Matthew Watkins

Image: Matthew Watkins, Photo credit: Faith Decker

interviewed by Katharine Matthias

Katharine Matthias: You directed and adapted live-streamed workshop performances of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in July. One of your goals for your workshop production was to understand how theater performed on virtual platforms continues to be theater. From your experimentation, you discovered four elements of online theater: 1. The performance should be created at the same time it is viewed (not entirely prerecorded); 2. It should exist in 3D space even if the audience and performers don't share that space; 3. It should straddle the worlds of reality and fiction; and 4. It should engage with the history of theater as an art form. How did you discover these four rules for virtual theater-making? Did you set these rules before your rehearsal process, or did they develop gradually as you were in rehearsal for An Enemy of the People? 

Matthew Watkins: They were things that I had kicking around in my head for a while. Right now, we have to have a theory of what theater is in order to make it. It's not a given anymore. I have been figuring out what is important for me, what makes my art form my art form, and why I do it. The four elements were hypotheses that I had about theater and what makes theater worth doing, and one of the things that I was really excited about in doing this online theater work was that I realized pretty quickly that whatever we decided was necessary to make online theater pointed to what we thought theater itself is.

KM: You are both a director and designer. Have you noticed how that experience helped you in the transition to online theater?

MW: Yeah, I found myself really oddly prepared for this because we've been doing a lot of work with technology before the lockdown started. Katrina, who's one of the members of our collective Ghosteater and who played Catherine in the show, was like, “Oh yeah, like I'm super comfortable with this” because she's been working with cameras for a really long time. One of the things that we discovered was that it is a skill and some people are more comfortable working with the camera either because they're interested in it or because they've done it a bunch. Some people were like, “I don’t know what to do with this.”

In auditions, I had two questions for performers in addition to what we normally talk about in an audition. We said, “We're going to give you these cell phones, and they are going to be on tripods and you're going to have to hold them in your hand as a hand prop and use them in a specific way that's different from what you would do on stage.” Then, as a gut check, we asked, “Are you excited about that, or are you more on the side of that sounds terrible or intimidating?”

The other question that we asked them was “These cameras are going to be in your house. You're going to be moving around, and you're really going to bring us in as collaborators and then the audience will be strangers into your house. Are you comfortable with that?”

Nobody said no to the last one. People definitely were like, “Yeah, I don't want to deal with the camera,” but everybody seemed to be somewhat comfortable with bringing people into their houses.

KM: You also worked on this production with the performing collective Ghosteater. How did working with that group inform your rehearsal, design, and production process? 

MW: This particular collective grew out of the devising ensemble that I ran for almost 10 years that kind of ceased to exist called The Orange Theater. I've been working with Joya Scott, who's our producer and dramaturg, and Katrina Donaldson for more than 10 years. The way that we work is like asking a fish what water is.

We, as a collective, encountered some challenges to the ingrained ways that we had been working that came about because of the shift to online theater. 

One of the things that's very different about the theater industry in Arizona is that there are more projects than there are actors to fill them and that is the opposite of New York. It's a seller's market for actors, and we've been in a mindset that we need to get people locked into projects. We haven't held auditions in I don't know how long because we're like, “Okay, who can fill this role,” and we make a list and then we find and talk to those people individually and see if we can get folks locked in for a project. In the past, some of our most creative work has been solving the issue of not having an actor in a role.

Since Covid began, it changed pretty radically for two reasons. There's way less work happening, so the actors around here have more time and we're doing an online production, so we can cast from literally anywhere in the world. We were like, “Oh yeah, we're working in like a really, really different kind of ecosystem now,” and it also meant that we weren't really used to putting a lot of resources and cultivating people for auditions. We realized that there were some really big racial equity issues. The theater scene in Phoenix is very white, and it's a huge systemic issue.

So, one of the really cool things about being online is that we get to get out of this system here. We have to put in work to build those relationships and to make sure that it doesn't happen like that again, so that was pretty eye opening. It does seem like a door is opening in those relationships, and I'm pretty excited about that.

KM: When I watched the production, I really enjoyed the moments when actors stood in similar positions or places in their respective homes because I could see the connection between their spaces, even though they were not sharing the same physical space. How did you and your performers find the similarities and specificities to each other’s homes? 

