Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, Founder and Director of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast.

Charlie Melcher:

Today, I have the pleasure to speak with a remarkably talented trio, Zach Morris, Tom Pearson, and Jennine Willett, who are the creators of Third Rail Projects, a collective that's been reimagining the boundaries of theatrical performance since 2000. They are best known for their award-winning immersive theater production, Then She Fell, which is based on the life and writings of Lewis Carroll and his relationship with Alice Liddell, the real Alice from Alice in Wonderland.

Charlie Melcher:

I was lucky enough to fall down this magical rabbit hole of a show and was blown away by how meticulously designed the experience was, from the lush environments to the smells, tastes, objects, and interactions discovered while exploring the space and unraveling the dreamlike narrative. This intimate show for 15 participants at a time opened in 2012 and quickly became a hot ticket for fans and critics alike. The New Yorker exclaimed, "Wildly imaginative, wonderfully written, directed, and choreographed." Ben Brantley of the New York Times declared it one of the years' most memorable productions. And Adam Green of Vogue wrote, "One of the most hauntingly lovely pieces of theater that I've ever experienced."

Charlie Melcher:

Then She Fell sadly fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic and closed in 2020, having set records for immersive theater, dance, and off-Broadway with a total of 4,444 performances over the course of seven and a half years. Third Rail has gone on to create many more wonderful and acclaimed site-specific immersive and experiential performances, including As Time Goes By in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sweet & Lucky with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Ghost Light with Lincoln Center and The Grand Paradise.

Charlie Melcher:

Please join me in extending a warm welcome to the three co-founders and co-artistic directors of Third Rail Projects, Zach Morris, Tom Pearson, and Jennine Willett.

Charlie Melcher:

Jennine, Zach, Tom, it's such a pleasure and an honor to have you on the FoST podcast. Welcome.

Zach Morris:

Thank you. It's lovely to be here.

Jennine Willett:

Yeah, thank you.

Charlie Melcher:

I just want to start by saying that when I went to see Then She Fell, it was the moment that I fell in love with immersive theater. It's when I really saw for the first time how completely different this was as a medium and an experience for the audience. First, just thank you for that beautiful work, and what an impact it's had in the world.

Jennine Willett:

Oh, thank you.

Charlie Melcher:

I would love to understand a little bit from you about how that work came to be, how three people, you three, came together to make that.

Zach Morris:

Sure. Well, we are very, very happily celebrating our 20th year of collaboration. The three of us have had the pleasure of knowing and working with each other for two decades now. Then She Fell sort of hit right at the midpoint of that collaboration. We had been creating work independently and collectively, but that work was really a culmination, I think, of all of the thinking and exploring that we had done prior to it. Jennine, you have a really beautiful way of talking about how many of the things that we were experimenting with or exploring came together in Then She Fell.

Jennine Willett:

If you look at how we ultimately brought that piece together, we had a lot of different phases. I think it really started with a series of reveals that you were doing as an art installation. That was in a flower shop at 1 New York Plaza. I guess it was really an art piece for the tendency where this vacant space had a tiny little hole etched in the black paint that was covering the windows, and the tenants could take a look and peek through this tiny hole each week, and I think it got bigger every week. And so, the installation got deeper and deeper into this pretty vast space.

Jennine Willett:

At the same time that you were building this lush, beautiful Alice in Wonderland inspired space, we were rehearsing a site-specific work that was going to go up for Brookfield in LA, and we were rehearsing inside of that space. It was, of course, too hard not to play in your beautiful exhibit and start to bring some of our scenes into the sets there. That was an organic merging of live performance and art installation coming together, but that had been happening for years. I think that in that moment, that particular content was crisscrossing in different ways and those stories were evolving inside of a world that was being built at the same time. I think there was something really special about that because the notion of bringing the public performance elements and the engaging with audience in large public spaces had been something that we were interested in but we were thinking about how to distill that into smaller, more intimate areas where we could actually spend time with the audience alone for a good portion of the performance.

