Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky:
Two Innovative Australian Directors Photo: Tracey Schramm
Photo: Tania Kelley
O
ne of the great attractions of writing about the
performing arts is its impossibility; the greater
the impact of a work, the more difficult it is to
convey accurately what that experience was. The experience
is translated from the immediate present, where it lives and
exists, into a past tense, which makes it what it never was—a
complete and finite object, now preserved in the distorting
aspic of memory. Theatre is not a recordable experience; its
repetition is, even in its crudest forms, not a reproduction
Alison Croggon is a Melbourne writer. She has published
several volumes of poetry, for which she has won a number
of literary prizes. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the
national daily newspaper The Australian and last year was
named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year. She is also the
author of the internationally acclaimed fantasy series, The
Books of Pellinor, published in the US by Candlewick Books.
Photo: Tania Kelley
by Alison Croggon
Photo: Courtesy of Vienna Schauspielhaus
so much as an imitation of its earlier performances. Even
filming a performance is unsatisfactory: however artfully
done, the most essential aspect of the performance, its
elusive present-ness, its quality of being created in the
moment before an audience, is irretrievably lost.
Every artform expresses this tension between the present
moment and past memory, between now and then, the
unfixed and the fixed, the open and the closed. I suspect
that one of the reasons why theatre remains fascinating
Photos 1-4 (clockwise from top left): The Women of Troy (Robyn
Nevin, Jennifer Vuletic, Natalie Gamsu, Queenie van der Zandt,
and Kyle Rowling) are lined up for inspection by their conquerors;
in The War of the Roses, Richard II (Cate Blanchett) speaks as
gold leaf rains down upon the stage, with Peter Carroll in the
background; in Poppea, Nero (Kyrre Kvam) rapes Ottone (Martin
Niedermair) as Poppea (Melita Jurisic) watches, Drusilla (Ruth
Brauer-Kvam) kneels behind Ottone, and Amor (Barbara Spitz)
and Ottavia (Barbara Frey) look on in the background; reality
fragments with a background of unbearable acoustics in Moving
Target (Alison Bell and Julie Forsyth).
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is because it’s an artform that by its very nature baldly
articulates these contradictions. Its various disciplines unite
into something which is at once a product and more than a
product: it’s a commodity that eludes possession, that can’t
be confined, that escapes our best efforts at definition. In
writing about theatre, every attempt only reveals, as Eliot
said of poetry, a different kind of failure.
As a temporal art form, theatre enacts a condition
central to the experience of living itself. Raw experience
is continuously mediated and shaped in ways of which,
most of the time, we are hardly aware—by language, by
memory, by consciousness itself. In its more interesting
forms, theatre brings this mediation to the foreground; and
ideally, by doing so, it makes its audience more aware of the
things that shape them and their lives.
The pursuit of this kind of awareness is an abiding
obsession of innovative theatre, from Brecht’s theory of
Verfremdungseffekt to the disorienting stage images of
Romeo Castellucci. Much exploratory theatre plays with
ideas of aesthetic alienation, a foregrounding of artifice
that at once refuses an easy articulation of feeling and,
paradoxically, intensifies its experience. This has been the
case with much of the innovative theatre made in Australia
over the past decade, and is particularly clear in the work of
two of the most influential auteur directors, Barrie Kosky
and Benedict Andrews.
Both bring to Australian theatre a distinctly European
awareness, which hybridizes with local practice to generate
oeuvres of particular interest. They work regularly in
Germany as well as in Australia. Andrews is an associate
with Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, where he
developed a relationship with Marius von Mayenburg that
resulted in notable Australian productions, and Kosky
was the director of the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and,
beginning in 2012, will be chief director of the Komische
Oper in Berlin. Their cross-cultural careers are not
unusual in Australia, where the smallness and undeniable
provincialism of much of the culture has paradoxically
sparked a wave of artists who situate themselves
aggressively as local artists participating in a global culture.
The poet John Kinsella, who works as an academic and poet
between England, the US, and Australia, coined the phrase
“international regionalism” to describe this kind of locally-
centered art that, while celebrating its particular locale and
tradition, refuses to confine itself in nationalist borders.
Kosky and Andrews are both very different
directors, but their work is irrevocably linked. It is seen
to epitomize—for better or worse—Australian auteur
theatre. They have many collaborators in common—both
were often produced at the Sydney Theatre Company
under the artistic directorship of Robyn Nevin, who
ran the company before it was taken over in 2010 by
Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton. Both have also had
significant collaborations with the writer Tom Wright,
who both scripted Kosky’s spectacular adaptations of
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Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Lost Echo, and The Women
of Troy, and for Andrews dramaturged the adaptation of
Shakespeare’s history plays that became The War of the
Roses. Wright has also collaborated extensively with
Michael Kantor, the artistic director of the Malthouse
Theatre in Melbourne which has commissioned and
presented work from Andrews and Kosky, and which has
been a critical institutional supporter of this work.
Kosky is from Melbourne, Victoria. His first major
production, as a precociously young director, was of
Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden at the 1989 Melbourne
Spoleto Festival. After that he formed his own company,
Gilgul, which premiered its astounding self-generated
pieces in a former garage in St Kilda in the early 1990s.
Over the years, he has directed for every major company in
Australia, both opera and notable productions of Oedipus,
Lear, Tartuffe, and other classics. From 2001 to 2005, he
was co-director of Schauspielhaus Wien, and since then has
directed opera in several German theatres.
Andrews comes from Adelaide, South Australia. His early
work included the Australian premieres of Howard Barker’s
Wounds to the Face in 1996 and Jez Butterworth’s Mojo in
1998. He was appointed a resident director of the Sydney
Theatre Company between 2000 and 2003. Since then,
he’s directed a range of classics and new works for various
companies, including Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and David
Harrower’s Blackbird for Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a
production that went to the 2006 Edinburgh Festival.
The major difference between these directors is perhaps
their orientation: while Kosky’s first and informing
theatrical love is music, which leads him to an almost
mystic exploration of the possibilities of ecstasy in the
theatre, Andrews is a text-centered director whose works
are notable for their intelligent formality. They have
identifiable and individual styles, but the work of each
encompasses a wide variety of approaches and modes.
Benedict Andrews
The Sydney Theatre Company’s 2009 production of
Andrews’s desolatingly beautiful The War of the Roses
marked a watershed. It was an event which, in the peculiar
dynamic of theatre culture, was at once a culmination
and an end: it was the final production of the STC’s
Actors Company, and perhaps in later years will be seen
to mark the end of a rich era in Australian theatre. The
Actors Company, which lasted from 2004-2008, employed
some of Australia’s most high-profile actors and during
its lifetime generated controversy, public vilification, and
some indifferent programming. However, it also incubated
some of the most brilliantly realized, intellectually ambitious
theatre that Australia has seen in recent years, including
major works by both Kosky (The Lost Echo) and Andrews
(The Season at Sarsaparilla). After Cate Blanchett and
Andrew Upton took over the STC from Robyn Nevin, it
Photo 5: Richard III (Pamela Rabe) wrestles France (Luke Mullins) as Hayley McElhinney throws flour to represent death.
was replaced by The Residents, a permanent company with
a more modest brief, chiefly focused on being a resource for
developing new work.