MW: The actors did that themselves. We didn't talk about it, they just started doing it when I told the actors to play. When I start rehearsals, I have three principles that I tell actors. One is that nothing happens without trust. Then, we are after two things, and nothing else matters: one is to find clarity in the form, and the other is to find the fullest expression of every idea. I'm really only going to give notes about whether something was clear or fully expressed. Then, everything else is just like, “Well, was it dramaturgically relevant to the show?” and maybe that doesn't even matter. Maybe we're like, “Oh, we want something that's not dramaturgical relevant because we're interested in seeing how it cracks open the dramaturgy of the show.” I was like, “Just play, and I'll let you know if it's clear or fully expressed,” because I honestly don't know how to block this because I don't think anybody's ever done it before.

It's not like filmmaking because there's not a camera crew. There's not a director of photography there to make those decisions. You've got this hand prop and just have to do something. There's no way to know right now. Now, moving forward, I think that I will do more blocking, but I was like, “I honestly don't know, your gut and your physical experience is going to be a better judge of what we should do because nobody's ever done this before.” I don't necessarily think that that's a good strategy for doing a show, but in a workshop, it seems totally fine.

The idea of coming through the doorway and using the equivalent spaces in people's houses was just something that they did organically.

I was also really excited about the idea that everybody's got a front door of some kind and most people have a kitchen of some kind. They’re different in everybody's house, but they're recognizable as kitchens. It brings up this linguistic concept: “What is a kitchen? What are the signifiers of kitchen-ness or couch-ness?” If we were working with people in a different culture, they wouldn't necessarily have all the same signifiers in their houses, but there is some similarity to everybody, so I thought that was really fun.

KM: You also mention that you used your workshop performances to experiment with three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional virtual stage. What were some of your discoveries and challenges in seeking three-dimensionality on the screen? How did working with performers’ cameras from their phones help with finding three-dimensionality?

MW: I did see some things emerge immediately and pretty consistently across the board in terms of virtual theater that I thought, “Why are those the things that are emerging organically?” because they don't seem like the most interesting ways of using this technology. There's a lot of virtual theater where we're just static, in front of a green screen, and talking into the camera that doesn't get what I really like about theatre, which is the dynamism of bodies moving in three-dimensional space.

We were actually looking at film and noticed that a lot of the dynamism and film actually comes from editing and not necessarily from the camera or the bodies moving in space. So, we actually found a subset of experimental filmmakers who are doing work with handheld cameras, including Dogme 95, Jonas Mekas, some Godard films, and skate videos. We looked at people working with handheld cameras where the camera kind of becomes a prop in the three-dimensional world. We decided to use that as a model for what we're doing instead of green screens.

I had heard in conversations that a lot of theatre artists were really bummed about the fact that you can't control where the screens are in the gallery view in relation to one another in Zoom. It just arbitrarily chooses where to put people, and it's different in everybody's window. I don't think it's the deal breaker that it seems to be. I think that when you're working with the green screen, and you're thinking about it as a flat two-dimensional plane. The relationship horizontally between the screens is really important.

As I've been watching these things, I don't honestly care about the relationship between the screens horizontally on the two-dimensional plane. I'm actually way more interested in the axis between performer and camera. This is a more meaningful dimension for me.

I think it's really easy to say that the relationship between actors happens on a horizontal plane, but I don't think that that's actually what's happening. When I watch the show, I see the relationship between characters actually going on the Z axis [the axis between performer and camera], and then the audience member actually reflects the gaze back down onto the grid.

I'm finding myself in an experience where I, as an audience member, am placed in the center of the relationship between the characters, so that an audience member takes the gaze and reflects it back onto their scene partner on the screen. Then, the audience member is placed emotionally in the center of that relationship and is a meditating figure that makes that relationship possible, which I find to be a really interesting and emotional experience. It engages me and implicates me in the play in a way that just watching it happen on the two-dimensional plane doesn’t.  