Charlie Melcher:

That word intimacy just rings so true for the experience because you really felt like you were there, like it was a show just for you. I know I've heard you say in the past about this idea of caring for the audience. Can you talk a little more about that, about how you consciously think of holding their hands or bringing them through your work?

Zach Morris:

A lot of our explorations had been in site-specific work, and Tom started doing a lot of that. We had the pleasure of being commissioned to create a number of site-specific pieces, and I think one of the things that really emerged for all of us was the idea of creating works that were for the denizens of these spaces, thinking of work as an offering or a gift and also thinking about the ways in which we wanted and needed to navigate the public. I think a lot of that got enfolded into this notion of care for the audience. I know, Tom, you've thought a lot about that recently in terms of how is a work engaging with different communities.

Tom Pearson:

I think anytime you start a process it's a new discovery of that all over again. Especially coming out of the last couple years of pandemic, we're relearning our own assumptions and testing them. And just being back in rehearsal with folks the last couple of weeks, we're so much more tentative in some ways with each other than we ever were before, but then that thing unlocks and the permission unlocks and the series of invitations invites you further and further in. I think that's one of the things that was really cool about growing from site-specific work into this particular work when we were making Then She Fell, it was suddenly the moment where we were devising scenarios with the audience at the center, right? So we were testing them from the very get-go, very early on about what it means to actually be intuitive with an audience, give them an offer they can accept and grow a sense of trust with them.

Tom Pearson:

There's that level of nuance on one side and then on the other, training ourselves for a sustained practice of quite aggressive percussive abandon with site. And so, those two counterpoints are always in our work, they've always been in our work. There's been meditative nuance on one side and this rigorous dynamic on the other. And to put those into an enclosed space together, there's the quiet space around an audience and then there's this space that you can create between you and the audience where you can do some of these crazier things like flip backwards off of a wall three or four times a night.

Tom Pearson:

For me, I feel like no one part of that was a separate process to develop. It was thinking about the audience and relationship to all of it. Like cinema in a way too, if they're this close to you, you will blow them out of the room if you do that on that side of the room, so do it over here. And then when you're with them in that more intimate question, answer exchange or something that's more dialogue-driven, you can close that sphere.

Charlie Melcher:

I want to unpack a little more this idea of the language of interaction with the audience. I keep feeling this sense of the birth of a new medium and the need to discover its organic language, because we're not used to as an audience interacting directly with the actors. We were used to the safety of the theater or the screen or the medium that separates us from the story safely from it. Were you aware of how uncomfortable that is for people in a way and this bigger role that you actually were helping to play?

Tom Pearson:

I sometimes joke that I am the most uncomfortable audience for this type of thing, and therefore, I try to make scenes that I can handle. It doesn't mean that they're soft core at all, it just means that they have all the steps in place. Because sometimes we talk about how basically all this boils down to is good manners, but you have to learn why the manners matter and what you're doing and what you want to do. I think it is a more recognizable active space for an audience, and that can be both exciting and terrifying. It can also be really unhinged if they're not given the guidance they need, because most people will do a really good job if it's clear what a good job is.

Tom Pearson:

And it is an act of co-creation defined very differently amongst creators. It might mean you're playing a role, but in our work, most often it doesn't mean you're playing a role, it just means that you're co-creating this moment by participating in this activity. Because I think that's what it boils down to, is there's something recognizable that you step into. And then there's all of this other story and psychology and everything else that comes along with it. But there is, at the core of it, a structure that holds it all together, and it holds the intuition in place and it helps you to go back and codify it later.

Charlie Melcher:

I wonder, though, how much of this is just peeling away things that we've unlearned to let us get back to a natural state of play that we have as children. I played roles, games with friends lots as a kid. I had no self-consciousness about playing a cowboy or a doctor or whatever the role was. As a kid, that was natural. But then as an adult, it's like, "I don't play. Don't touch me. We don't touch, I don't know you." I mean, and again, perfect for working with, with a classic Alice Wonderland children's story, right, because it's a character we know from childhood. Somehow I think it's not a coincidence that you chose that [inaudible 00:12:16] as your fertile ground for inviting the audience into play again.

