Philip Santos schaffer and isabel quinzaños alonso

Philip Santos Schaffer

Isabel Quinzaños Alonso

interviewed by Katharine Matthias

Katharine Matthias: You invite the audience to experience the first act of this play from a dark, confined space. I sat in my closet for the first act. What inspired this invitation to audience members?

Philip Santos Schaffer: The play was always intended to take place in a closet. When we first started working on it, it was designed even more specifically to be in a closet. The idea was that we would travel to an audience members' home, and they would sit in their closet and the actor would sit on the other side of the closet and talk to them through a baby monitor.

One of my dreams in life is to write a play for every room in an apartment. WalkUpArts has a show called The End of the World Bar and Bathtub that I wrote, and I perform in people's bathrooms. So, this play takes place in a closet.

When we shifted to doing it over the phone, which largely was because of Covid-19 and not being able to work in person, it felt like we could still maintain the feeling of being in a dark, cramped place, while giving the audience a little more agency over their experience of the space.

The instructions for creating your space hopefully start off the relationship between the audience and the experience of the play in a place that's collaborative. I think that’s key to setting up a positive interactive relationship, because you [the audience] are already our collaborator and the set designer for this play.

When I was writing those instructions given to the audience member, a lot of what I was thinking about was how much I miss theater and how I wanted to find a way for a person to create for themselves. I miss the feeling of walking into a lobby, hearing the music playing, seeing all of the people, and being told there's 15 minutes before the show begins by the chimes playing. It felt like the shell around the play and the context in which it takes place could lean heavily on this feeling of walking in and finding your seats.

Isabel Quinzaños Alonso: Back in 2018 when we were test driving the idea for the play, we did a series of very controlled performances, so we could understand how people reacted to being asked to get into a closet, stay in the dark, and talk to a stranger through a baby monitor.

One of the really surprising findings from the feedback that we were given was “It's great! Longer! Make it Darker! More Silence!” It was counterintuitive, and it reflects where we were at in 2018. I think a lot of people were feeling a desire to have space for themselves and disconnect from the world. 

Now, it’s two years later, and we’re sort of in an inverse position where we're inviting people to still get that intimacy and space for themselves, but the focus now seems to be on what the audience gets out of the connection with other people because everyone's been so isolated.

KM: You interspersed Baby Jessica’s story [a true story about Jessica, a baby who fell down a well in Midland, Texas, and was stuck for 58 hours] with a conversation between a performer and an audience member. How did you find this balance between the Baby Jessica story and the conversation with the performer and audience member? 

PSS: The script was always built to be interactive. There was always the intention of opening it up to the audience to respond. I'm interested in interactive theater where the audience member is given the opportunity to learn something about themselves and then immediately to share it, which is something that I crave when I go to the theater.

When I'm just sitting in a chair, watching a play, I always have this feeling of “Well, what's my character? Who am I supposed to be?” If I have a feeling about the play, I want to be able to say, “Oh! That's a great point!”

I'm interested in making plays where the moment you learn something, you can go, “I just realized something,” so the structure of the play was always built to contain that experience.

For all of the questions that are asked [to the audience member], I've put my answers to those questions. Then, the actor can read my answers, write their answers, and then the audience member responds to the performer’s answers. I feel that anything that I'm going to ask the actor or the audience member to do, I should also do. It's sort of a secret three-way conversation where Mary Round [the actress in Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play] and I are in this little dialogue. Then, Mary and the audience members are in the dialogue that is the play.

IQA: I keep thinking that the whole experience of directing this play has been a complete relinquishing of control of any kind. There's nothing about getting something tight and making sure that everything happens in the right sequence. It's been so much more about enabling the experience to happen and giving the tools to the performer to make sure that they're in a good place. It felt a lot like therapy. It felt a lot like making sure everyone was good, centered, and able to relate in a way that felt safe, fun, and engaging. There was also so much discovery about what the play wanted to be. 

At the very beginning of the process, we got stuck in a place where we were trying to figure out who Mary was playing. In this play, is she a Puck-like, fairy creature that lives in a well, and is she there to guide you through the journey of being stuck in a well? Is she always just waiting for Baby Jessica to fall? Then, it just stopped mattering who she was, because her role was about being in the moment.