We started playing with that and thinking about what that can mean for what the camera could be. We started thinking about how the camera can occupy three roles: it can be an objective third eye, just like a watcher, but that was like the least interesting out of all of them. It could also be a hand prop and that the actor was conscious of it being a camera that they're using and speaking to. Then, in a really interesting way, it can become your scene partner. In that sense, the camera becomes a puppet, but it's a puppet with a set of eyes, and I'm watching the scene as an audience member from the perspective of the scene partner.

The idea of the Z-axis—of depth being really important—is something that I took out of An Enemy of the People, and the idea of how the gaze works. I think it's important because it does something with the gaze and it pushes it out because the audience member is situated on that third dimension. If we think of it philosophically, there actually is no two-dimensionality. Both the screen and the camera exist in a three-dimensional space, so the screen is an object and the camera’s an object. All those things are already three dimensional, and we're just bringing that third dimension into the communicative medium.

KM: That reminds me of post-humanistic studies where scholars talk about embodied virtuality and the fact that the mind and the body are not separate in cyberspace.  

MW: I think that it brings in this idea that we were talking about the performance being created at the same time as it's viewed and we were thinking “how is this theater and not film and not TV?”

One of the things that we thought about with film is that film is produced in three dimensions. If you're not making an animated film, if you're capturing human bodies on camera, it does happen in three dimensions, but there's a separation between the production and the consumption of the film.

So, when you view the film, the action that is taking place on the other side of the screen is in the past, and it's not actually happening simultaneously in three dimensions. It's happening in two dimensions whereas, on a live Zoom call, it's just mediated through the two-dimensional interface. We realized that this concept seems really crucial. We're not watching an archive of something that happened three-dimensionally in the past. We’re mediating two-simultaneous—as close to simultaneous as we can get it—three-dimensional experiences.

We're really interested in playing with that in the future and setting up something that promises simultaneous three-dimensional experience and then taking that out or undercutting it in some way and playing with the medium. I've been messing around with using OBS because it has some plugins for doing live instant replays and slow-motion for sports broadcasting. 

KM: Speaking of experimenting with OBS, you used Zoom and OBS for your live-streamed performances. Did you experiment with other platforms and tools in your process? What made you land where you did?

MW: I think the sound designer and I completely redesigned the entire infrastructure on five different platforms in one week, and it was absolutely terrifying. One of the challenges on a technical front that we discovered is that we have a limited ability to test the system before we get it out into the field.

We initially started on a tool called OBS Ninja, and it's an open source tool. We thought it would be awesome, but it just couldn't handle the number of people on the call because we had eight actors, the stage manager, myself, the dramaturg, and the sound designer all on the call at once. One of the goals of the show was to be able to capture individual feeds of each camera into OBS. We were using Zoom and OBS, so we wanted to get each camera stream from each actor into OBS independently, so that we can manipulate them independently. We could do that with OBS Ninja, but the group chat feature failed.

Then, we went to Skype because Skype has the only group chat feature that we could find that has a feature to output something called NDI, which is basically a way of routing video through software. Skype will output NDI, and we thought we could bring it into OBS. But, when we got into rehearsal, we discovered two things. One, Skype has some built-in audio effect processing that makes it totally impossible for more than one person to speak at a time. That was a non-starter for us because another thing that we wanted to accomplish and that we wanted to improve upon in digital theater was pacing. We felt like we had seen a lot of stuff where people were really kind of like politely and taking turns speaking. I really wanted to build an actor-centric platform for doing theater online and to help actors do their craft.

Some of the goals with the platform was to achieve better pacing where we wouldn't have to just take turns speaking our lines, that they can move in work in three dimensions, and then the other thing was we really wanted to be able to turn their cameras and microphones on and off for them.

We're looking for a system where the actor can turn their microphone and their camera off and opt-in when they log on. Then, the actor would be constantly transmitting, and we would just turn on and off whether it goes out to the audience at a given point. But there's not really any platform to let you do that right now except for OBS Ninja, but it just can't handle the number of connections. We went up to five connections, and then it pretty consistently cut out at five. So, we tried to use Skype because we thought it would allow us to bring the video feeds out individually, but it has this terrible audio quality, and the interface on the cell phone was terrible.

So then we're like, “We're gonna use Zoom for table work,” because it's something that everybody's familiar with and that was kind of the plan anyway because we did all the table work without the handheld cameras.