In The War of the Roses, Andrews and Wright pared the
eight History plays—beginning with Richard II and ending
with Richard III—back to their essential speeches. It turned
the event—eight hours long in four parts—into a theatrical
oratorio, a series of soliloquies made by people in agonizing
solitude. The protagonists were caught outside historical
action, in the isolating interstices where they become
conscious of the implications of their acts. As the audience,
we were their silent witnesses, their co-conspirators, their
allies and enemies and subjects. This approach loosened the
self-consciousness of the Renaissance stage, summoning
an earlier idea of theatre. As the Shakespearean scholar
Anne Richter noted, medieval drama implied both audience
and player in one transcendent reality: the Easter plays
were originatory rituals, where time future and time past
were resolved into an infinite present. Shakespeare’s plays
were part of a reality that splintered this holistic pageantry:
his plays were the culmination of the secularization of
the dramatic stage, the zenith of the self-contained, self-
conscious, articulate world that was the great invention of
the Elizabethans. Interestingly, it was this reaching back that
gave the production it forcible sense of modernity.
When the fire-curtain rose silently on the first stunning
image of the cycle—Cate Blanchett as Richard II seated in
a throne, surrounded by her unmoving courtiers, while an
endless fall of gold leaf rained down onto the stage—what we
saw was a medieval image, recalling in its hieratic formality
nothing so much as the famous portrait of Richard II that is
now in Westminster Abbey. [Photo 2] And like the medieval
Photo: Tania Kelley
pageants, this was a theatre that directly addressed us, that
sought to make us implicit in its world. Through the four
acts, we were begged, importuned, commanded, rebuked;
we wept and laughed and were bewitched. We were not
apart from this world. It even made us flinch in immediate,
visceral fear at the end of Part One, in an extraordinary coup
of lighting: a huge shadow seemed to fall from the top of the
theatre as the curtain closed, as if a weighted wing of darkness
were falling onto the auditorium.
There were still dialogic scenes—most notably the
brilliant scene in Richard III when Richard (Pamela Rabe),
the killer of Anne’s (Cate Blanchett) father and husband,
seduces her as she follows the corpse of Henry VI, whom
Richard has also murdered; or the scenes between Falstaff
(John Gaden) and the wild, contemptuous, young Hal
(Ewen Leslie) in Henry V. But these played out in relief
against a frieze of grinding existential solitude and called
into question the very basis of human communication.
This was what made The War of the Roses a contemporary
production, rather than a nostalgic glance back to
a romantic history: each character here was as pitilessly
exposed, as cruelly alone, as any character in Beckett.
Andrews generated the production’s startling visual
richness from a poverty of illusion. He stripped the stage
to its back walls and found for each of the four acts a single
informing (and utterly transparent) theatrical metaphor: a
garden of cut flowers, a fall of golden rain, a playground of
ash. [Photo 5] This lyric simplicity had the effect of framing
and foregrounding Shakespeare’s language. It highlighted
the literary beauty, wit, and power of the speeches, not by
reverent attention to their formalities, but through excessive
physical demands on the performers, which excavated the
visceral truths of its poetry.
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Photos 6-8 (from top): Hamish Michael, Alison Bell, Rita Kalnejais,
and Robert Menzies play hide and seek in Moving Target; the
Moving Target cast pin up their finger paintings (Rita Kalnejais,
Julie Forsyth, Robert Menzies, Hamish Michael, and Alison Bell); an
alienated Alison Bell towards the end of Moving Target.
All photos: Tania Kelley
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The central obsession filleted out of the plays was the
machinery of power, what critic Jan Kott called the Grand
Mechanism: the eternally revolving History that raises
high and casts low. The primal violence that inaugurates
the State was laid bare; the illusions that conceal its bloody
origins were torn roughly aside. Pomp and ritual, the
notion of justice, the vision of an “anointed king” whom
God blesses, or a President with a personal phone line
to the Almighty, all flew up like the painted scenery on a
stage to reveal a bleak world driven by power, in which the
only thing that counts is who is stronger. In this world, the
world that Shakespeare brought to artistic fruition in the
dark, bestial universe of King Lear, history is Godless and
bereft of meaning.
The tragic ambition of The War of the Roses couldn’t
be a greater contrast to Moving Target, a collaboration
between Andrews and German playwright Marius von
Mayenburg that was developed by Malthouse Theatre and
premiered at the 2008 Adelaide Festival. [Photo 4] This
was a particularly fascinating theatrical experiment. The
idea was to collaborate on a text with the performers from
the ground up, and to this end several workshops were held
over two years with the cast, writer, and director. Over that
time, a text was devised from the games—notably hide and
seek—explored by the actors.
When you walked into the theatre, the first thing you
saw was that there was no escape for the actors. The six
performers were already on stage, in what appeared to be
a giant, open-fronted box. There were plainly no hidden
doors, no moving walls. The actors could, of course, step
out of the front of the stage, but the “fourth wall,” the
convention that separates the stage from the audience, was
as tacitly constraining as any material barrier. They were
thrust before us, trapped in our gaze. On stage there was
a red carpet, a table, a couple of chairs, and a red couch.
There was an assortment of props—a sleeping bag, a doll,
a toy dinosaur, some rolls of masking tape. What followed
was an intriguing work exploring the multiple meanings
of “play,” which, frustratingly, didn’t follow through the
implications of its own process. But it did demonstrate
the power of a work of theatre in which performance is an
integral part of the script and vice versa, in which gesture
and words are organically linked, each emerging from each.
Its premise was ingeniously simple. The actors played
themselves: each was called by his or her proper name,
Alison (Bell), Julie (Forsythe), Rita (Kalnejais), Robert
(Menzies), Hamish (Michael), and Matthew (Whittet). The
performances emerged from the game of hide and seek,
a game that had a certain poignancy because in Robert
Cousins’s merciless white box, there was hardly anywhere
to hide. [Photo 6] The actors, who are all excellent clowns,
became increasingly imaginative and absurd in their efforts
to hide themselves. In these games, the stage oscillated
between disorder and order: the furniture was thrown about
the stage, the carpet was rumpled, the sofa up-ended, and
in one case, an actor became almost terminally tangled up
with a chair. And then, patiently, order was restored—to
an extent. Part of the process of the work was the gradual
breakdown of recognizable order, which was realized not
only in the bad treatment of furniture, but in the escalating
emotional dishevelment of the actors. [Photo 7]
These enactments of childish pleasure and—
increasingly—distress were counterpointed with the
dialogue, in which the six actors became parent figures—
each differentiated and yet not quite characters either—
speaking about a problem daughter. It was unclear what
was wrong with this child, who was at the unsettling age
of prepubescence, at the threshold of adult sexuality. The
girl was described as dangerous: she made stains appear on
the carpet, she was surrounded by a mysterious energy, her
touch could make metal hot. She became the concrete—
and ultimately tragic—expression of a free-floating anxiety
that is pervasive in contemporary society, the fear that is
ultimately a fear of our own desire for destruction.
