The 3rd annual Game Play Festival put on by The Brick is exactly what it sounds like--it is an investigation into the potential theater of video games. Are they a vehicle for storytelling? Does the controlled and consumable medium of the modern video game have any place on the stage? The Brick invites the audience to take a seat and pick up the controller. Were it a different festival, I might mean that last part metaphorically, but the shows of Game Play reach out and hand you a microphone, a red button, your own cell phone and demand that you participate. Indeed, the show cannot continue without it.
Gyda Arber's Red Cloud Rising takes place about as far from The Brick's physical Williamsburg location as one can get: the Financial District. Set up a mock interview for the fictional Bydder Financial corporation, the audience is quickly shuffled onto the streets of lower Manhattan on a scavenger hunt of sorts, out to deliver a mysterious envelope with only a series of cryptic text messages to go off of. Along the way, we are intercepted by another group, Red Cloud, bent on tearing down Bydder's cheery and intriguing veneer of corporate camaraderie to reveal a dark underbelly of corruption and political manipulation. But the orientation video! we cry. The gym looked so nice, with so many elliptical machines! Alas, even in the fictional world of Red Cloud Rising, a good job without any strings attached is hard to come by.
The main interest of Arber's piece is to challenge the role of the audience as passive participants. In order to progress and complete the play, they must complete their series of tasks. Furthermore, by sending the audience out into the wilds of the Financial District, Red Cloud Rising blurs the lines between where the heavy-handed conspiracy theories of the show end and the real world begins. We saw a woman in lavender with her dog, talking to her friend about an FBI cover up at one hiding spot, and saw her again at another drop off point. It was hard not to wonder whether she was in on it or not (though it turns out she was just freelancing). However, Red Cloud also takes significant risks in this dispersion setup--by releasing the audience, they also relinquish control of our attention. Sure, we give it to them when we're looking around grave yards for clues, but in the inevitable downtime between increasingly cryptic instructions, it wanes. The city has a strong magnetism. In the end, it wins, and we might forget that we are doing anything more sinister or suspenseful than walking aimlessly around lower Manhattan.
BrainExplode!, a new piece written by Stephen Aubrey, Danny Bowes, and Richard Lovejoy (dir. Paige Blansfield) and set in the firm confines of The Brick, took a different approach. Rather than pulling the audience through a familiar landscape, BrainExplode! relies on the audience's ingenuity to pull themselves up and over the arc of a story. Ray Pinter (Stephen Heskett) is a video game designer pitching a new product who passes out and mysteriously falls, Inception-like, into the deadly, personal worlds of his own game. Aided by his girlfriend Ginny, his mother (both played by Megan Melnyk), his former friend Brian (Jesse Wilson), and five select members of the audience, Ray must find a way to stop the clock before time runs out and his brain quite literally explodes. The players in the audience interact with Ray and Ginny, suggesting tactics and asking questions that might help them out alive.
The sheer amount of planning and work that went into preparing all the worlds and alternate endings that might arise depending on the audience's suggestion are impressive, but more impressive are the actors' performances through such simultaneously wide and narrow parameters. For while Heskett and Melnyk must be ready to react to whatever the audience throws their way, they must also remember the long and detailed bank of information about their lives, their parents, and their relationship. Heskett's Ray is appropriately self-effacing, and he does a fantastic job casually guiding the players to possible solutions that might get them to the next level without making it look like work. Melnyk's portrayals of both Ginny and Ray's neurotic mother are a real treat to watch. Whether she is playing the supportive-yet-sly girlfriend or the wildly inappropriate MidWestern matriarch, Melnyk's energy, earnestness, and comedic timing make us genuinely care about her fate. And that of her boyfriend, and his potentially exploding brain. Jim Hammer's costumes transport us in the unfortunate polyester of 1987, and the rest of the production team works admirably at what must have been an memorably unpredictable job of cueing lights and sound for a half-improvised play. Delightfully tongue and cheek, BrainExplode! offers what the best games always do--a chance to play.
THough the festival ends on the 30th, you can catch Game Play's Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games for the Stage in the New York Fringe Festival August 12-28.
For tickets to game play: www.bricktheater.org
Chloe Carter Brown is a writer, playwright, and blogger living in New York. Her newest play, Beautiful Somewhere, was featured in the Culture Project's Women Center Stage festival this spring at the Living Theater. Her short play, "Blast Radius, or, Rachel and the Salt Pillars" was also produced as part of the Studio Series at Williams College this year. Her other writing has been featured on Huffington Post and USA Today. http://bootsandkittens.tumblr.com
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