In the same way, the audience members’ participation—in which, part of the time, you’re Baby Jessica and part of the time you’re you—is not about having a perfect logic. It's about the empathetic and real-time experience of sitting and thinking about things that matter for a bit.

KM: Throughout the play, I kept thinking about the line between the audience member being an audience member versus the audience member also being a performer. I kept asking myself, “Is this real or not real?” I would love to hear more about how you dealt with this question of audience engagement. 

PSS: I'm interested in scaling participation. Many of the plays that I make present you with a series of actions that you're invited to take. The idea builds up towards a larger and larger sense of ownership. The End of the World Bar and Bathtub, as an example, is a play where, by the end, audience members are asked to stand in a bathtub with me. 

I think that Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play is built on a similar layering of agency. In the first act, you're just listening. In the second act, it's mainly prompted, and you respond periodically. The third act is much more conversational.

Then, in the fourth fact, you are the questioner. You are the person who is shepherding someone else's experience of this play. People bring different styles to the way that they present. We had one person who was commenting on every question, telling jokes, bringing in this very different inquisitive style, but asking follow up questions that they made up.

We had some people who just read the questions very rote, don't give their own answers, and lean in with “I'm playing the part of an interviewer.”

I think that is exciting because by the time you get to the fourth act, you’ve spent three hours with us, and now you are in charge. You decide someone else's experience.

That's an important moment in shifting the experience from receiving empathy to acting with compassion. It's not just about building empathy. Now you steer the ship, and how will you choose to bring this experience to someone else?

IQA: When Philip came with this proposal, it was very exciting to think about getting people out of their comfort zones, bit by bit, and helping them understand that this is not a scary experience.

My husband is someone who would run far away if you told him he had to participate in anything, and yet he's done a couple of trials for us. The play is designed to help you find your feet, to take away that fear of being exposed, and to engage with the piece on a very different plane.

We are in a situation that is demanding that theater evolves. There's something really exciting about breaking away from that traditional model of experiencing something and keeping it to yourself. By asking the audience to put a bit more of themselves in the play, the audience’s experience intrinsically becomes theater, because it’s a unique experience every time you do it.

KM: For the third and fourth acts of the performance, you provide a list of questions that one audience member asks another. How did you come up with the questions for the performance? What were some of the challenges you encountered coming up with this list of questions? How did you navigate the rehearsal process for this part of the performance?

PSS: I always knew it was going to be 58 questions because Baby Jessica was in a well for 58 hours. I like having frameworks like that as a playwright. It helps me know that there are parameters. When I was writing the questions, I was thinking that each question would take about a minute, so it would be an hour long, which has certainly not been the case. Now, that act is scheduled for the possibility of taking an hour and a half.

I started with questions closer to the questions about Baby Jessica specifically and built out from there, because that's the meat of the first parts of the play. Then, the questions that started coming up were questions of how we do this act together. That's where the “How are you? Do you need anything from me?” and earlier check-in questions arose. From there, I think it just started popping off.

I'm interested in asking questions like, “What do I want to be asked? What's something that no one has ever asked me that I'm excited to talk about? What is something I do not want to be asked?” 

There were way more questions at first. Then, at a certain point, there were way fewer. We've gone up and down. Some were not interesting or didn't bring up interesting responses. There are some that I had written in that are obviously just my opinion with a question mark at the end, and I tried to take all of those out because that’s very didactic. Once we started reworking the play, I started adding back or adding in new questions that are more directly related to the moment we're living in while trying to avoid (again) didacticism, and trying to avoid saying “Here's what I think” or “What do you think about what I think?” 

For me, “Do you think donating money is a form of activism?” is a really important question right now. That’s a question where I’m like “I don’t know.” Some days, I think it's a part of activism. But on the other hand, I'm not sure. You’ve got to do more than that. It’s exciting to me that I don't have a good answer for that, and that's how the play started to expand. We spent a good amount of time asking each other these questions, asking ourselves, and taking notes on what sparked a good response.

IQA: Back in 2018, when we first started doing this, we didn't get through Act Three properly because we needed to figure out how we get to strangers to meet. It felt very daunting.

Then suddenly, we were in this situation, and we were like “we'll just get them to speak on the phone. That feels pretty safe. It feels like there’s a good amount of distance there to ask people to participate in this way.”

