Katie Pearl

Katie Pearl

interviewed by Elena Araoz

Elena Araoz: When you were moving from making a stage production of The Method Gun to a Zoom production, how do you consider it?  Are you making an adaptation?

Katie Pearl:  As my students pointed out to me a lot, they really feel like it would have been a radically different experience if we hadn’t been in the room together for five weeks. So it definitely felt like a translation to Zoom. I was already embarked on an investigation that I am really interested in, which is - How can a play that has been devised by a company have a further life? Do you just repeat what the company did or take on the prompt that ended up making their play and remap, redevise it based on that prompt? So we were already in a mode of adaptation - adapting that script to this company, to this university, and the things they cared about. We expanded the cast. We were adding characters. 

So when we got to Zoom, it felt very clear to me that the first thing we had to do is go back to the beginning and just read the play together on Zoom to see where it was going to come alive and what we had to let go of. The impulse was very clear, but it was a long process. It took us another five weeks to complete the translation to Zoom, which happened up until probably an hour before the first performance. Some of it was we had to go through the technical learning process, we had to discover the theatricality, we had to refind the joy in the midst of deep grief. It was important to me, and ultimately to them, that the play acknowledged the moment that we were in, in that site-specific mentality.  

So there was a lot of rewriting and finding a new way to tell the story that conflated with the experience the students were having. And then once we got to runthrough time, we had a whole learning curve of “Oh god, this is way too long.” I refuse to have my colleagues sitting at their laptops thinking “Oh my god, when is this going to be over?” I wouldn’t let that happen. So we had to cut a lot. 

So the word I am most comfortable with is translation. It’s translated to Zoom. But adapted is probably accurate too. The text isn’t written for this medium, so you cannot be just like [gesturing throwing her hands at the screen as if throwing the play into Zoom]. But I was already working with a play that had given me permission to do that kind of adaptation.

The strength of Zoom is an intense intimacy, potential intimacy with the audience. I talk to my actors all the time: “You have to take responsibility for that person who is on the other side of that screen, watching you on the other side of that green dot. And you need something from them. You have to request that.” So we are all going to have our own aesthetics for it. My aesthetic is high on humanity and low of technology, which is sort of my aesthetic in real life, too.

EA: When you think about directing a production with your students in the fall, and you haven't had those five weeks together, how do you think you will start?  And how will you take care of them? Can you read them well enough over Zoom to really take care of a student who might be struggling?

KP: Well, I actually got a little glimpse of that this weekend. I started teaching a class, a Masters class in site-specific work. And I hadn’t met any of the students. There are 9 masters students. My instinct was that before we met together as a class, I had to have one-on-one get-togethers with them because I had to get to know them.a little bit. And that really helped a lot. 

But care - I do think it’s really helpful to make a hierarchy of priorities when you're working on Zoom, that puts care right at the top, if it was not already at the top when you are in real life. I know for some of us, it is always at the top, and for some of us, it’s not.  

I felt it was very easy to read them over Zoom. And if it was not easy to read people, I would just ask them. At one point, I acknowledged how taxing this was to do. And we came up with things that would allow us to sustain over time. Many of the students said, “I depend on this time, because it’s where we feel connection and community.”  At one part, I had to stop everything and take a good part of rehearsal, taking people through exercises to identify why it was important to continue.: “Why are we doing this? What for?” And one student one day said, “I can’t do it. I can’t find a why.” And that actually found its way into the play. He said “When I am at school doing this and I leave rehearsal, I feel changed. Something is changed. But when I leave Zoom rehearsals, I leave and I feel nothing has changed inside me.” And I think almost that exact language ended up in the play. But then a week later, he was like, “Oh my god, Ithink I found my why.” So we could celebrate that.

EA: You mentioned journaling, did you take journaling breaks?

KP: We took dance breaks. I think we all realized the value of dance breaks.

One of the things we realized is that a lot of the energy comes from the walking to rehearsal and the hanging out after rehearsal. So one thing I learned - they started asking for it actually - is that when I had the post-rehearsal debrief with the stage manager and the Assistant Directors, they were like, “Can you guys go into a breakout room so we can keep hanging out together?” And I think that was really helpful for people. 

EA: How are we going to help the incoming freshman who do not know anyone and will need to make friends?

KP: I’ve been thinking a lot about the buddy system, like at camp when you go swimming and you have your buddy. I think there is something to that, especially in hybrid classes, if some people are Zooming in and some people are in class - to create buddy pairs.

One of the things that gave us a lot of pleasure is some of the warm-ups that we did, it was sort of fun and silly to try to translate them. We did a lot of weight sharing in the room. There is a disembodiment to being on Zoom - like you and I, our bodies are not in the same room. I have found that particularly in moments of tension, in a moment of conflict, when we are in the room together, I can get very affected in my body, rattled physically and almost feel myself losing myself. And I have noticed when those same moments happen over Zoom, I am still in my body.  Because it’s a different kind of energy coming at me. It’s a different kind of threat somehow.  And I am able to hold my ground in a different way. 

Physically, in terms of Method Gun there was a lot of breathing. We also leaned into the neuro-linguistic programming cognitive behavioral ideas that your brain doesn't really know whether you are doing something or imagining doing something. And we layered that with the Stella Burden technique. So if you can’t be with someone, then you really have to work your imagination to have that experience, which is essentially what Method acting is doing anyway. Then we just extended that into our own rehearsal practice.  

