RIchard Biever and James Ruth

Into the Woods by Richard Biever and James Ruth

interviewed by Elena Araoz

Elena Araoz: The role that you both play in relationship to each other is suddenly a new kind of collaborative experiment. From what I understand, James, you are the Virtual Director. I think that title is fantastic, because if you are called a Stage Manager, that only encompasses a small portion of what you do. You are part performer, as any stage manager is, and yet, there's a technical expertise needed to manipulate the production live, and you are making a lot of visual and aesthetic decisions. Can you speak to how your collaboration developed over time, how you stepped into this role and why you feel this new title is so important?

Richard Biever: We initially thought it was just going to be some scenes and songs from Into the Woods - four or five songs and several of the scenes and then call it a day. And I think the thing that kicked it off was I put a Facebook post up that said - we’re trying to do this thing, and that's when James said, “Hey, we're doing it already with plays.”

And so that's what started the whole thing from “Maybe it's going to be selections,” to “Perhaps we could do the whole thing.” That’s what we told James, and he said, “Oh no, we could do the whole thing,” without hesitation.

James Ruth: It was sort of a big dream at the beginning. So there was very little to reference when it came to putting a whole musical together online. I was confident that it could be done, but I was saying so without guarantee. And I thought - All right, I made this promise, I have got to figure out how this can be done.

I knew right from the beginning, just because of my background in computer science that I had to solve what the problems are first. And part of it was figuring out what songs can be done live and can't be done live.

As far as how the title came about. pretty early on, I thought - Okay, I'm sort of like the Technical Director. My most important responsibility is running the actual stream out of my house. For any live stream, there is a point on the network, on the World Wide Web, that it comes out of, and my house becomes that point. Somebody who can post the live stream out of their house, somebody who has the technology and the infrastructure to put it out there. I could be the infrastructure that the show needed. And so it was that that made me think - Oh, I'm not quite the Technical Director, I'm the house. You know, when they say 'House is open,” I have pressed the button that says my internet is online. So it became a couple of weird overlaps and responsibilities: stage manager, and house, and technical director. And that is when I thought - I don't think this position exists. I think I'm wearing so many hats at this point. It's got to have its own little name, and so Virtual Director was what came up since this is virtual performance. It is live. But just like virtual reality, it can be live and real without being on a stage.

EA: As theatre artists, I believe that the theater is a very slowly innovating industry…

RB: That was a very kind way to put it.  

EA: Because we can't gather and we have to do things in a different way, suddenly it's the technologists and experimental theatre makers who really are shining, and we realize we are all dependent upon these people. We can't do theatre without a person like you, James. And virtual performance is very polarizing in the theatre community.

RB: I just saw this post. It was beautifully written: “I mourn not hearing ‘Five.’ I mourn going to the theater and getting ready to do our show.” And interwoven in that was the sentiment “I'm not into the virtual thing. I don't want to do it on Zoom. I don't want to be online.” I don't think any theater creator really thinks that they want to do this virtual thing for the rest of eternity. But there may be, on the other side of this, a way to combine things in a way that we hadn't thought of before.

I'm just of that opinion - we are creators, or else we will be locked into creating only in a certain way.

I think our Into The Woods, it’s kind of an outlier in terms of how it was put together and the combination of 75% of it being live and only that 25% being recorded, and that you can actually make it look like a production as opposed to a reading on Zoom.

There has to be an example of something other than what looks like a reading. I agree, if that's all we're doing, that’s not really going to entice viewers. It's not necessarily a theatrical experience. It could be mixed in with other things.

So, last night a scenic designer who I've worked with many times - so I got on Marco Polo for the first time. Whoo. That was fun. Anyway, he was one of the first people on, and he's like, “What are you doing next, because I'm into 3D background design. Just give me something to start working on.” So, people are ready to do stuff.

EA: So Rich, when you do get to go back to doing a play on stage with a live audience, do you feel that this experience will change the way you direct?

RB: My initial thought is about the acting and how big - you know, musical theater, especially, tends to be bigger. And I feel like what we found in Into The Woods was something more intimate, and the show meant something different. So that would be one thing I know for sure that I would take away.

EA: When we go back to the theater and have a live audience, would you still want to keep some of this going?

RB: Yes.

EA: Why, and what keeps that impulse going?

RB: One thing is a wider reach for for actors. I would love to invite more actors of color. Here, only 6% of people are black. Here we are not in a position where we can serve our community as well as we can serve the community using online means.

EA: Let’s talk about the rights to content.

RB: The licensing companies are forging ahead with livestream. But the number of available titles is really small. But they say, “No, Zoom. you can't do them on Zoom.” There's no reality in that statement. And even just the cast coming together to do a livestream, how, how are we going to do that? So I hope that they become aware that the whole point of them moving toward with livestream was to give their authors a chance to make money. But if you limit the whole Zoom hybrid thing -

EA: Do you feel because you did the production online that your audience was different than it would have been if you were doing it in a theater?

RB: Well, the problem with Into The Woods was they really restricted what we could do. We couldn't publicize it. So anybody who has seen it was invited. We couldn't just put it out there and sell tickets.

EA: And why couldn't you publicize it?

RB: I think the only reason they let us do this at all was because of James Lapine. And I think they knew they were heading into this announcement saying this was not going to be a possibility. We're not gonna let people do it this way. I talked to a guy from another rights holder  about another title, and he said - we're not going to allow it, because “it's an awkward blend of live theater and film.” So I'm kind of pessimistic about it, to be honest with you, in terms of the major titles. So I'm looking for original stuff.

