Sarah Gancher
Fill in the Play by Sarah Gancher is a theatrical experiment: “Mad Libs” meets improv game meets play. Fill out the form and a PDF of a one-of-a-kind play will be automatically emailed to you. Fill in the Play is a commission from Play At Home and The Playwrights Realm.
interviewed by Elena Araoz
Elena Araoz: I must say, right off the bat, that every live performance artist, right now, wants to reach out through technology and create that feedback loop between artist and audience - where both their creative energies affect each other. Your project Fill in the Play gave me exactly that experience. I felt that you were sculpting my response and that I was affecting the outcome. I also felt, without speaking to anyone else who was participating in your fill in the blank “Mad Libs” style play, that I was in community. I kept wondering about how other people would fill in the blanks; how some might create a fantasy science fiction, like I did, or some might try to create realism. I have become hugely curious about the other Fill in the Play scripts floating around in email inboxes and I want to read them. Your project has given me an ideal experience, where I thought of myself as audience and as co-creator. And the sense of whimsy and play, without even leaving my kitchen table, was exactly what I needed right now in these unknown times. Thank you for that.
Can you discuss how you came to this audience participation idea for a new play commission?
Sarah Gancher: I knew that the Play at Home initiative was intended to create plays for families to read together at home. I was thinking a lot about the vast expanse of time that lay before us at the beginning of quarantine. I started asking myself: do I want to write a single use play—something that can be read or experienced only once? Would there be a way to make something that could be experienced anew over and over again? And how could I make it funny? Years ago I used to make Hip Hop Mad Libs with my friends—you take lyrics to a well-known song and turn them into mad libs, making sure that the right words rhyme, and that syllable counts match (“three syllable adjective. Now a three syllable noun that rhymes with that adjective.”) I wondered whether I could make an entire ten minute mad-lib play. The technology component came in when I started to realize that with the level of complexity I was imagining, it was unfair to ask a reader to keep track of their own responses.
EA: Without giving any spoilers, Fill in the Play seems to be speaking to our time as it asks the audience/co-creator to think about community, leadership, and plague. Do you see this work as activist or political?
SG: No, I just see it as timely. Perhaps it is political in that Fill in the Play asks the people participating to imagine solutions to problems like the ones that our elected officials have been unable or unwilling to solve.
I teach playwriting at NYU Tisch’s Department of Dramatic Writing and at The New School for Drama. I always tell my students that a play is a thesis about how change happens in the world. In some ways, Fill in the Play is really just a container, allowing users (participants? audience members? collaborators? players?) to plug their own ideas into the story infrastructure that secretly underpins most of our mainstream movies, TV shows, and plays. It’s an infrastructure that has ancient roots in Greek theater, which of course was a way for the Athenian community to wrestle with questions of identity, accountability, responsibility, guilt, etc. The legacy of Greek theater has also been on my mind—maybe because of Oedipus, a leader who thought he was curing a plague when really he was the cause of the plague all along.
EA: Have you read the plays that are generated by the Google form you created and do any of them surprise you?
SG: I have read many! I love how much I learn about the person (or people) filling in each form. We’ve received responses by four year olds and eighty year olds. Some are extremely literal, others are incredibly fanciful. Some of the dialogue imagined is really good!
EA: Have you received any feedback or interesting stories from participants?
SG: Many high school and middle school drama classes from all over the country have been filling in the play together during remote learning. That makes me so incredibly happy!
EA: What was your practical process to form the questions in a way that creates grammatically correct answers that further the story?
SG: Very tricky! It required a lot of trial and error. My technical partner, Rory Kulz, is a brilliant actor who is also a great software engineer. He helped me to build the structural skeleton that users fill out. By filling out a few forms together and looking at the results, we were able to start to see what types of guidance that users would need to make responses that would fit. We also learned about how much users could stand to fill in before getting frustrated and giving up. If you can believe it, the first draft was about twice as long!
EA: Has this unique process of co-writing with the assistance of technology taught you anything about your art making and your own voice?
SG: I set out to create a totally classical, Hero’s Journey style structure that would feel so familiar that my voice would sort of disappear. However, I always joke that any play I write ends at least five times and the first version of Fill in the Play… ended five times. That still cracks me up.
It’s certainly made me want to continue these types of experiments! Next on my list is doing an entire 30 minute television spec script in this style—”Fill in the Rick & Morty Episode.”
EA: Once we can gather again in a theatre, is this a process that you would continue?
SG: Maybe! This pandemic has me hungering and thirsting for new forms, experimentation, blowing up form and throwing old styles out the window. I just want to make things that feel totally new, but still help us to understand who we are, where we are coming from, where we are going. I want to help myself and others imagine a new world, a new way of being together.
