom echo.
This occurs as a result of the fact that the audio from the Zoom meeting might be coming to you through a built in speaker on your laptop, mere inches away from the built-in microphone. And so a feedback loop is created in which endless unpleasant echo erupts making it virtually impossible to follow what's being said by the speaker.
So we just introduced an element to break the link between speaker and microphone. When I listen to a meeting I'm attending through headphones or earbuds rather than through the built-in speakers, the sound is going directly into my ears with no bleed into the room. This eliminates the possibility of my laptop's microphone picking up the audio and reintroducing it to the meeting.
So, over the past year or so, we've arrived at a pretty magical formula whereby as many of our audience members as have headphones or earbuds are able to enjoy the monologues with their own microphones ON. So while we're hearing the character speak we are also aware of a crowd of folks responding. And an interesting thing happens. Our responses have evolved to meet this moment. In a way, it seems the Zoom unmuted audiences we gather are more vocal and more verbal in their appreciation of the show than we maybe had been inside a live theatre.
Give a listen to this monologue by Suze Allen, which she performed at the closing Some1Speaking of the season, August 2nd. Notice just how much we hear the audience taking in the character and her struggle.
This is what we're building. We're building a new venue, the online unmuted venue. And in this venue the playwright and the audience engage with each other in a fresh and highly intimate way. I hope you'll join us.
2021 Hear Me Out Finalist Winners:
“It’s Nice To Be Out In Society” By Andrea Aptecker
”In A Petrified Wood” By Mike Brannon
”I Love Parties” By Kate Cortesi
”In-Between Spaces” By Josh Drimmer
”Crossed” By Isidore Elias
”Made In China” By Maggie Gallant
”Sound Mind” By Dana Hall
”Rhymes With Border” By Janet Kenney
”Mother(Land) Will Teach You That” By Anya Martin
”Boot’s Vacation” By Rex Mcgregor
”Ecce Mom” By Patrick Mulcahey
”Border Line (Looks Like I’m Going To Lose My Mind)” By Rick Park
”The Power Of Bianca ¡El Poder De Bianca!” By Michael Wells-Oakes