The mise en scène was superbly choreographed, with a
lot of unobtrusive detailing and a rhythmic authority that
gave the impression that the space itself was animated, like
some kind of meta-puppetry. This sense was reinforced
by Hamish Michael’s sound design, which used mics
embedded in the set itself and jagged snatches of music
to create a dense and sometimes punishing soundscape.
The actors used a theatrical language of gesture, a mixture
of exaggerated banality and child-like formalism (familiar
hand games, for example, that as the parent of every
toddler knows, must always be played the same way) that
developed into a rich texture of performance. It began as
faintly hysterical, faintly neurotic, and gradually escalated
into a highly expressive mimesis of contemporary anxiety.
[Photo 8] This anxiety was all-pervasive, and all the
Photo 9: The families in their simultaneous domestic spaces. From left: Nora Boyle (Pamela Rabe), Clive Pogson (John Gaden),
Harry Knott (Martin Blum), Mavis Knott (Emily Russell), Pippy Pogson (Amber McMahon), Ron Suddard (Dan Spielman), Judy
Pogson (Hayley McElhinney), and Girlie Pogson (Peter Carroll). Photo: Tania Kelley
more uncomfortable for its lack of focus. It built up to an
extraordinary monologue delivered by Julie Forsythe. She
told a story, comically punctuated by sounds from the other
actors, in which the anxious parent witnesses what appears
to her to be an ideal family having a picnic together. They
have been hunting and are happily seated by their prey:
It brought tears to my eyes. And I asked my husband:
when was the last time we had such a carefree picnic with
our daughter? And my husband thinks about it and says:
never, we were never carefree, even at breakfast, there’s a
butter knife and I break out in a cold sweat, how does the
father know that none of his three children will take the
front charger and gun him down from the back, what a
happy and healthy family for them to stroll through the
tall grass with unsecured weapons and him not afraid that
they’ll zero in on him and shoot his head from his body or
follow a whistle command and riddle his thighs with bullets
and leave him to bleed to death, or they plot it in advance
and the best shot kills him with a single dry headshot
through the silencer. No, everything is wonderful here. . . .
As she took us through the macabre absurdity of
this vision, a sardonically twisted image of middle class
family life, Forsythe summoned an increasing sense of
tragedy. It culminated in a piercing cry of anguish: “Why
us and not him? Why us?” And it was heartbreaking,
even as the audience registered the horrific reality of
the ideal family she so envied. It was this kind of naked
actorly presence that worked so successfully in Moving
Target. Rather than investigate character, Andrews
exploited the individual performative strengths of each
actor, and the result was richly rewarding.
Andrews’s ability to generate a frame for compelling
performance was particularly clear in his production of
The Season at Sarsaparilla (STC 2007). [Photo 9] Written
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by Patrick White, primarily famous for his novels and In his direction, Benedict Andrews invoked conventions
Australia’s only literary laureate, the play is an Australian that were instantly recognizable—notably, the use of glass
classic with a checkered history; like these directors, White as a reflecting and mediating surface—from his earlier
exemplifies a Eurocentric intellectualism that has often production Eldorado (Marius von Mayenburg, Malthouse
been regarded with open hostility. White didn’t win any 2006). He played intriguingly with alienating effects like
popularity contests either with his scathing attack on what miked voices and windows, using them to both displace and
he called the “Great Australian Emptiness,” a spiritually heighten the emotional textures of the text, and he invoked
impoverished suburban materialism he attacked with all a sense of autumnal desolation with colored leaves fluttering
the considerable venom of which he was capable. However, from the flies onto Robert Cousins’s stylish set (a trope also
this hostility elides the ambiguous edge of White’s satire: echoed in the gold leaf falling in the opening act of The
as much as an assault on the stifling limitations of 1960s
War of the Roses). His most inspired decision, however,
suburbia, The Season at Sarsaparilla is equally a shatteringly
was to locate the action within a single house. Where White
poignant paean to the life that beats within it.
specified that the action was to take place in three back
In the play, three different families are woken to their
yards, Andrews had the different families criss-crossing
repressed desires by the howls of a bitch in heat who is
one kitchen, as we watched them through three huge
pursued by a pack of dogs (the “season” of the title). The
windows. [Photo 10] As in Eldorado—or indeed, Ariane
action follows the mundane details of their lives over a
Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail—the audience
few days: a young girl becomes pregnant and kills herself;
members were enticed into a voyeuristic complicity, peering
another falls in love; a marriage cracks under infidelity; a
through the windows like nosey neighbors.
man loses a friend; a woman has a baby. The sensual heat
This voyeurism was heightened by cameras dotted, Big
of desire—acknowledged, abused, or repressed—shapes the
Brother-style, inside the house. It permitted the audience
entire action of the play. White’s ambivalence runs through
to witness moments of almost unbearable privacy: we saw
the core of every character. He makes merciless fun of the
characters in grotesque close-up—eating dinner, showering,
rigid respectability of Girlie Pogson (Peter Carroll) and
contemplating their reflections in the mirror—even as we
her campaign against nasty “words” and other assaults by
watched them in the flesh on stage. Andrews modulates the
reality on feminine respectability; but equally, as with all
cameras with superb sensitivity, drawing his audience into
his characters, he also reveals her essential innocence, the
horrified compassion with one shot, invoking disgust with
yearning that tremulously glows beneath her starched frock.
another, heightening the comedy with a third. I’ve seldom
Likewise, the blazing innocence of Ron Suddards (Dan
seen multimedia used to such precise and powerful effect.
Spielman)—“a decent fellow,” as White describes him—is
[Photo 11]This was an illuminating example of a director
easily mocked, but it’s Suddards who wins the girl from the
applying techniques honed through experimental practice
would-be writer Roy Child (Eden Falk). Like Kafka, White
to a conventional production of a classic play.
understood the value of human kindness.

Photo 10: The lonely Nora Boyle (Pamela Rabe) watches as her husband Ernie (Brandon Burke, right)
embraces his old friend Digger Masson (Colin Moody). The video shows Girlie Pogson, played by Peter Carroll.
Photo: Tania Kelley

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 Photo 11: Judy Pogson (Hayley McElhinney) and Roy Child (Eden Falk) stare into the darkness,
while Harry Knott (Martin Blum) talks to his pregnant wife Mavis (Emily Russell) on the video.
Barrie Kosky
Barrie Kosky has, on the other hand, never really
concerned himself with simply directing plays, preferring
to adapt classic texts, often violently, to his own ends. On
the rare occasion where he used an unadapted text—his
theatricalization of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (Schauspielhaus
Wien/Malthouse Theatre)—he used not a play, but a short
story. There is nothing moralizing in Kosky’s theatre,
although it is mistaken to think of it as amoral: he plays
rather beyond good and evil, in a world of George Bataille’s
hypermorality. At the center of the stage—as it is at the
center of all Kosky’s work—is the human body, exposed,
abject and ecstatic in its extremity. And out of the extremes
of bodily suffering are wrung, in a Rilkean paradox, the
ravishing beauty of the voices of angels. It’s not surprising
that he has directed so many operas—among others, he has
directed notable and sometimes scandalous productions
of Wagner’s Lohengrin (Wiener Staatsoper), Ligeti’s Le
Grande Macabre (Komische Oper, Berlin), and Tristan
und Isolde (Aalto-Musiktheater, Berlin).