Zach Morris:

Yeah, very much so. I think as we were collectively dreaming of what a very intimate evening length work might be, we found ourselves drawn to the Alice texts. We figured that whatever it was, we were going to be creating was going to be inherently fragmented for the audience, and so what were their ways in terms of familiar characters, familiar stories, something that they could latch onto? And then I think something that we both gleaned from the texts and also some of the other work that we had done is just the idea of creating just thresholds and thresholds and thresholds. I think, Charlie, maybe to answer your question about what gives us the permission to play is the ability to move through these thresholds into increasingly concentric magic circles that allow us to step away from the people who we were when we walked into the front doors. In Then She Fell we talk about it. It is creating liminal space and several sequential liminal spaces that afford all of us the ability to engage in ways that we don't as adults in our society right now.

Jennine Willett:

One thing that we often talk about is how unlike a lot of other kinds of theater where you create something and it's much more fully formed and then you have your audience come and maybe you have an invited dress rehearsal or audience very much in the last bit or even at a preview, but for us, inviting the audience in very early on is really, really crucial. Because you might think you're making something that is one experience, but until you actually have an audience that has no context when they walk in the door, unless you try it out with them, you really don't know what you're crafting.

Charlie Melcher:

There's so many layers in your work, and they're drawing from so many different disciplines, obviously theater and dance, literature, visual arts, culinary arts. I mean, how do you get so many layers in?

Tom Pearson:

Just a piece at a time for me. I actually go through a scenario and I usually ask what senses are at play in a scenario and then check that against... It's like little fractals and then zooming in zooming out a lot. But for me personally, it's about having time in between the iterations to let things sift.

Zach Morris:

Even in the works that we've been commissioned, we intentionally built workshop phases in. And so we would do an intense workshop and then have time for that to gestate and then come back and be like, "Oh, you know what? This needs a drink to be served in this scene." And if that is the case, then it becomes a really exciting conversation with a mixologist or a food designer to talk about like, "Well, what is the essence of this scene?" I remember early on working with the drinks in Then She Fell and being like, "Okay, well, what is the drink that you drink when you need to screw your courage to the sticking place? What is that flavor profile?" And working with an expert to be able to evoke that was really fun.

Charlie Melcher:

That sounds like a totally cool creative challenge, not the average request of the person who shimmies up to the bar. Why do you think there seems to be such a close relationship between dance and immersive theater?

Zach Morris:

In our work it is because we all hailed from the downtown dance world. Movement was very much our shared vocabulary. And so, for us, I think we started creating, and then at some point someone was like, "Oh, you're making immersive theater," and we were like, "Oh, are we?" That's one part of it. But I wonder if one of the reasons that it is very prevalent, I think there's something that allows us to be in a poetic space with heightened movement, with heightened language. And that ability to have a little bit of aesthetic distance affords a different relationship with the audience. There is too much naturalism in that close proximity. It might also feel very uncomfortable. It might almost be like the uncanny valley, that the audience is like, "This isn't quite real, but it is real." But when we're in a more figurative space, it gives us all a little bit of permission to suspend our disbelief.

Jennine Willett:

I always start every project with dance. I realize that I need to understand something through the language of movement in order to understand what I'm making. And then the words actually come almost last. I often think about how movement is action and gesture and quality and it's a visceral experience, and I think that speaks to the heart. It's the soul of things and connects with people in a subconscious different way. I think when you combine it with other elements and ways of conveying the story so that you're experiencing it in multiple ways, it really lands. I think that's what gives depth. It's like when you see something that's embodied through movement, and then later you hear a story told through beautiful words, and then later you see a space that actually also evokes exactly what you saw, you might not realize that you're seeing the same thing three times, but they fit together in this really amazing way. That's what I'm fascinated by.