EA: Did you develop any best practices for rehearsal that you might not have done if you were all on s stage?

RB: Because we were able to rehearse the show before the pandemic, it skews the results. But knowing what I know now about how to do it - first of all, I would do a lot of things individually and not call many people at all. I would do in very small chunks. I would like to not waste any people's time anyway, but especially on Zoom, the Zoom fatigue, the whole just being online all the time.

JR: We had a Slack channel. For the cast and the crew and every, every single student from both casts, and me, and Rich. Everybody should always be watching the Slack because at any given time, we might need something from someone, whether it's a recording or we need them to download this background. We just needed an always open channel for everyone involved. Doing this with email - if that Slack channel had to all be email chains. I'd go insane. It was just so much information.

RB: And then just in terms of teaching music. It's really tough, but there are these new technologies coming out that are supposed to allow you to go with real time music teaching. That will be a significant advance in terms of the learning process. Real Time Music Solutions is this new thing that's coming out with real time rehearsal.

JR: Yeah, they're running a beta program right now which you can jump into. I imagine, they've solved the latency problem, they've just sort of figured out a way to wrangle the latency, where they sort of compute everyone's latency and then they link everyone up. So when the music director or the teacher receives everyone's feeds, it’ll be simultaneous. They’ll hear everyone at once, but all of the other people, you know, they'll all be out of sync with each other because the only important thing is that of the teacher.

EA: James, do you ever feel like in this work that you've run into the limitations of technology where you say, “Oh, if only I can make it do this,” or do you feel like you have the ability to to make it do whatever you want?

JR: You know, I really come from an engineering background and I see these things as problems with solutions. I'm trying to think. Let me look at my little notes here from the show if there was really anything that I was like, “Oh, I'm so sad technology isn't there yet…”

RB: I've never heard you say that.

JR  Here's what I'll say. The other issue that is not so solvable right now has to do with how expensive video feeds are on bandwidth, and any company, including Zoom or Skype or Discord or anything, is always going to use algorithms to get video feeds out faster, because you want it to be as live as possible. And what that means, sometimes is losing information, compression. Real time video feeds are still very expensive, and the platforms that deliver them are not cheap or free. I guess that's less of a technology-can't do-this as much as we're not in a place where the infrastructure supports that being really possible. So even right now, you know, looking at both of your feeds. I can see the compression, you know, watermarks, whatever you want to call it. You know, Rich is a five minute drive away and because of the way Zoom works, it has to take his feed and send it to Zoom's servers and then it sends it from wherever the Zoom server is back to me. So I think that's probably the one thing I would say - video compression in conference calls is another big hurdle.

EA: As you, Rich, look for the next play or musical that you want to do, is there particular content that you're looking for? Is there a particular kind of cast size or way that it's written as you think about this translating easily for Zoom?

RB: Well, it's funny. I now think about things in terms of Zoom. I think intimacy of the content. I think if it's about scope, how big you can make things, then it may have trouble. You may not be able to translate that into this one if you need a cast of thousands, like if you're a high school. That's going to be tough when your ensemble comes out, and they're 75 people.

So I think like Company. I think it would be perfect for this format. Because the whole point is you're trapped in space in New York and there's people crowding in.

JR: On the flip side, I think something that is a little more unique to this medium than traditional staging is the fact that we are working in a space that is unreal. So you know, if, for instance, if you're doing, Peter Pan is the first thing that came to mind, you don't need a fly system. You don't need any sort of rigging. You don't need anything. You can create impossible spaces online. And there will be pieces out there that this is going to be incredible for, for that reason. I think the intimacy is really important. And this has a lot going for it in that regard. But I think, on the flip side, if you go otherworldly, if you don't go so intimate and mundane, you can have a ton of opportunities.

EA: I wonder if this kind of work will bring us a little bit more theatricality and imagination into our American theater.

RB: I don't see how it couldn't because you really have to rethink, and really so much more is possible.

EA: James, you’re an actor, besides being this technologist and Virtual Director. Do you feel like this is going to change your practice once you can go back into the theater?

JR: You know, before this, I wasn't doing a ton in State College in other disciplines. I was pretty much just doing the acting thing. But I do think this has sort of shone a light on me, that I may or may not have actually wanted in the first place. Like “Oh, look at what James is capable of.” And now that knowledge is out there, I'm learning quickly. I'm getting a lot of emails from other people, both locally and a few from back home, who are asking for help and assistance. I'm sort of finding myself now in new opportunities I didn't ask for but I'm almost certainly going to pursue because I love working with these people and exploring new opportunities and teamwork.

EA: Okay, so do you think you'd be more adventurous even on your next project?

JR: Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely.

RB: I'm excited about it. I'm not upset, I'm excited about it. It's caused not only a different part of my brain to be activated about how to think about a show, but also what kinds of shows we could do. And so it's like a whole new way to look at it, a new way of being excited about it. Yeah, I would prefer not to go back immediately because it will just take us back to exactly what we were doing before. If I had to plan a season starting in September, it would almost assuredly be a typical kind of thing that we would do.

JR: Feels like a waste of potential because everybody would go back to expecting normal stage theater, and we wouldn't have the chance to really show them what can be done and everything we've learned. So I'm glad he's sort of morbid, you know that we are still stuck in place, because we have this time.

RB: Time. Yeah, exactly. It's time to experiment.

Richard Biever and James Ruth have made their extensive webinar “How To Create A Musical On Zoom” available on demand here.