As with The War of the Roses, Barrie Kosky’s The
Women of Troy (2008)—also adapted by Tom Wright—
generated a contemporary potency from a classic play.
A co-production between the STC and Melbourne’s
Malthouse Theatre, it brought Euripides’s steady gaze to
bear on contemporary warfare by stripping it back to a
stern, austere, but undeniably contemporary classicism.
The result was a work that stared unblinkingly into
Photo: Tania Kelley
catastrophe: from the beginning, its outcome was inevitable
and unavoidable. [Photo 1] The emotional effect was
cumulative, and ultimately shattering.
This two-fold vision of the ancient and the
contemporary was evident from the moment you entered
the theatre and saw that the auditorium was shaped like an
amphitheatre. Every seat was draped in white; the fabric
intensified the fluorescent lighting, which was already
alienating and harsh. The audience looked down on a
naked stage, which was dominated by a huge back wall
constructed of old lockers, which were stacked like bricks
up to the ceiling. It began with a figure draped in black and
crowned in a tiara being pushed onto the stage on a flatbed
trolley by a guard. The guard was wearing a white mask,
like those worn by people who deal with corpses, which was
subtly configured to look like the masks on Hoplite helmets
worn by Greek soldiers.
The woman was standing in the pose made famous
through the photograph taken in Abu Ghraib, balancing
precariously, her arms stretched out, trembling with strain,
on either side. The guard (Kyle Rowling) took a photograph
with his mobile phone, and then began to strip the woman’s
finery—her rings, her bracelets, her necklace, her tiara—
putting them in a clear plastic bag. He left her face draped,
anonymous and blind. At last she was revealed as Hecuba
(Robyn Nevin), former Queen of Troy, standing in her
shift on a cardboard box as ordered by the guard, her face
bruised and bloodied, her hair shorn. The other women
were then wheeled in, also cowled in black: also brutalized,
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Photo 12: Hecuba (Robyn Nevin, foreground) unleashes her anger and grief before the chorus of Trojan women (Natalie Gamsu, Jennifer
Vuletic, and Queenie van der Zandt). Photo: Tracey Schramm
anonymous, stripped of all civic rights as they were of their
clothes. They were the theatrical image of what Giorgio
Agamben calls “naked life,” the “state of exception” that
defines the sovereign power of the State.
The play simply consists of the women waiting
to discover their fate, and finishes when we know what
happens to each of them. [Photo 12] The adaptation hacked
what is already a minimal play to its bones, hewing closely
to its original dramaturgy. Tom Wright’s language was
chillingly effective: utterly plain, with the weight of tragic
necessity in every word. The brutal reality it depicted was
punctuated by singing—a diverse range of music which
included Dowland, Mozart, Bizet, and Slovenian folk songs.
The music, the single human expression remaining to the
women, was a lament for everything that the action of the
play denied and destroyed: love, beauty, harmony, hope—
which was rendered as a transfiguring beauty wrenched
from the depths of abjection.
In his essay On Ecstasy, Kosky describes Melita Jurisic’s
performance of Medea at the Schauspielhaus Wien. It’s a
description that applies equally to Jurisic’s performance as
the luckless Kassandra, raped, broken and abject, babbling
in her divinely inspired insanity:
It was that howl emerging from her cunt, through her
body and out through her mouth. A visceral music born
from somewhere else, emerging from her bloodstained,
screaming mouth, travelling through the space where it
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entered our ears, sank into our bodies and transformed into
something else. Something waiting to be born another time,
something waiting to be touched by another sound, another
imagination or another illumination.
The contemporary allusions—Abu Ghraib, the
mundane industrialization of warfare—emerged organically
as inevitable aspects of the war state’s instrumentalizing
of bodies. In its weight of tragic inevitability, the hieratic
power of the performances, and its displaced but powerful
sense of the contemporary world seen through a glass
darkly, The Women of Troy was probably as close as we can
get to what the emotional experience of classical tragedy
might have been like. It was a cry of grief, a single naked
action, that resonated in its own present and then left the
audience to deal with the aftermath. [Photo 13]
Kosky’s obsession with the body is perhaps more
evident in his music theatre and opera pieces, where the
world of musical imagination permits a freer expression
of his impulse towards transcendence. His production
Poppea—a radical rewriting of Monteverdi’s final
masterpiece L’incoronazione di Poppea—is a good
example. [Photo 3] This production premiered in Vienna
(2003) before travelling to the 2007 Edinburgh Festival
and finally Sydney, where I saw it at the Sydney Opera
House last year. Here, Kosky gave Monteverdi’s last opera
a very 21st century treatment. The opera was cut to the
bone: all the secondary characters and all the gods save
Amor, the goddess of love, were deleted. The original
libretto, by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, was translated
into German, and Monteverdi’s music was interwoven
with songs by Cole Porter. The production illuminated
Porter’s songs in an entirely fresh way, bringing out
their themes of obsession and passion, their world-
weary cynicism, the black polish of their urban wit. Their
contrast with the baroque intensities of Monteverdi’s
music was as exciting as their thematic collisions. It was a
bold, dramaturgically elegant attack on the original work
that brought its blood to the surface of the skin.
The production was realized with a simplicity of
staging that again pitilessly exposed the action. The set was
an office-like box, white walls with doors, that threw the
emphasis onto the bodies of the performers. The revealing
costumes—Melita Jurisic’s flowing dress was completely
transparent—made the actors seem more naked than
they would be if they were actually unclothed: the erotics
was revealed by the gesture towards concealment. The
performance turned in a trice from cabaret grotesquery
to sublime operatic beauty, from comedy to tragedy.
And the cast, without exception, rose fearlessly to
Kosky’s demands; every performance fully inhabited the
contrasting extremities of the roles.
Photo 13: Attempting to hide from the soldiers, the chorus screams (Natalie
Gamsu, Queenie van der Zandt, Jennifer Vuletic and Robyn Nevin).
Photo: Tracey Schramm
From the overture, during which the lights slowly faded
in the auditorium and the curtain rose, revealing Amor
(Barbara Spitz, played as a world-weary madam), with
her back to us, one garishly braceleted hand gracefully
extended in silhouette, my breath seemed to stop. I left
the theatre exhilarated, moved and shaken. Poppea was an
outstanding and fearless work of theatre—a work about
love that was for grown ups, enacting the darkness, beauty,
and amorality of eroticism with a rare honesty. It showed
at once the preposterousness of lust and the dignity of love,
the ruthlessness and tenderness of desire, its ludicrous
obsessiveness, its corruption and its purity, the murderous
seduction of power. [Photo 14]
The opera tells the sordid story of Poppea’s accession
to power as Empress of Rome, as she and the Emperor
Nero (Kyrre Kvam) connive to divorce Nero’s wife Ottavio
(Barbara Frey), exile Poppea’s lover Ottone (Martin
Niedermair), and murder Nero’s advisor, Seneca (Florian
Carove). At the end, Poppea and Nero emerge triumphant,
celebrating their marriage with an achingly beautiful duet.
