Lizzie by Wendy Haines, performed by Wendy Haines and Siân Mayhall-Purvis in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The UK’s first coronavirus lockdown timed itself pretty perfectly with the release of the much anticipated Animal Crossing: New Horizons game by Nintendo. The nation was locked inside, but in your lap was the chance to build your own island getaway and help the quarantine hours slip by.
For the uninitiated, Animal Crossing is a game that allows you to slowly build a personalised home and island (getting into considerable debt with a racoon), and live alongside quirky friends from the animal kingdom. My personal favourite resident is Zucker: an anthropomorphised deep-fried octopus ball. The game is endlessly charming and addictive.
One of many appealing features of the game is the ability to visit your friend’s islands and virtually socialise in groups. I attended many birthday parties and even formed a band. When a dear friend by the name of Beans gifted me a street organ on his island I had the idea – which I’ve no doubt others have had too – to build a theatre. The little street organ would play a song and move little figures around when I activated it, and at first I pictured just playing it for my residents as a joke, but when laying the foundations of my outdoor clifftop performance space (wonderful views) I realised there was greater potential. Theatre is an exchange between bodies, and if my friends can bring their avatars to my island then they can become an audience.
My debut was a minimalist one-avatar performance of The Oresteia – brief, but an impactful surprise for my guests. Within the game you are limited to speech bubbles (written, not audio), emotional ‘reactions’, set decoration, and costume. It is enough to convey a story, albeit only as fast as you can type on a Nintendo Switch console.
Audience members discuss the show in the theatre cafe.
After that, I got a bit more ambitious. Back in 2015 when we were researching for By Jove’s Season of Violent Women we came across the remarkable true story of Lizzie Borden, and inspired by my first outing I devised a short play for two performers based on her infamous murders to be performed in the game. It became a fully scripted 15-minute performance with planned ‘reactions’, multi-roling, and costume changes. It was short, sweet, and silly, but the experience was undeniably theatrical for everyone involved. I took on the role of an usher, leading my guests along a trail of pears – the fruit that Lizzie was allegedly found eating after the murders – to our performance space, where Lizzie (played by the avatar of By Jove’s Chair of the Board of Trustees, Siân Mayhall-Purvis) was preset in wait; our audience could react with speech bubbles and emotion throughout, and have discussions in the theatre café post-show. Overall, it was the most connected I felt to people throughout lockdown.
Low and behold, a few months later New York Theatre Workshop announced Celine Song would perform her adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull live in The Sims 4, a life-simulation game. Ticketholders in the UK had to join the livestream at 11pm, which only added to the chaotic energy of the event. The performance was livestreamed on Twitch, a platform which allows gamers to stream their activities live to an audience. Song built her characters as part of the performance, and people made comments and suggestions in the chat box throughout. It was truly interactive and there was a mutual understanding between everyone that this was flawed new territory.
Song designing her characters and taking input from the audience via the chat.
Chekhov’s plays are all a balancing act of humour and existential crisis, which is the essential premise of The Sims; the mundane, the ridiculous, suffering, cruelty, aspiration, love, and a sense that life is not in your control. As Sim Konstantin sat weeping at his writing desk, surrounded by seagulls, begging for sleep and dying of starvation, I was struck by the perfection of The Sims as a platform for a play written years before anyone could conceive of life-simulation computer games. The internet stream, too, felt appropriate: ‘Konstantin is one of the first incels of Western drama’, said Song, referring to the online subculture of ‘men’s rights activists’ who describe themselves as ‘involuntarily celibate’ and feel entitled to sex with women.
The Seagull, adapted and performed by Celine Song in The Sims 4.
The familiarity of The Seagull made this restricted adaptation legible; it was an exercise of overcoming plot points like obstacles and herding pixel people like cats. The humour came from moments where the avatars somehow reflected their characters perfectly, like when Masha insisted on playing the violin terribly while everyone was trying to sleep, or Trigorin loomed over Konstantin’s desk as he wrote. In perhaps the most alarming moment of the piece, Trigorin and Nina booted Arkadina out of her own bed so they could, as they say in The Sims, ‘WooHoo’.
Siân Mayhall-Purvis gives her thoughts on performer-audience relationship in these performances here:
In our performance of Lizzie in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the audience almost took on the attitude of groundlings in an Elizabethan audience, boisterously laughing and shouting at the action of the play from the pit. None of our invited audience would dream of screeching ‘oh my god’, ‘woweee’, ‘clever girl’ or wailing in distress during the performance of a piece of drama in a real-life theatre. Yet their contributions added to the communal dynamic of this particular experience. As a performer, you can feel the energy of your audience; you can feel when they are with you, and you can feel when you lose them. You draw from their laughter, gasps and tearful sniffs. The text in speech bubbles and reactions from the avatars of our virtual Animal Crossing audience gave us encouraging feedback without disrupting the flow of the action as a real-life heckle has the power to.
Similarly, the interactivity of The Seagull on The Sims 4 felt akin to watching improvised comedy, with a performer taking prompts and suggestions from the audience that shape the direction of the action. Celine’s experimental performance was at its best when she kept a close eye on the chat, riffing off of jokes and observations made by the audience, and taking their ideas on costume and how to reach a certain plot point in the play. It was thrilling when someone else in the chat acknowledged something you said, even more so when Celine herself would respond to it. Again, this blurred the lines between performer and audience in a way that felt exciting, safe and mutual. Celine was streaming from New York, Wendy and I were watching from the UK, and there were members of the audience all over the world, but for the five or so hours that we tuned in to this performance we weren’t simply individuals staring silently at separate screens. We were all together gathered in one virtual room, experiencing the same thing at the same time and influencing it — as a present audience would.
This is a new playground, and we’re yet to test its limits. What separates these ventures from the many examples of ‘gaming theatre’, or interactive theatre, is that pre-existing platforms are being used as found space. It’s an opportunistic practice, and creators allow the limits of the chosen game to dictate the tone and form of the performance. Restriction breeds creativity. Regardless of its limits, finding joy and beauty in our new world is what matters.
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Lizzie by Wendy Haines