Tom Pearson:

It starts as a phrase. For me, it's a phrase. It's a phrase of movement or it's a phrase of language, but it's a phrase. The poetic of like dance and the poetic of poetry, those two things they just immediately go to the symbolic, right, which I think is the interesting place to go. And then you give it structure. Here's the phrase, here's the structure, right? The things that I recall most profoundly are very imagistic. They're very movement-based things. And there's something evocative about that that conjures memory for people. It conjures all of what Jennine often refers to as the cloak of experience that an audience brings in. You have no idea what that is, but you've opened up a lot of space for them to just channel their own narratives right in there. And it puts them at center, which is exactly where we want them to be, right?

Charlie Melcher:

I think about dance as being the original language with gesture and body movement. Before we had words as a species, we had those things to communicate with. Dancers understand something fundamentally about embodied cognition, about communication through the body. With that said, I'm so curious to learn more about what is the cloak of experience that you speak of, Jennine.

Jennine Willett:

It's really different. It's really different. But before I tell you what it is, I have to tell you that a while back, Charlie, you recommended your podcast with Annie Murphy Paul. I haven't read her book yet, but the podcast was amazing. As I was listening to, it was capturing what I call magical beings that I get the privilege of working with. They're incredibly intuitive physical listeners who can connect with audiences in these magical ways because they're so connected with their own body and space and able to pick up on the subtle nuance and energetic information that people in the audience give off. I don't know, I just had to bring that up because it really connected with a new way of describing what we do that I hadn't heard before and understanding what we do and being like, "Oh my gosh, other people are telling us why this works. I've just known it works, but I don't know why it works. I just know it works." I just had to say thanks for that. Now I have to run out and get her book, so I will report back.

Jennine Willett:

So the cloak of experience, we were talking about the audience, and I think this holds pretty true to a lot of our work that audience members are not coming into our worlds and expected to be someone else. We actually rely on the fact that they are in fact themselves and they're bringing their memories, and then they're also bringing this cloak of experience is everything that's happened to someone in their life. It has to do with generational things that have happened, where they've come from, what their home life has. We're never going to ever know what that patchwork quilt is that someone is walking in with. I draw it on pictures as this giant Superman cape that's really long, that's a patchwork quilt like in that movie, Like Water for Chocolate when she has the quilt that she drives off with, that's the magic place that we won't ever know, but we can sort of predict a little bit about it. We can think about things from a generational perspective or gender perspectives or anything that we might be able to think about impacts how someone's going to experience a scene or experience performance. And so, I find that to be super interesting.

Zach Morris:

It is sort of the sweet spot in between the audience members having this cloak of experience and us wanting to create work that can in some way almost be a Rorschach where they can choose to see whatever it is they want or need to see. The sweet spot about that feels like the ability to both create work that is incredibly specific but also has the ability to have enough space for the audience. Tom, I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about the way that you think about it because it's so beautiful.

Tom Pearson:

I might think about it differently now. I've been diagramming these things because I try to make sense of things all the time. I used to think about a triangle, if you're thought about a triangle and the hypotenuses were touching. My job here is to get to the longest side of what I'm offering to an audience meeting their most receptive side. So wherever I start in origin, I'm pulling it out and then they're gathering it and then they're making it mean something for themselves.

Tom Pearson:

Now I've reversed it. I think about it a little bit more of it as an hour glass where I'm like pulling all the things into something as specific as I can get so they can receive it in that way. And then their job is to take it and unpack it. Because most of people's experience of something like Then She Fell or any of the shows that they go to that walk them through a liminal series of scenes, they experience it more after. They're unpacking it, and the meaning for them is coming, the memory of it is getting layered, and all of that is actually happening after they step outside of the show, because they're intake while they're in there is a little bit on overload, right? And so then they have this very long conversation within themselves or other people.

Charlie Melcher:

I'm really interested in this thing you just said, Tom, about the audience making sense of it in waves after the experience and how much you think about that. Because it's true, you're on overload when you're in there. You're responding. There's so many senses being activated. There's such an active role, sometimes running upstairs or whatever. You're physically engaged and some of the more thoughtful understandings of what the works about definitely are happening afterwards in the retelling. How much do you think about that in the creation? How important is that?