There are ironies here that are mostly lost on a modern
audience: Monteverdi’s audience would have been aware
that Poppea came to a bad end, as most Roman historians
agree that Nero murdered her by kicking her in the stomach
when she was pregnant with her second child. Moreover,
Ottone, Poppea’s rejected lover, became Emperor in the end
anyway. Shorn of this context, Monteverdi’s triumphant
ending is disconcerting, even obscene, a blackly realist view
of the effectiveness of ruthless power. Kosky exploited this
ambiguity to the full, reserving easy judgment for a more
sternly Platonic morality: that virtue is its own reward, and
vice its own punishment.
The scene of Seneca’s death demonstrated Kosky’s
ability to situate the body’s mortality at the center of a
disturbing eroticism. In this production Seneca was played
as mute, signifying his impotence, and his arias were sung
by another actor or, in one extraordinary scene, acted out in
sign language. Seneca rose up in a bath-tub from the floor of
the stage, smeared with the blood from his cut wrists. As he
died, Nero climbed into the bath with Seneca and smeared
himself, with gestures like those of a lover, with Seneca’s
blood, before the corpse slumped heavily out of the bath in
an image which remains one of the most shockingly abject
representations of death I’ve seen on stage. [Photo 15]
None of this bestiality, however, took away from the
ravishing beauty of Poppea and Nero’s final declaration
of love. They could be monstrous and amoral and still
truly love each other; after all, their victims gained their
dignity through losing the power game and, aside from
Seneca, were no less morally questionable than the Imperial
couple. Amor, the goddess of love, is not concerned with
the morality of passion: her drive is towards the orgasmic
TheatreForum 11
 Photo 14: Nero ( Kyrre Kvam) and Poppea (Melita Jurisic) mock the humiliated Drusilla (Ruth Brauer-Kvam) and Empress Ottavia
(Barbara Frey ). Amor (Barbara Spitz) is reflected in the background. Photo: Courtesy of Vienna Schauspielhaus

moment of excess, the primitive, unbridled nightmare SOURCES

of passion. Watching Poppea, duration was abolished;
I woke up at the end as if from a dream, aware only
then of what had been stirred out of the dark reaches of
the psyche. For me, its major residue was a profound
sorrow, which is perhaps what beauty inevitably does. By
situating us so intensely in the present moment, it leads
us to drop, however briefly, the shields we raise against
the painful awareness of our own mortality. If opera is
indeed a song of love and death, then Poppea was, for all
its impurities, pure opera.
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2005.
Kosky, Barrie. On Ecstasy. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London:
Methuen, 1965.
Richter, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy.
London: Penguin, 1967
von Mayenburg, Marius. Moving Target. Unpublished.

Photo 15: Seneca ( Florian Carove) slumps dead out of his bath, as Amor (Barbara Spitz) licks his blood from her fingers.
Photo: Courtesy of Vienna Schauspielhaus

12 TheatreForum
 The always-on part.
That’s what everyone
wants a piece of.
–Whit MacLaughlin,
Artistic Director, New
Paradise Laboratories

O
ff a quiet street
in a transitional
neighborhood,
the audience enters a
massive brick building
through a loading
dock. Inside, a blonde
femme fatale on a giant
screen greets everyone
via webcam. [Photo 2]
She invites us into an
industrial space divided
up by ten projection
screens and five muslin
scrims—a labyrinth of
“rooms” for performance
and viewing. Cue lights
and sound: suddenly
there’s action onscreen
and live in front of you.
And behind you. Actors
and audience occupy the
same space. Where to
look first? Something’s
happening in every
direction.
Welcome to
W o n d e r l a n d ,
Philadelphia-style:
Fatebook, the latest
creation by New
Paradise Laboratories
(NPL), premiered as
part of the city’s 2009
T H E AT R E A S A D E L I V E RY S Y S T E M : Live Arts Festival
and Philly Fringe.
New Paradise Laboratories's Created to explore the
difference between real
space and cyberspace,

fatebook
Fatebook began online
in July 2 0 0 9 , w h en
thirteen Philadelphia-
area twenty-
somethings assumed
by Charlotte Stoudt fictional identities
on Facebook. Those
characters generated
relationships and stories
on the social network
Photo 1: A maze of screens inside a warehouse gives audience members the disorienting feel of being inside an online
social network. Pictured: Alex Bechtel as Tim Drexel. Set design by Matt Saunders. Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou
TheatreForum 13
 Photo 2: Anita Prowler, broadcasting live from within the environment, acts as host, guide, and unreliable narrator. Pictured: Emily
Letts as Anita Prowler and audience members. Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou
that culminated in the live show in September. Part
installation, part web soap, and all head trip, the
groundbreaking seventy-minute show mesmerized and
bewildered audiences. One local critic called it a cross
between MTV’s The Hills and David Lynch.
From the beginning, Fatebook director and NPL
artistic director Whit MacLaughlin hoped the project
would blur boundaries among artists, advertising, and
audience. “Theatre is still used to creating a product, a
thing, a production, and then hiring marketers, who
shape the ‘story’ of that thing and try to sell it to the
public,” observes MacLaughlin in an online interview
with Andrew Eglinton. [Link 1, see sources]. “But in
cyberspace, that relationship is begging to be up-ended.”
In a show about social networking, he argues, shouldn’t
the artists be in direct contact with their audience? “I saw
an opportunity to build a community, where the marketing
of the piece was indistinguishable from its content. I
began to say things like ‘its marketing is its content,’
which some people found disturbing, as if that couldn’t be
the content of a theatre piece.”
MacLaughlin is accustomed to confounding people with
his unorthodox approach to theatre. A former Bloomsburg
Theatre Ensemble member, he founded NPL with a group
of Virginia Tech graduates in 1996. They quickly became
known for provocative physical theatre pieces inspired by
history, anthropology, and utopian ideals: Prom set the
high school rite on an Astroturf football field; The Fab
Charlotte Stoudt is a writer and producer in Los
Angeles. She can be read every week in the Los
Angeles Times, and is a resident dramaturg at the
Ojai Playwrights Conference. She holds a doctorate in
English and German from Oxford University.
14 TheatreForum
Four at the Pearly Gates sent the Beatles to the afterworld;
Planetary Enzyme Blues toured progressive movements
gone awry in 1960s Philadelphia.
NPL’s shows play more like installations than drama,
but Fatebook took that style to a new level of complexity.
There is no fourth wall and no seating. The audience
wanders through the show as if in an art gallery, free to
watch any part of the action. [Photo 3] MacLaughlin
describes the show as “all the scenes of a movie… played
simultaneously in a 3-D projector.” The set, designed by
NPL ensemble member Matt Saunders, is a maze of 15
rectangular screens made of muslin or sharkstooth scrim.
The smallest is 6-by-9 feet; the largest is 12-by-18. [Photo
4] Live performers interact with projected scenes, with the
audience, and with each other. Their stories are elliptical:
a disintegrating love affair, a career crisis, a drug deal. The
video, shot by Jorge Cousineau, is a moody Philadelphia
at night, a collage of alleys, dive bars, rumpled beds. The
characters are all heading for a party—and a catastrophe.