We tried Jitsi, which is an open source conferencing app. I think that that's probably what we'll try and use in the future because I wrote some programs that would let us pull audio and video out independently and turn microphones on and off, but the public jitsi servers are under a huge load with the pandemic, and we were having some synchronization issues between video and audio. There's a lot of stuff that you can do to tweak it, but we were like, “We can't do this in the middle of rehearsal, so we'll just have to find something that works out of the box.”

Then, we actually went on Discord, which I was super excited about because it could do pretty much everything that we wanted it to, but it was really chugging under the stress. If you use Discord or Jitsu on the browser, you can actually pop the videos out independently within different windows and then capture them into OBS that way, so I would be interested in that as a platform in the future.

When that failed we were going into tech like two days later, and my producer was like, “We just need to do something. We just need to add something that's going to work.” We're going to be on Zoom, and we're just going to have to table with pulling out individual streams for the next go around and work on it in between projects and come in with a solution.

We had a single Zoom window that I was browser-capturing into OBS because you can stream directly out of Zoom to Facebook and a variety of other places, but I decided to use the browser window. I guess it's a window capture feature in Zoom to bring a gallery view window into OBS, so I can do the fades, the titling, and the show that way. We actually figured out a way to use the breakout rooms in Zoom as a way to have an on-stage and off-stage relationship in Zoom and that let us communicate with the actors when they weren't on stage, so they can talk to the stage manager and deal with problems without them having to like text on their cell phones, which is what we did on some previous online shows. More importantly, it meant that the actors didn't have to turn off their cameras in order to go off-stage, so they could set up their next shots, which was a hugely important artistic and aesthetic tool. It let them have some control over what they were doing. They weren't jumping in blind.

We discovered that there's a six second delay between when you click between breakout rooms, and it's pretty consistent. So, we could plan for it. Every entrance became a tech cue, and every entrance was called by the stage manager. She had a line in her script and called actors. Then, they clicked the button and pretty much dropped in right around the time they expected to be in. But, we wound up having a complicated system for taking the video and audio from the onstage breakout room and routing it back into the green room, which was the main room so that folks could hear and see what was going on stage, but the folks on stage couldn't hear or see anything from the green room.

One of the actual cool things that we discovered in doing that setup was pulling the audio out of Zoom and putting it into OBS, I could talk off-stage to the actors and the audience couldn’t hear me. So, anybody could talk to actors on stage during the show and the audience couldn’t hear them, so we were queuing the actors the whole show while they were on-stage. During those fades, I was talking to all the actors and the audience never knew, so that was a really cool discovery.

KM: You also modernized and adapted Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Does the modern adaptation allow an easier translation to Zoom? Does it better speak to our current social moment? Does using technology and virtual performance highlight the story and adaptation in unexpected ways?

MW: When the pandemic first happened and all the theaters started putting their archival content online, I was super excited about that because it meant that I got to see productions that I always wanted to see. I’m a huge Thomas Ostermeier fan from the Schaubühne Theater in Berlin, and I've always wanted to see his Hamlet, and it was amazing. We started watching the Schaubühne’s work pretty much every day, and they did their Enemy of the People, and I was like “Holy Shit! This is what we’re going through. That's what this play is about.” So, I was like “Oh my god, we have to do this play,” and we did.

It was very clear to me that Florian Borchmeyer, the guy who adapted it for the Schaubühne, took a lot of inspiration from the Arthur Miller adaptation and that was really focused on the persecutionof a character who is speaking the truth and the ways in which the majority stands in the way of the truth. I thought that made a lot of sense like pre-Trump, pre-pandemic as a way of looking at play, but I was more interested in pulling up the argument that is already there in the play, which is if we solve the health problem, it will cause an economic problem, and it will be a lose-lose situation.

I was looking to say in order to solve this problem, this community would have had to make different decisions about how they were organizing themselves economically and socially hundreds of years ago. This is the entail of hundreds of years of not building resiliency into the system and of not prioritizing the community above economics. I also wasn't interested in making a play that was like, “Well, just solve the health crisis”, because I wanted to explore that it would cause economic collapse, and the moral question is how did we get ourselves into a situation where we had to make that choice in the first place, and why are we in a situation where solving the health crisis will cause an economic collapse? The real moral culpability is that we’re in that situation.