Tom Pearson:

It's true of performers too, right? The performers have to decompress after a show because all the anomalies and all the things that were brand new, because everybody that visited that night was brand new, is an accumulation of learning about the piece. That's also true as creators. Everyone's imprinting on the work and it's imprinting on them, so everything is just a little tornado of world-building all the time, and that's affecting the whole. And then, of course, you're brushing it up and you're keeping the intentions and the beats clear, so you're not letting it crack the structure, but it is filling it to the brim with information. That's what happens in the decompression, in the time that you get to take and talk about it with each other afterwards as performers, as creators. If you are lucky enough to have the chance to have that exchange with an audience, you learn even more. Your critics come in. You get all this information and it's like you start to understand what it is you've created. And then you make some of those choices on purpose like you say. We're welcoming that new little volunteer into this moment and it's going to stay, and now we eat the peach in this way as opposed to this other way. But it grows. It's pretty cool that way.

Charlie Melcher:

The patina of participation.

Tom Pearson:

One of my favorite quotes that just came into my life is from Watermark: Essays on Venice from Joseph Brodsky where he says, "All surfaces crave dust, for dust is the flesh of time." And that's my argument for not dusting, but it's also like Then She Fell.

Charlie Melcher:

I know you've been itching to go to this next place, which is to talk about what you all have been doing in terms of having to think about the work so that you can teach it. I don't mean now teach it to the actors inside who are taking on a role, but I mean teach it in a more academic setting. What has that process been like? How has that been enlightening for you?

Zach Morris:

It has been very enlightening. I just recently taught a class on writing for immersive theater, and it was this moment of trying to teach myself or codify for myself what it is that I had learned. Understanding what it is that we do is a really extraordinary process to try to figure it out and to be able to distill that down into teachable workshops and also then poses these extraordinary new questions like, "Oh, what does it mean to design for this type of experience? What are the new tools that we need to make to be able to make another experience that operates in a totally different way?"

Jennine Willett:

I can certainly say that when I've been teaching on Zoom, that opened up a whole nother level of learning how to explain and diagram and use slides and actually put things into place in a much more organized way. So I think that was a fantastic learning experience of how to really share things on a completely different format, like on a platform where we really can only be a talking head. But what that afforded was the ability to make slideshow that use our body of work as a lot of exemplars, like being able to show a video of something or just show photographs and tell a story about how a scene was created. I think I learned a lot about just being really flexible and working with whoever shows up and making stuff that's really modular, which I think is going to be fantastic for the future of working with COVID. We just have to make everything flexible and modular so that if someone's out the whole thing doesn't go down, but we reorganize very quickly. So I think it was a really great learning experience.

Charlie Melcher:

I'm interested in talking about the ideas of intimacy and scale because those are a constant conflict point for immersive theater, where you had a show, Then She Fell, with 15 people an evening or a production, you go to other shows, I don't know, Sleep No More or Secret Cinema, but they don't have the same level of intimacy and one-on-one experience as is experienced by your guests. Is it possible to maintain a high level of intimacy or connection with the guests and still do things at bigger scales?

Zach Morris:

For me, I often wonder, "What can intimacy mean?" We created a work called Sweet & Lucky here in Denver, and one of the things that as we were working with our extraordinary producers they said is, "We want to ensure that every audience member gets a one on one." And what does that mean when your audience is 80 people? How do you engineer that? I think another question that I've been asking myself is, does intimacy necessarily mean being alone in a room with one other person? Or can intimacy be found in communal gatherings? I think really engaging this idea that Jennine has of cloak of experience, how can we create spaces in which the audience is able to engage with their memory, with their story, and how can it intersect with that which we're collectively creating? And then, how as a group of people can we share that experience? I think there's a possibility for incredible intimacy there. It is a shared intimacy. It is a collective coming together and gathering in that way. Those are the questions that I'm asking myself.