The “show” is actually one ten-minute sequence: a series
of interconnected events that play out simultaneously, live
and on screen. This short sequence is repeated five times—
each time ending with a gunshot. The events of the show—
compressed into one ten-minute sequence–are replayed five
times. By literally following different performers around
the space during each repeating loop, the audience pieces
together narrative clues. [Photo 1] The configuration of
the audience, the actors, and the story constantly changes.
A live actor gets punched out by an on-screen rival. Two
performers face each other, silent, unable to speak directly;
as they type on cell phones, their texts appear on the screen
above them. A woman races frantically in slow motion,
pursued by three smiling Fates in sleek black club wear.
Watching a particular actor just inches away, you can also
see other audience members watching other performers.
Fatebook makes you keenly aware
of having just one perspective on a
show with multiple points of view.
Only during the last moments of
the show does the multi-media
immersion end. The screens go dark;
the music ends; the work lights come
on. We’re left with performers back
in real time, helplessly watching one
character die of a gunshot wound.
More a state of being than
a story, Fatebook evokes the
uncanny intimacy and simultaneity
of cyberspace. Standing inside
the production feels like stepping
into Facebook’s world of 24-7
connectivity. You’re eavesdropping
on the instant messaging and
Photo 3: The audience and performers occupy the same space. Pictured: David Greene as Logan Souers,
online relationships of Generation Kevin Greene as Mysterious Man (on film), and audience members. Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou
Y. “We used to sit in a room and
read a book and think, ‘What am I going to do?’” said Take your average 20-year-old who doesn’t go to see theatre on a
MacLaughlin at an April 2009 Wallace Foundation regular basis. You could offer them two free tickets, a limo ride to
presentation: the show, and 100 bucks. And they still wouldn’t come.
Now you go into your room and access a million –Whit MacLaughlin
people who are thinking like you. You can look in a
Fatebook was first conceived in partnership with the
camera and be in the room with whoever is out there.
Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis (CTC),
As marketers, we go, “Got to get me some of that.”
where NPL’s Prom was staged in 2004 and again in
As artists we go, “The paradigm is shifting.” And as
2006. MacLaughlin was struck by a marked difference
people thinking about the future, we go, “What does
in the two young casts. Then he realized the 2006 group
this mean? What is this doing to us?”
had entered teenhood on social networking sites like
Fatebook explores whether theatre can reinvent itself
MySpace and Facebook. “They didn’t care as much about
alongside Web 2.0. Can the stage offer a more enticing
being awkward in each other’s presence,” he recalls.
profile to generations raised in cyberspace? What
“There wasn’t such a burning need to develop a smooth
exactly is our status update?
persona in relation to how desperately weirded out they
felt around other human beings.”
He also noticed the intimacy with
which the teens communicated to each
other in cyberspace. “The overall tenor
of online ‘conversation’ was really close
to the atmosphere of pillow talk. It was
bedroom-to-bedroom. I started to think
about a piece that would look at the
difference between cyberspace and real
space, where we’re here smelling each
other, being unhappily close.”
MacLaughlin imagined Fatebook
as an ensemble piece for high school
students, with both an online and
onstage component. Performers would
create fictional selves on Facebook and
friend in their real-life acquaintances to
follow their characters in cyberspace.
Photo 4: Audience members view Fatebook from inside the media environment. Viewers The audience would “attend” the show
move through the projected virtual realm like detectives, immersed in the lives of individual
characters. Media design by Jorge Cousineau. Photo: Jacques-Jean Tizou online long before opening night—

TheatreForum 15
perhaps even impacting the plot. And CTC would gain
email access to a whole group of young people who hadn’t
previously been on their radar. “Fatebook felt like the only
piece of theatre we could actually learn something from,”
remembers Cody Braudt, 17, who was part of the CTC cast.
Fatebook’s stage set would consist of six bedrooms
where the characters engaged in cyberspace relationships.
At the end of the show, the walls would disappear and
the characters would be present together in a contiguous
real-space performance. The story would revolve around
Photo 5: Fatebook focuses in part on the transition to full, economically independent adulthood. The characters, seemingly in their own worlds,
all move headlong toward a single shared moment of calamity. Pictured: Alex Bechtel as Tim Drexel and Delante Keys as Clayton Hughes.
a friend’s sudden disappearance, with certain echoes
of Macbeth. The scale and technological demands of
Fatebook were daunting, but “we were madly in love with
the project,” says CTC Artistic Director Peter Brosius. “It’s
what our audience is living and doing every day.”
But in Fall 2008, the recession hit CTC hard. The theatre
had to withdraw from the project for financial reasons.
MacLaughlin scrambled to regroup. “There wasn’t time
to develop connections with high schools in Philadelphia.
But I realized I had all these inroads with colleges in the
area because I’ve done residencies.” He reconceived the
show around the idea of people in their twenties facing
down early adulthood. The shift to older characters, he
says, “freed us in terms of subject matter. With a younger
16 TheatreForum
cast, the show was people reaching out from behind their
parents’ moat. They were still dreaming of their future lives.
So the piece became less about Plato’s cave and more about
the dangers of the outside world.”
Then he started making calls to colleges and
universities. The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and
Philly Fringe, which has presented NPL shows in the past,
stepped up with more support. Through the University
of the Arts, NPL hooked up with website designer Jeremy
Beaudry. “I found I had many ports in a storm,” says
Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou
MacLaughlin. “We had two choices: throw in the towel or
do it on our own. And we chose the latter.’”
In early January 2009, MacLaughlin posted an audition
notice for performers between the ages of 18 and 23 on the
website of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia.
He heard from over 300 people and asked each to create a
one-minute video audition on YouTube. 120 people posted
[Link 2]. NPL invited all of them to participate in two
days of workshop auditions in mid-January. MacLaughlin
expected to cast six people but ended up with fifteen; he
invited everyone else to participate online. (Two core cast
members eventually dropped out.)
Later that month, the core cast met twice in person.
At their first meeting, MacLaughlin handed out pens and
paper and asked them to come up with a name and a brief
biography for their Fatebook alter ego. “It was intuitive,” he
says. “Off the top of their heads. Most built fictional persona
roughly based on who they wanted to be.” [Photo 5]
Everybody’s watching but nobody’s there. It feels like the most
private space, because it’s your bedroom… but it’s also quite
possibly the most public space on the planet.
–Digital anthropologist Michael Wesch on webcams
Photo 6: Physicality is a signature component in New Paradise Laboratories' work. In this photo, Danh Marks (actor Nhut Le) gets carried away by the night.
Performers would create fictional selves on Facebook
and friend in their real-life acquaintances to follow their
characters in cyberspace. [Link 3]
For the next six months, NPL built a play without
knowing the set design, the plot, or even who the characters
were yet. From February to early July, “rehearsal” consisted
of the cast interacting online. MacLaughlin nudged them
into certain relationships. “I would message someone and
say, ‘Hit on this person as your character.’”
