Taking Theatre Online with WebGL and WebRTC

I did miss having audience feedback, most notably laughter, which is one of the best reasons to do live theater. I treated it as a radio play, another successful medium with somewhat different rules.

Working on a full Shakespeare play is harder. The group scenes are notably difficult, since you don't get to the usual physical cues about who you're talking to. Feedback from background characters is important in helping the audience connect, and that's harder with a big Brady Bunch screen of faces, and no eye contact. In rehearsal last night, it was hard to have the final reconciliation with Romeo's father as just one face among many, and it was sorely tempting to "indicate" sadness rather than organically being in the moment. (Turning off our own faces helps: if you're feeding back on what you see you're going to try to force yourself to look like what you're feeling, which always looks false.)

This was a project already in production before lockdown. We'll probably just move it to Zoom, which is very sad because it's only a fraction of what it could be. We probably won't move on to our next scheduled show until next year. We'll keep artistically alive with projects like that play festival.

Fortunately for us, we don't have a theater to pay for, or salaries. The professional theaters are desperately trying to keep out of bankruptcy, both themselves and their staff, but this is going to be very, very bad. Tech will help replace a tiny bit, but this will devastate theater for years, even if we get a vaccine by the end of the year.

Some details of one of the shows, Return To Elsewhere, here: https://www.big-telly.com/return-to-elsewhere-23-24-may/

And a talk they gave about how they did their shows: https://youtu.be/iYTizaG6NOc