Tom Pearson:

I like that way of asking people to define intimacy differently and to look for it in different places too. Because there's a way to cross fade between things, and you can use technology. You can actually isolate someone into an audio moment where it's just them and every single other person hearing something, and then you can cross fade into community, right, and you can cross fade into a lot of different things. Because what it comes down to is what's holding the attention, and if you want to achieve intimacy, you can give 60 people a one on one, or 100 people, whatever, but you end up in a situation where it's a fast repeatable thing. I always find that it's a struggle to strike a balance between what is interesting for an audience and what is also interesting for a performer. Because you can have a performer do the same thing over and over and over and over and over, and you can give an audience an amazing experience. And you are killing the soul of this performer. You are burning them out. I mean, it's like nobody's going to want to do that.

Jennine Willett:

I was thinking about we just came out of a rehearsal process and in the midst of it found ourselves making all pieces that are communal, that have all of the audience for everything. I was thinking about that and realizing that, well, of course, I didn't want to go in the space and create little scenes in isolated boxes because that's been the last two years of my life. I don't really want to be isolated in little rooms right now, and nor did anybody in the group. I think subconsciously we all wanted to do everything together from the moment we got to be in that studio, and it made something that's profoundly communal, but I think it's really intimate. I think we're onto something with having this shared experience that still feels really personal and connected and people feel cared for, but yet they're in a room with 30 people.

Jennine Willett:

I'm curious, I don't know if I can scale that up or at what point it stops feeling that way, but there's something interesting about what it means to craft audience experience and to take away all the other stuff and really start with just that. And so, we have all these great ideas for immersive spaces and set design, but all of that is on the back burner and we're focused really on the audience experience at the center, and I'm curious about how that's going to evolve. But it certainly feels really good to be in space with audience. I think everybody feels that from the cloak of the last two years, the specialness of sharing space together, and I'm thinking about how that's going to create this whole other impact that we probably wouldn't have had in 2019. That's pretty cool.

Charlie Melcher:

Speaking of space, can we just take a minute and talk about how important space is to your creation and your creative process? I know in many cases you're doing site-specific pieces. Are you also thinking about pieces that are not site-specific, that can go from black box to black box or generic space?

Zach Morris:

I would guess that we might all agree that that's really a spectrum. Sometimes we're thinking very site-specifically, sometimes we're thinking not in that way initially. But I think that it feels true that we're all always thinking a lot about whatever space we are in. There is no such thing as a neutral space. There is no such thing as a space where the audience coming in, the artist coming in, that's not impacting what it is. And so, I think in the same way that we spend a lot of time, maybe all of our time, caring for the audience, centering them, we're also spending a lot of our time in conversation with whatever space we're finding ourselves in, and then designing the piece differently depending on what that space is, whether it is a beautiful century old institutional building. Or, "How do you design site-specifically for the Zoom platform," was a great question that I and a bunch of co-creators got to ask with Return the Moon. I think we're all engaged in a conversation with space, but those conversations are always changing.

Jennine Willett:

I've been challenging myself of wondering, "Can I make an immersive work that's really meaningful and special with none of the bells and whistles of an immersive set? Can it be in a bare room that has four walls and some chairs, and is that possible?" I don't know about that, so I'm still wondering, but part of that's just thinking about how I've had so many fantastic opportunities to make beautiful work in amazing spaces and beautiful architecture and really rich historical places. But the one thing about those pieces is that they're so unique to that site that they can't ever be replicated. But I'm really wondering what is the piece that could be adaptable and how could we make something that could fit in a gymnasium, a black box theater, a church hall, a community church hall or like a VFW Center or a grassy space in a park under a tent. What's the way of being truly flexible, and can we do it? I don't know the answer yet, but that's been something I've been chewing on, is finding that ability to be able to take something across the country and play it out with lots of different communities.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, I think it's one of those huge challenges that people don't fully appreciate of this immersive form, which is because they're site-specific, they don't translate, they can't move, they can't be put on in a high school gym. And so, they're like sand mandalas. They come, and then at the end you blow them to the winds. It's a real, I think, challenge for the form to be able to figure out how to be reproducible both for the economics of it, because you put so much money and time into the creation and would love to see it be able to travel, but also just for the appreciation. I mean, think of all the great Broadway musicals that you saw in your high school because they could put it on as that year's musical all over the country and all over the world. Immersive theater hasn't really had that opportunity to be distributed that way and remembered and replayed. And then also gets into things like leases, right? Like how many landlords want to give a six-month lease that can then extend to 10 years to a theater group? They don't