It took my student directors a long time to realize that they didn’t just have to sit in front of their computers, or their actors didn’t just have to sit in front of their computers. It took them a long time to realize that.  

EA: Why do you think it took them so long to figure out that they did not need to just sit in front of the computer?

KP: I suspect it has something to do with students being really good at following the rules, and the rules of being in front of a computer - you sit in front of it and talk to people. And I think they felt very responsible to the script. At the beginning, they didn’t feel an invitation or a freedom to experiment with that.  At the very beginning of Method Gun, we went through that very awkward, “Okay, let’s have everyone stand in your room and try to do the blocking we had in the studio. Do I look over here?” We had to go through that phase. But I do think it was about, “Am I allowed to do this?  I don’t know.”  And because they don’t really have a site-specific mentality.  They don’t go into it thinking, “What is this? What can this do?” [KP moves her body around the room and screen.] But the actors got way more invested once they started doing that, because the actors are totally bored. They were just sitting there script reading over and over again. 

EA: Like tablework ad nauseam?

KP: Right. I’m curious about how the industry is going to respond. What is an Arthur Miller play on Zoom? How much freedom do we have? 

EA: Do you feel there is anything that you have learned through this process that you will take with you when you go back into the rehearsal room?

KP: Oh, I think this has made me a better director, because I think that I have had to become way more precise. I think it is partly about precision, but I think it’s partly about this really activated sense that you can’t just count on your audience to sit there and watch you. They might just get up and go and cook some food in the kitchen if you’re not really requiring them to be there. That even the play, as I was conceiving of it in real life, which I still think would have been very interactive with the audience, I don’t know that I would have had the stakes of holding the audience there that we ended up with.  

The play went to so many different places. In real life the play could hold that. But on Zoom I just started to feel that there was no consistent ground that the audience was coming back to . It was just like another weird thing, another weird thing, another weird thing.  So we ended up cutting because of that. The audience had to have a ground that they could return to. And some of that led us to the decision that in the group scenes, the actors would always return to their same spots on the screen. So the audience, even if they didn’t know they were doing it, could become familiar with where this person was. 

It’s weird because some of that Method-y work or energetic work or emotional work was paired with such prosaic instructions like, “The second you click on, you have to move your arms a lot.” It’s a very weird combination because that [KP waving her arms] translated energy to the audience. 

The whole cast and I were really startled when we got to a place with the climactic scene. We had just gotten to a point in rehearsal, before we all went on spring break, where we were working on that scene, and it was very affecting. It was affecting for the actress doing it and it was affecting for everybody else. And I don’t think we ever thought we would get back to that moment again. I don’t know if the audience was affected by it, but when we did that scene and felt that communal moment, even though everyone was everywhere, it was very -- This question of “Is it theatre?” is not that useful. I don’t find it to be a useful question. Sure we can call it theatre. I like thinking of theatre as the exchange between a performer and an audience person, so it that sense, sure, it’s theatre. Otherwise, no. It’s its own thing. It’s definitely not film. It’s definitely not TV. And it’s definitely not live theatre. It’s just what it is. It’s Zoom performance, for better or for worse. But when we started feeling the things that were being felt via the practice of theatre, that was really affirming, and I think was one of the things that helped us carry on. 

EA: Do you think when we are back in a theatre that there will be aspects of this that you’ll want to go back to? Do you ever imagine doing this again, this Zoom performance, or is this just 100% out of necessity?

KP: I think it should continue if only for the really basic reasons of bringing a creative event to communities that couldn't have it otherwise. I also really love the idea of this long distance collaboration. I love the way it sits in my brain, this kind of intimate connection that we are making over distance. 

I hadn’t really thought about combining it with live theatre necessarily. Although, I’m continually moved by seeing an empty Zoom screen, seeing into someone’s space that doesn’t have anybody in it, yet. Kirk Lynn, who wrote The Method Gun, has another play called Cherrywood that I kind of want to do. It’s about this group of kids who are squatting. They break into a house in a suburban neighborhood and have this crazy dangerous party. And they talk a lot about the neighbors. And I have this image of wanting a Zoom window into the real time of the neighbors’ house, so we always have this clock of just life going on as this crazy party is happening. 

I think it’s great. It’s definitely not a substitute, but there is something - for those of us that like composition, there is a lot to play with. 

It was really interesting how the responsibility of the actor went way, way, way up. They were their own crew. And in that sense, it extended the devising ethos.  

EA: Do you ever feel like you are prying too much into people's privacy?

KP: Not really. One of my favorite moments of the process was the moment when Liz, who played the main female character - we were working on one of the final scenes, and she was in her bedroom and she said, “Do you still want me to light something on fire?”  And I was like, “Yeah, how do you think your parents will feel about that?” And she said, “I think they would be okay with it.” And so she did. But then the production team got involved. And then they were like, “Okay, so you are having fire. Where is the closest fire extinguisher? What about the smoke alarm? You better unplug the smoke alarm.” They tried to do their job within her own house: “Where is the bucket of water? Can you show us the bucket of water?”