In terms of rehearsals, I've never really had an experience like this before. As Philip mentioned, we did a couple of sessions where we went through each question with the whole show team. People were sharing answers, and we had one of the best conversations I've had in a long time. We were all engaged.

So, we realized it works. It's doing something. It's guiding a conversation even between us, and we know each other fairly well and we've been working on this for a while. It's engaging us in a way that maybe we hadn't done before. We had to do trial and error to figure it out, and then ask how we give some structure to the people whom we are asking to do this. We didn't want to invade the space so much that we would make people feel self-aware because that goes completely against the idea of asking anyone to do this. 

We tightened that process throughout the previews. That's when we started getting into a much more concrete rhythm. We started building all of the safety mechanisms to answer the question of how we help people be safe. The fewer people we have in the room, the less control we have over what's going to happen. So, we needed to create systems around that. Ultimately it is a big leap of faith about whether  it's going to work. It feels like you’re waiting to see what happens. That's also what's so wonderful about it. 

KM: On that list of questions that you give to audience members, you record the answer to question #54, which will be used for an unseen fifth act. Have the responses you have collected to this question changed how you think about the show?

PSS: I don't think they've changed how I think about the show, but they inform me as a person outside of the show, which I think is the point of recording them. In the end, I always knew that there would be a question that was recorded from this act. I always knew there had to be a fifth act because well-made plays have either three or five acts.

The idea was to have this recorded question, but the question has changed.

I think early on, it was, “What would you say to Baby Jessica while she was in well?” I think in 2018 that was a fun question. It's very nice. It's very sweet. It's a little saccharine. It's very vague.

Now, when we were really approaching it, that simply didn't suffice. It felt like what this act was leading up to become a discussion about how we take care of each other and the world. This became a really clear answer for what to save, and seeing the answers is really meaningful.

I don't think it's changed how I think about the play, but I think it's changed how I think about the world. It’s really exciting to get instructions on how I could help impact the world a couple of nights per week in an email. It's really nice.

IQA: Yeah, I agree. This is a collaborative play now, at this stage. I think Act Five might not change how we feel about the whole of the play, but I think it will inform how we decide to move forward, because it is a collaboration.

KM: This performance also changes per audience member. Given this aspect of chance that is in every performance, how did you navigate virtual rehearsals for the performance?

PSS: Something that I say to Mary Pound [the performer in Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play] a lot, and that I feel generally about the play, is that the script is only the most likely sequence of events. It’s probably what will happen because most likely you will do the script, but it isn't the rules. If something more interesting happens along the way, always pursue that. 

I don't think my presence as the playwright is more important than the audience's desire to know more about this or that element, or for Mary's desire to know more about this or that, so I think the element of chance is built into it intentionally. The possibility of chance also allows for the possibility of the most interesting thing in the room to occur, because there aren’t rules saying, “Actually, you can't move that curtain that is hiding the inner mechanism.”

After college, I worked with The Living Theatre for a few years, and we were doing this play in the park called No Place to Hide, which was the last play that Judith Malina had written before she passed away. There was this one evening when we were doing the show, and about halfway through this guy came and just started screaming at us and cursing at us. We didn't know how to make this person stop, so we just kept going. We did the show. We didn't know what to do. Afterwards, we went off stage, and Judith was in a wheelchair at the time. We all gathered around her and said “We're so sorry. We're so sorry. We didn't know what to do. We're so sorry.”

She said, “No, that was the best performance of the show, because this person had to respond, and they couldn't stop themselves from responding.”

I don't know that I'd have the grace to feel that way. 

When I listen to Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play, and people start veering away from the script, there's a part of me that thinks, “what’s going to happen?!” I start to clench up, but that is something that I'm trying to train out of myself. I think that is my worst impulse. 

IQA: I feel like I come from the very opposite direction. I feel like my job is to imagine how it could all go wrong and try to prepare for that and try to build in language, form, space for the performer to connect with the subject matter and with their own stories.

A lot of performers and a lot of people that want to be in the theater have such a desire to please that they can over-share, over-expose themselves, or open themselves too much. This is a lovely, generous, beautiful impulse, but sadly, we don't have a lot of tools to put it back in.