Zach Morris:

Very few, very few want to do that.

Tom Pearson:

I think a lot of entities need to do some shifting. And it's not just the people who make the work and perform the work, it's all the people with all the infrastructures who support and market and talk about... All the things could shift because the work is like water, the work can change and take the shape of whatever container it goes into. A lot of work can, but the containers are the problem. They're either not available or they're too expensive or they're not willing to program differently. I'm not calling any one thing into this space with that, but I'm just saying there's a lot of infrastructure, not just for immersive theater, but for theater, for art in general that could do with some shifting right now and be more flexible and permeable. And then work could travel and could live in different iterations and have its time and grow in its own way and develop.

Charlie Melcher:

So I'm just curious, Tom, what does that mean for you? Does that mean theaters that don't have all those rows of seats nailed down?

Tom Pearson:

Well, I think there are examples of people who have done it very well. I think that's the thing to look to, is who has relinquished the control over the space in the way that they always do it, right? It's complicated to say yes because you're answerable to a lot of people. And if you have unions, there are rules about these things. So there's some negotiation of work that has to happen, but I think a lot of people that really understand the work and how it is about centering the audience, then they loosen with you and then you can also tighten up so that you fit them too. It's a really interesting negotiation to find work that can fit. And when both places are fluid and malleable, you come up with something really new and exciting like Ghost Light and what that did for its audience.

Charlie Melcher:

So just to explain what Ghost Light was quickly for those who didn't have the pleasure of experiencing it, like I did-

Tom Pearson:

As someone who made it. Exactly, Jennine, I'm bouncing to you.

Jennine Willett:

Well, Ghost Light was a piece that we created. Zach and I were the collaborators on that. We were commissioned to make something for the Claire Tow Theater, but the conversation went like, "Well, can we use the theater and the backstage and the green room and the dressing rooms and the hallways and the closets?" Pretty soon we were in every part of that building. I have to say, Lincoln Center, they were so supportive of the idea. At first they were like, "Well, what do you mean?" And then we did a showing, we spent two weeks running around, and they let us go downstairs into their prop and costume areas with giant bins. They were like, "Take anything you want. Use whatever you want." It was so much fun.

Jennine Willett:

And when we did the showing, I think they suddenly realized like, "Oh, you need more spaces. So yeah, we could figure out how to give you more spaces, and we understand how you're going to take audience through all these spaces and how you imagine creating a world that brings you in the theater but then lets you go right up on stage and into the wings." They were really excited about it.

Zach Morris:

I mean, ultimately, I think we were really interested in thinking about the theater as a site and what are the places that audiences don't normally go, and how can we create that access? And then also, there's such great stories and superstitions in the theater, and so it was sort of a benevolent haunting.

Charlie Melcher:

In a certain sense, you could say it was about bringing different audience to this, what was a traditional new theater, right? It was a presidium theater. It had all those rows of seats and a stage and people used to coming in to sit down and watch a show for two hours in the theater. In reality, we spent all the time with the guests running around in every other space available except for those seats, right. The thing that I just thought about over and over again was that the finale, the reveal, if you will, at the end of that show, was that you had broken us up into these little groups, I can't remember, eight or 10 or 12 people at a time, many of these groups running around in sequence so we didn't even see each other except for the beginning. You felt like you were just with that small group of eight or 10.