Cindy Spitko, aka Julia Zelda Taylor, says MacLaughlin’s
initial low-key approach worked, though it took her awhile
to embrace being someone else. At first Spitko would
check her real Facebook page and then look at Julia’s. But
as rehearsals went on, something changed. “Pretty soon I
would just go straight to Julia’s. I was much more compelled
by my fictional life. Being Julia was so liberating. I could say
things as Julia that I would never, never say, even think, as
myself.” The cast met in person again once in March. By
then, the alter egos had taken hold. “Everyone–including
me–now knew each other’s characters much better than
they knew the real person,” says MacLaughlin.
Over two weeks in April, Jorge Cousineau shot video
portraits of the cast, both for the website and the show. (He
used a Sony EX-1, the best commercially available camera
Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou
for slow motion work.) Inspired by the work of Bill
Viola and conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, these portraits
showed each performer dancing, jumping, crying, or just
gazing into the camera—a way of revealing character in
purely physical terms. “We would say, ‘Jump like you’re
going to die if you can’t jump anymore,’ and wouldn’t
give them any time to think about it,” says Cousineau.
“So it became an existential jump.”
The images also captured what MacLaughlin finds so
fascinating about internet intimacy: the physical safety
of cyberspace makes possible an emotional vulnerability
unlike anything in three-dimensional social interaction. “If
the show is a party before a catastrophe…, we thought of
these portraits as being filmed after the disaster,” explains
TheatreForum 17
Photo 7: The final scene is the only one watched by the entire audience together. It is performed on the loading dock of the space and the
street behind it, real space and cyberspace collide. Pictured clockwise from left: Kate Brennan, Cindy Spitko, Rachel Radenberg (crouching),
David Greene, Delanté Keys, Alex Bechtel (on stretcher), and Tom Osborne. Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou
Cousineau. “They say a lot with very little. There’s a rather late in the rehearsal and writing process that we
darkness there. Also, the sheer number of people being settled on the final design.”
filmed had its own impact. The footage became no longer Since the very beginning of the project, the team had
about individuals but a whole group of people undergoing a known the show’s locations would be projected on screen,
story. You wanted to see more.” but they had struggled with how the audience would
While the cast discovered their cyberselves, interact with all the stories. “We knew the space had to be
MacLaughlin, Cousineau, and Saunders tried to figure interactive—we didn’t want the audience to sit down,” says
out the right three-dimensional space to play out their Saunders. “So it became all about traffic flow and changing
experiment. Without CTC’s support, the design budget perspective. With Fatebook, the primary design concern
had shrunk. And NPL doesn’t have its own theatre. The wasn’t so much ‘the look’ of it. The screens are where they
Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, which hosts approximately are primarily because that’s where they need to be for the
20 curated theatre and dance productions each fall—as storytelling and shifts in perspective to work properly.”
well as a large Fringe Festival—offered NPL the chance to As the design progressed, MacLaughlin realized his
stage Fatebook in the warehouse portion of the Festival’s cast now needed more specific direction. On vacation in
offices. There were no pre-existing drawings for the Norway in June, he scoured everyone’s Facebook accounts
2000 ft. cavern. Saunders spent hours measuring and and compiled all of each character’s messages and status
photographing the warehouse to create an accurate scale updates. He distilled the material and rewrote it as six
model. “We had no idea what the structure of the evening weeks worth of status updates for each character; these
would be,” he remembers. “The number of screens and 140-character posts would be the “script” that would run
projectors needed would depend on the number of online six weeks before the live show, as if the events were
perspectives we were going to show. We played with the unfolding in real time. The final status updates referred to a
model for weeks. I cut out little screens and chairs, and party all the characters planned on attending.
we moved them around the model, creating different On July 8, the show went up online and cyber audiences
configurations. As the actors started to generate story, could friend in and follow the story. The online portal,
locations emerged: a hospital, a bar, a park. It wasn’t until www.fatebooktheshow.com, has since attracted over 6400

18 TheatreForum
individual visitors, representing over 9,000 total visits, with
an average visit time of almost 3 minutes.
Roughly 2,000 people friended the Fatebook characters.
Some were only voyeurs, but others talked back. About
fifty people, including a few artists who had been involved
in Minneapolis, assumed fictional Facebook identities to
interact with the cast online. Kate Brennan, who played
one of the witchy Fates, Zoe Ex, developed a strong cyber
rapport with one friend. “His posts were darker, edgier than
most. After several months of interaction, I found that Zoe
was getting darker in her point of view. Almost a little evil.
He definitely influenced who she became.”
Via the website and Twitter, MacLaughlin fostered an
interest in the show that reached as far as Brazil and Russia.
He was interviewed by German radio [Link 4] and by a
London theatre blogger who discovered the show from a
tweet [Link 5]. “I also wrote about 1400 individual emails
discussing Fatebook,” MacLaughlin explains. “It was never
explicitly about selling tickets.” As NPL General Manager
Inger Hatlen points out, “Some people [we]re having a ball
interacting online but will never see the live performance.”
Full-on live rehearsals began in July. “We were all a little
bit thrown once we saw each other in three dimensions
again,” remembers Brennan. “It was an entirely different
experience than the cyberspace element. We thought we
knew each other online, but it’s different when you’re
touching and looking into each other’s eyes. In the
Facebook world, there’s no real time. You respond when
you want, at your leisure, 24 hours a day. But people are
unpredictable in real space. You can craft things online, but
things are raw when they’re right in front of you.”
Using NPL’s movement training techniques,
MacLaughlin and the cast built a gestural vocabulary that
would give the show a coherent physical style. One sticky
morning in early August, the cast wandered the unfinished
set in bare feet, shorts, and tank tops. MacLaughlin led his
notorious warm-ups—an intense 30 minutes of yoga-style
moves and stretches. There was no air conditioning, and
everyone broke a sweat in minutes. The morning’s work
was blocking the end of the show. MacLaughlin wanted to
play with slow motion. He started with bad pantomime that
looked like the worst parts of Dances with Wolves.
“Don’t think of it as slow motion,” he said, “just highly
attenuated action. Your torso leads. At this speed, space
gets thicker. Express less, take in more. You should be
permeable, soft, and active.” People walked by themselves,
then in pairs. Feet wobbled as the actors tried to stay
balanced. Eventually everyone dropped into a similar
tempo. Like a dance company, they achieved a gestural
unity that felt extremely intimate. The density of the piece,
its ambitions, its otherworldly aura, were emerging.
After rehearsals, Cousineau and MacLaughlin shot
hours of site-specific video material that the performers
would interact with during the live show. Cousineau edited
each segment of video to match up with the other dozen
that would run during each 10 minute loop. “Everything
had to line up, especially the sound. The performers needed
to hear their cues clearly because most of the time they
couldn’t see what was happening onscreen.” To sync all
the cues, NPL relied heavily on Isadora, video projection
software that “allows you to project onto multiple screens
simultaneously, to send images around the room at instant
command,” explains Cousineau.
Fatebook offered choreographed live performance-video
interactions reminiscent of the Wooster Group, but with
the immersion level of gaming. Yet this extraordinarily
innovative environment was achieved on a fraction of the
budget spent by better-funded multimedia companies.