It used to happen a lot more when I was younger. Now I'm a little bit older, and I know to stay away from those things. So, my main impulse in this role is to be vigilant, to make sure that this is a sustainable experience for the performer, as much as for everyone else on the team and for the audience member. To model how to be in a space, be open, be vulnerable, but not necessarily put yourself in a position of danger or hurt—because we're not going to be there to take care of you next week, tomorrow, or the day after.

That's how I was looking at my role throughout the process.

It's been really exciting to see those off roads, because I feel safe. I feel like we've talked through this. We have ways to figure this out and we have a really good team in place. Everyone is on hand. 

KM: This play started development in 2018. How did moving online change how you approached the material within the play? How has this production changed your approach to making theatre?

IQA: We've had to learn a lot in a very steep curve about Zoom, and about the capabilities to share sound through Zoom, and which computer we want to use. There’s a lot of running around virtually that you don't see, and we had to learn a lot about those practicalities. 

I'm only really impressed by all that work now that I can look back on it. It felt like a very natural progression for us at that moment to be like, “let's do this.” 

It helped that we had been working on this a couple of years ago, and then we took a break. We came back intending to make this happen in 2020. I remember we had one meeting in person. Then the next time, everything was online, and we started joking, “if we can do this on the phone, then this is the most socially distant way that one could ever ask for, because we're only asking for a few people at a time anyway.” That helped us ease in so simply and easily into what this moment demanded of us.

PSS: No one would have to know that there's this sort of large machine that's operating to facilitate two people just having a chat, and to me, that's really exciting. I think that that's what makes it a heightened experience, and what makes it a theatrical experience—even if all of it is going into making a nice conversation on the phone. A huge part of the joy of working on this has been working with WalkUpArts as producers and working with Isabel, Mary Pound [the performer in Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play], and Jorge Olivio [the sound designer and composer]. 

In the context of writing the play, it didn't feel like too much of the writing had to change. I had to write things that buffered the instructions that you get at the beginning of the play: on how to set up your space, and the text messages that you get in between acts. All of that didn't exist before.

For WalkUpArts, an ethos that has always driven us has been trying to ask how we adapt to the situation that we're in and the tools that we have at hand to make something that needs those tools, as opposed to viewing the lack of other tools as a limitation. So, the first play we ever did was in our apartment, because we couldn't afford to rent a theatre. We didn't have connections. The question was, “how we do a show in our apartment that is so specifically in our apartment that to do it in a theater would sort of ruin it?”

I think that was the same approach for Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play. We had to do it over the phone. We could say, “here's the phone version that's sort of a half version of the good thing.” Or we could say, “how do we do this in such a way where even when we can be in person again, we don't want to, because it works over the phone in a way that has become a part of the play?” I feel like that has become true. I don't feel the need to travel to people's homes because the experience you now have is over one device.

For me, immersive is a word that I tend to stay away from just because I think what differentiates the type of plays that I'm trying to make from specifically being immersive is that you're always playing yourself, and you're never asked to be someone other than you—even if the contexts are so imaginary that you are inside of a well. It’s still, to an extent, a little different than some of the experiences that I've had within immersive plays. We tend to leave a little more up to you. 

I'm not enough of a technician to say that we're going to create the entire experience. You have to do some work. You have to imagine it. I think that this hopefully helps create buy-in, that the audience is saying, “I can control some of my experience on this.”

Right now, I'm working on a play that two people perform for each other at home. It's about the room you're in and a lot of it is informed from the process of Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play. A lot of what I've learned has been about the balance between questions and storytelling, and taking care of people, and giving people the tools to take care of each other. I think that that's been a lot of what's been informative for me.

IQA: The other thing that has been so important is learning how to listen in a way that I don't think I ever really understood in the same way that I do now. 

There was a while where we were thinking about using Zoom, and it very quickly became clear that Zoom was going to be the space that we were all going to be living in for so much of the time, but that Zoom just was not going to help the play in any way. It was probably just going to detract from the play. That's when the decision happened to make it completely over the phone.

The play is about connecting to another person through your words, through how you speak, and through your ability to understand what they're saying and understand and relate to it. It’s a weird, happy accident [that it turned out in this form], but also maybe it’s not an accident, because the play was there all along. Now we’re seeing the piece so clearly because the circumstances have led us to not get distracted by other things that this piece doesn't need.

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

PSS: Tickets for Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play are on sale at WalkUpArts.com, and we recently put tickets up through February.