Charlie Melcher:

And at the very end, the reveal was us. You brought us all into the theater, and it was like magic. All of a sudden, all the seats were full. It was like an inversion. Instead of what was on the main stage as being the finale, it was like the audience was the finale revealed to itself. To me, that was this magical moment where all of a sudden I just realized, "How many people are we? Oh my God, we're a whole theater worth of people. I hadn't seen these people, and I'm now in this theater with them all together at this last moment." It was beautiful.

Jennine Willett:

Thanks. There was something interesting about Ghost Light. When I was at Trinity in Texas, we also used their theater space, that was the space available to us for making an immersive showing. One thing that always lands is how audiences very rarely get to be in the wings. They very rarely get to see behind the scenes of a theater space. That alone brings so much of a thrill, but your storytelling is a whole nother layer on top of that. But just physically being in what's often forbidden space if you're an audience member, there's so much excitement about that. But it never ceases to amaze me how the audience members were all saying, "I've never been in the prop shop before. It's so cool." And the costume shop, people just light up just to be in those spaces because they're so cool. And if you're not in the theater world, it's really special.

Charlie Melcher:

You do original works and you do collaborations or commissions. How does that work, and how do you decide which to take on and who to work with and what to prioritize?

Tom Pearson:

The things I love most almost are the hardest to get going, always. Because people want to corral you way too quickly when they come in with a commission sometimes. Often not, often they're like, "You're brilliant, and you should do the thing that you can do here." We've been lucky to get a lot of those, but I'm learning that that runs the gamut and what it means to be curated or commissioned or whatever can mean very different things to different people. If it's a consultation and I'm there to facilitate and help somebody's idea, very clear for me, anything else, I have to have my idea at the center of it protected and cared for. Otherwise, it's almost there's two very clear things on either side and there's a lot of mud in between that I don't really track with very often.

Zach Morris:

I think that one of the things that has been lovely is that we have worked in so many different ways that we've learned to look at various opportunities as ways of creating iteratively. And so, sometimes we'll get a commission for a small something, that we can really chew on one aspect of something. We'll have the incredible gifts sometimes to be commissioned, to create a larger work, which is such an extraordinary gift. Yeah, I think it is always about finding that conversation with the space, with the presenter, with the producer and understanding through that conversation who are we creating this work for, who are we inviting it in, how can it be an offering, and then how does that intersect with any of our points of inquiry, the questions that we don't know how to answer, which I find so often are the things that drive our work?

Jennine Willett:

I think I really enjoy collaborating with other communities and other artistic groups that have really different skill sets than what I have. I'm really interested in what it means when we combine superpowers or what does it mean for... Albany Park Theater Project is the group that I've worked with in Chicago, and we've had a relationship since 2014. We're, hopefully, by next summer going to be opening a new immersive production. I'm always curious about what it means to collaborate with an artist that's completely coming from a different place. That's really exciting, and I always welcome that.

Jennine Willett:

I think that same thing happened with VR, when we worked on Wolves in the Walls. It was just suddenly you're in a room and I can be honest and say, "I don't really know what you're talking about, because I don't speak VR. You're lucky that I could figure out how to put the headset on my head." But just being able to realize what the common ground is, what do I bring to that to support a project? What is in my skill set when combined with someone else and their amazing skill set, what can we do together that we weren't able to do before? There's something fun about that.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I just want to say how much of a joy this conversation has been and how I can't wait to be able to put myself in your caring hands again for another production. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the thoughtfulness with which you share how you do what you do and look forward to more collaborations in the future. So thank you.

Jennine Willett:

Yeah, thanks, Charlie, for having us.

Tom Pearson:

Thank you, Charlie.

Charlie Melcher:

Big thank you to Zach, Tom, and Jennine for sharing their stories and wisdom with us on this episode. I'd encourage you to dive deeper into their body of work and follow their future endeavors using the links in this episode's description. My sincere thanks to you, our listeners. If you enjoyed the podcast and want more FoST in your life, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our free monthly newsletter at fost.org. The Future of Storytelling podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts & Leisure. I hope we'll see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.