NPL has only two full-time staff members. MacLaughlin
estimates the show’s cost to the company over a two-year
period at about $182,000.
Fatebook is part of an emerging wave of theatre with
online and interactive components. The offbeat Broadway
hit Next to Normal has been serialized on Twitter. In
TerraNova’s Feeder, the story of a man who pushes his lover
to obesity, characters blog about their fetishes long before
the piece is staged live. Eisenhower Dance Ensemble’s
Feedbacking will develop performances based on online
interaction between artist and audience. But none of these
shows puts theatregoers into the same zone as the actors.
Party tonight, bitches! Gonna let loose. Let me out of my cage!
–Fatebook character Tim Drexel, Sept. 5 status update
The live component of Fatebook premiered on
September 5, 2009 and ran for 17 performances.
Audiences were dazzled by the multimedia environment
and fascinated to share space with the actors. “At first, the
presentation seemed a bit overwhelming, with all of the
screens, visuals, and characters.  I enjoyed it more once I
started to follow the story lines and learned about each
character,” said audience member Catherine McCormick,
who planned to bring her Facebook-obsessed teens back
to the show. Above all, McCormick responded to the
immersive aspect: “No sitting and observing. You’re part of
the action.” A performer buying drugs shared his score with
anyone who would take a pill. [Photo 6] Another character,
reacting to seeing his own ghost at an on-screen ATM,
dropped his wallet. Someone always bent down to help the
actor pick up the cards that had fallen out.
Reaction to the run varied wildly. Some people were
eager to meet the characters they’d followed on Facebook.
Others found the noirish storyline, about a credit card
scam and a gun-wielding thug, a little banal. [Photo 7] But
virtually everyone agreed with theatregoer Pedro Davila:
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” For attendee Rosalie
Bochansky, Fatebook successfully recreated “that sense of
searching for related details in this sea of simultaneously-
delivered information; that’s what makes social networking
so addictive, and [the show] got that.” Bochansky liked the
TheatreForum 19
idea of “being able to show up at the theatre having a real SOURCES
relationship with a fictional character. I expect this piece
Link 1: www.londontheatreblog.co.uk/on-the-real-
will spawn others. I wouldn’t mind Tolstoy getting the
fatebook-and-whit-maclaughlin
Fatebook treatment.”
Link 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucQFbhee4K4&
Ticket sales were slightly lower than projected,
feature=related
but “we were successful in finding new audiences and
Link 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU
reaching our target age group,” reports MacLaughlin.
Link 4: http://podcast-mp3.dradio.de/podcast/2009/08/29/
“There are 50,000 college graduates in our area, most
drk_20090829_1405_5ff8aa98.mp3
of whom are tremendously sophisticated,” says the Live
Link 5: http://www.londontheatreblog.co.uk/on-the-real-
Arts Festival’s producing director, Nick Stuccio. But very
fatebook-and-whit-maclaughlin
few of them attend Live Arts, where the mean audience
Amorosi, A.D. Rev. of FATEBOOK, dir. Whit
age is 42. This year, ticket buyers under 25 accounted for
MacLaughlin. Philadelphia City Paper online. 7
19% of the Live Arts Festival’s overall sales. For Fatebook,
September 2009. 10 February 2010. http://citypaper.
that number was 40%.
net/fringe/2009/show.php/id/5/
“Distinctive to this show was the breadth of buzz that
Barnes, Robin. Telephone interview. 30 November 2009.
began months before the Festival began,” says Live Arts’
Bochansky, Rosalie. Email interview. 8 Sept 2009.
Marketing Director, Robin Barnes. She’s speaking of the
Braudt, Cody. Telephone interview. 28 July 2009.
Fatebook website but also about the guerilla marketing.
Brennan, Kate. Telephone interview. 9 December 2009.
NPL’s advertising included the use of 1700 “throwies”:
Brennan, Moira. Email interview. 17 August 2009.
single LEDs taped to nickel-sized magnets, with the
Brosius, Peter. Telephone interview. 15 July 2009.
Fatebook web address attached like the paper plume on
Cousineau, Jorge. Telephone interview. 6 December 2009.
a Hershey’s kiss. The throwies were stuck on the sides
Pedro, Davila. Email interview. 9 September 2009.
of buses, buildings, and bike stands for the curious to
Fatebook the Show.com. 8 July 2009. New Paradise
investigate. “One Fatebook cast member came home to
Laboratories. 10 February 2010. http://www.
find their housemate waving one of the throwies around,”
fatebooktheshow.com
laughs Barnes. “The person had no idea it was related to
Fatebook the Show Channel. YouTube. 10 February 2010.
his friend’s latest theatre project. He found it stuck to a
http://www.youtube.com/user/fatebooktheshow
parked car and thought it looked really cool.”
Hatlen, Inger. Personal interview. 9 September 2009.
Barnes believes some of NPL’s strategies can be
MacLaughlin, Whit. "FATEBOOK Presentation." Wallace
applied to any production: “The earlier in the season we
Foundation Arts Grantee Conference. Philadelphia. 2
can provide online content about an artist or show, the
April 2009.
better we can prepare audiences for what they’re going
-- Interview with Andrew Eglinton. London Theatre
to experience.  This gives audiences the information they
Blog. 1 August 2009. 10 February 2010. http://www.
need to feel comfortable committing to a ticket purchase.”
londontheatreblog.co.uk/on-the-real-fatebook-and-
A new set of audiences will likely encounter Fatebook
whit-maclaughlin/
2.0 in the near future. MacLaughlin is talking with
-- Interview with Gerd Brendel. Deutschlandradio Kultur.
producers in Boston and Virginia about devising the
29 August 2009. 10 February 2010. http://mp3.
show for a different setting. He’s already envisioning
rapid4me.com/download/2668776-porträt-whit-
changes. “I’d increase the audience interaction, online
mclaughlin-und-sein-fatebook.html
and in performance.” The plot that ends in a gunshot
-- Personal interview. 9 August 2009.
would disappear. “I’d look for a storyline or situation
-- Personal interview. 9 September 2009.
that doesn’t require specific urban imagery. I want to
-- Telephone interview. 23 March 2009.
be less precious about Fatebook being a play and more
-- Telephone interview. 22 November 2009.
about it being a delivery system. It’s about being in this
McCormick, Catherine. Email interview. 9 September 2009.
machine, in a movie that’s spatial.” Cousineau agrees.
Saunders, Matt. Telephone interview. 5 December 2009.
“To me it’s more about the surface of our lives than a
Spitko, Cindy. Personal interview. 5 September 2009.
murder mystery. It’s more effective as a portrait of the
Stuccio, Nick. Telephone interview. 21 August 2009.
unsolvable than a whodunit.”
Wesch, Michael. An Anthropological Introduction to
Designer Matt Saunders considers Fatebook an
YouTube. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 23
early prototype of a form with great possibilities. “To
June 2008. 10 February 2010. http://www.youtube.
me, the show feels like a hybrid of theatre, cinema and
com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU
visual art. I don’t know if we nailed it, but I think this
hybrid has the potential to be a new theatrical form. I’m
excited to explore it further.”

20 TheatreForum
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