It's not just that we should solve it. It's that there's a bit of a bigger moral issue here, so I think that speaks to the social moment. There's this issue of the individual hero standing up to the world, and it doesn’t feel good to me because it's the idea of this lone man. It's always a man. It's usually a white man who likes to stand up on his own, speaking the truth. I don't want to support that guy.

For me, Catherine became the center of the play, and I was really interested in the question around when the message is ethical, but the messenger is unethical.

KM: Ghosteater’s producer Joya Scott opens the show by encouraging audience members to engage with the chat feature. How did audiences use this feature throughout your three workshop performances? 

MW: Joya was on there asking questions and engaging people. The audience each night was different. There was some good engagement the first night, but the second two nights it was very little. As an audience member in other shows, the chat can give you that sense of it being live.

I was thinking about when they started doing Saturday Night Live during the pandemic, and it stopped being live. I thought it made a lot of sense because the scale is so much bigger. You can't have two and a half million people on a Zoom call. You also can’t really have two and a half million people in like a Facebook Live Chat, so it makes a lot of sense for them to drop the technologies that provide the liveness feel, and then it doesn't matter whether it's live or not because they don't have any way of having that live studio audience.

I think that we are working on the scale that can work with a live audience. It can be bringing the audience into their zoom call and doing it as a webinar style or using the live chat as an available platform for having a sense of liveness. I think how the audience chooses to engage is sort of up to them. People can be engaged quietly and have a meaningful experience. I think a little courage to let people engage on their own terms is generous to the audience.

KM: What have you learned about yourself as an artist through the production? How are you reimagining your role as a director and designer in this virtual world?

MW: One thing that I learned is that I have to direct in a really different way from than I did live. It feels like directing eight movies at once. I'm realizing, in theater, how much we relied on being live to just get us through to the next moment. Anne Bogart says, “Have the courage to stay in the room,” so you do. You can just stay in the room, and things will happen.

In online theater, the room can just disappear. Then, there's no room anymore. The room starts making artistic demands on you. It's like being asked to design your own theater while you're making the play, so the building is not a given; the theater stage is not a given.

There’s the issue of every entrance and exit being a tech cue, it's not just the actor. You can't just say, “The actor will figure it out.” The actor and the technician have to work together on literally everything because everything is mediated. You can never just fall back on the physical presence of the actor in the way that you could onstage to solve a technical issue. You can't cut the tech when it doesn't work.

I found that we have to do a lot more planning in advance. I am not the kind of director that comes in and has like a prompt book and is like, “You stand here, you stand here, and this is where the lights are going to be.” I was doing work with technology, and it was always really important for me that the technology be organically integrated into the dramaturgy piece, and often that meant discovering some of what the technology is doing during rehearsal. I hate shows where you come in, and it feels like they’ve plopped the design and the technology down on top of a staging and an acting concept that they've never tried out beforehand, and they're just sort of standing next to one another and they don't have anything. I just hate that, so that led to a particular way of working to kind of overcome that and that way we're working isn't working as well in the digital realm because it doesn't give the actors enough to stand upon. What I'm finding is that I might have to find it in between ways of working, where I have to come in with an idea and a plan for everything. I think what I'm going to do is to then say, “This is just a starting point, but we've got a plan to fall back on when things start to fall apart.”

In the past, the fallback plan was you're on stage, so something will happen. The tools are much more limited, like when you're on stage, you're standing there and that's good enough. When you're being mediated by a camera, there's so many more possibilities for how you could be presented to the audience.

Are you up close, or even on camera? Are you being manipulated visually in some way? We just have to make more choices about those things in advance, so I think that's kind of the big takeaway artistically in terms of how I’m changing as a director and a designer.

KM: What advice do you have for leaders or directors of a Zoom gathering?

MW: I read your rehearsal best practices document and realized so much of this stuff is stuff that we came up independently on our own too. I realized there was some commonality to these experiences.

I think maintaining trust in the rehearsal room is super important and keeping everybody oriented emotionally to the idea that this is new and that nobody has ever done this before. The guideposts and feedback you’re used to figuring out how you're doing, they're not going to be there anymore.

I felt that it was really helpful to keep telling folks that nobody's ever done this before. This is totally, totally new, so the pride that we need to take in our work is not like whether it's great, but whether we are solving the problems that we set out to solve, whether we're making new discoveries or not, and that means articulating some really concrete achievable goals and questions to orient yourself.

It’s important to come back and say, “This is a workshop. This is about building infrastructure. This is about building best practices for future productions, it's about getting comfortable with the technology and making discoveries, and this is about looking at the existing virtual theater practices and saying, “How can we contribute to the community in terms of solving some of the issues that keep cropping up over and over again, particularly in terms of pacing, characterization, and so on and so forth?”

There’s this great scene in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that I like as a metaphor for what's going on. In the scene, they're in a car and Mac is throwing up blood. They are taking him to the hospital, and he throws up blood all over the person next to him. Danny DeVito turns around after he throws up blood, and he says: “Could I offer you a nice egg in this trying time?”

I keep thinking I want to make virtual theater that is more than just a nice egg.

I want to make virtual theater that is more than just “Well, we’ve got this. It’s not appropriate. Nobody wants it, but it’s a gesture.” I want to get beyond making a gesture because we feel like we have to make a gesture and rather make something that's engaging in its own right.

KM: On that note, after we can come together in-person, would you still keep this kind of virtual work going?  

MW: If audiences want it, sure. I hope that when we do get back into shared physical space that we allow our experiences online to inform what we do moving forward. I don't get the sense that many people were happy with what we were making prior to the pandemic whether that's for artistic or equity reasons. I think there's a lot of discontentment in theater, and I hope that we let these experiences form how we continue to make theater.

For me personally, it's always flabbergasted me about why we don't engage with the internet in live performance. Why don't we stream plays, and why don't we engage with technology? Everyone is always twisted up in knots about engaging young people, but they don't want to put technology on stage or engage with technology in any way. 

 I would want to get rid of having everybody in their own spaces and not being in touch with one another in current digital performance. That's something that I'm very eager to get beyond, but streaming is great. I like engaging with audiences in different places and with larger bigger audiences. We're trying to put together a collaboration where we act with folks in Moscow. I never would have been able to do that prior to this, and it's also forcing everybody, whether they want to or not, to make work that engages with the 21st century.

Digital theater admits that we live in a world that's mediated through the internet and where the internet exists.

Sometimes, I do feel like theater does attract artists because it's a place where it's okay to be nostalgic about life in the early 20th century. So many plays are set in the 30s! Why is that? I think it’s a nostalgia for a time where we didn't have to deal with the alienation of the Internet and screens. I think that it's a way for people out of the constant bombardment of technological hyper-capitalism. I sympathize with that, but I don't share it. I think that desire, it actually robs theater of its relevance to an audience because that approach to theater doesn’t really have anything to offer and also makes it really difficult for us to ask pertinent questions.

It's not just about who we are representing, but it's also the context in which we're representing them. If we're not representing the technological hyper-capitalism situation that we're in, then we’re not actually representing ourselves and the people in our world, regardless of their identities, because we're then not representing the context, and those two things go hand in hand.

Is there anything else you would like to let us know? 

We're going to be finishing An Enemy of the People and doing a full production of it. With An Enemy of the People, the next steps are to get into the language of the camera and blocking. For the workshop, we were just trying to build the infrastructure. It was one of those “walk before you can run” kind of things. We wanted to get the script, get the infrastructure, and then take some tentative steps. We really want to dig in and make art with it.

I think some of the discoveries that we made are leading to some potential future projects around the idea of domestic intimacy and private versus public space. I had noticed on your rehearsal best practices sheet that you had also picked up on the idea that these spaces are first and foremost people's private spaces, and they belong as their living spaces first.

There were issues around the idea of how much we can ask people to transform their spaces in order to make them fit with the artistic process that we've had. When we are in the theater, it welcomes a transformation, but not so in people's living spaces. The idea of respecting those spaces is important.

I want to do something that thematizes that and asks the questions about private versus public space and the ownership of space. How do we occupy private space together? How do we make it private space in our emotions? How are our emotional experiences shaped by spaces that we are in, especially under quarantine?

learn more about Matthew Watkins.