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Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

An Off the Boards Discussion of Annie Dorsen’s “A Piece of Work”

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Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen's A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)
Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)

Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (formerly known as False Peach) came and went from On The Boards last weekend but the conversation goes on — at least it has at Slog, and between this critic and his editor. As I submitted my review I summarized my impressions. This led to a discussion of the show, its intentions, achievements and potential. An edited version of that discussion follows.

SDW: I didn’t much enjoy the show — at least not emotionally. Intellectually I loved it and in no small part because I felt like it failed kind of spectacularly as theatre. This is all the more interesting to me because it feels very close to success. A bit more humanization one way or another could have brought it together.

MVB: I talked to Annie Dorsen [the show’s creator] in advance but still wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It’s also a hard show to review in that the audience will see a different thing every night, as the algorithm reorders itself.

It felt a bit unfinished, and in need of tuning, as a piece. I think the algorithm was accidentally dropping names and scene IDs.

But the main thing I got from it is its resistance (as you noted) to telling me a theatre-story in any way. It was a bit like “an alien writes a play after reading Hamlet.” The alien has no idea about plot structure or character or relationship, all it can do is see word patterns: sets of prepositional phrases. Phrases that being with “O.” It seizes on “favorite” phrases to repeat, like an autistic person sometimes enjoys echoing things. It has a set of literal associations with set direction.

Dorsen talked a good fight about Hamlet as this ur-humanist text, and how this might redress that illusion of personal agency, but I think in fact you could walk out of it feeling a bit affirmed, as a humanist, that there is something more to consciousness than RAM and subroutines.

The failure of the piece as theatre I think rests on the context for it — if you include Dorsen & Co. in, then it’s a story about this attempt to present an algorithmic performance, and the inability of their creation to connect with 95 percent (?) of the audience. As a performance that you just walk in to, the failure is more obvious. You have to understand what is being attempted to “get” it on any level with emotional stakes. I like your notion [in the review] of an installation — what makes the creators think a computer has any interest in a set running time?

That reminds me, I meant to reference David Ives’s Words, Words, Words in which three monkeys (named Kafka, Milton, and Swift) are left in a room with typewriters to see if they’ll eventually write Hamlet. (You really think the percentage of disconnected in the audience was as high as 95 percent?) I was also fascinated by a sense that many thought Scott Shepherd [the lone actor to appear on stage, and then only briefly] was about to say something, and might not have entered for applause but for another scene just before the crew joined him.

Ha! I wasn’t thinking of Ives, but I definitely had a monkeys/typewriters association.

I may be exaggerating. The OtB crowd is famously tolerant of experiment, but I didn’t get the sense that most people were anything but puzzled by it. I think they probably wanted Shepherd to say something, at the close, to be human.

Neurologically, it’s an interesting experiment, because it frustrates the if-then “narrator” in everyone’s head that typically makes sense of things. It’s a bit Zen: boredom and frustration are cultivated as a way of turning off the monkey-mind. After peak boredom, the mind is more associative, less linear, more accepting of this “random” walk through a text.

It still may not amount to much; people have different interests, and this monkeying with consciousness may not rate that highly.

I feel like this show is more successful run as an experiment, asking people to record how they interact with it. Give them a survey on the way in. Seattle would get a kick out of that if they felt they weren’t being messed with.

I’m interested in your point about experimental theatre as an experiment in the double blind sense. Do you think the neurological experiment side of A Piece of Work would have been as interesting had Shepherd delivered the piece in its entirety? What if the only change were that Shepherd delivered all of the vocalizations instead of the computer-generated voices? Also, do you know if Shepherd was repeating lines delivered in his ear from the computer? What’s his role in this? I feel like his performance mostly served to highlight the non-theatricality of the rest of the performance.

I love your notion that the audience wanted him to say something, to act. I want to believe that this was intentional on the part of Dorsen, et al.

I think people would respond much more readily to the idea of a survey than a “talkback.” It’s weird, but people love being in experiments, so long as they know they are contributors to them.

Yeah, I think as far as frustrating that sense-making compulsion goes, plenty of plays already accomplish a similar thing with actual actors. Had Shepherd continued with gibberish, it would have gotten to people as well, just maybe taken a little longer. It’s when the play is all-computer that you realize you have to abandon all hope. :)

That said, I think Annie was trying for other effects by computerizing the space — I know she had this notion of the Hamlet text itself as a ghost of theatre, and if you step back, you can see that: sounds, lights going on and off. Is it a dramatic idea? Maybe not so much.

Re: Shepherd, she said something to me that was a (it turns out rare) emotional response, which is that sometimes (like with the chatbot play) she gets the sense that the bots are so close to thinking…that they’re trying really to say something, but fail, and it’s sad. Knowing of course that she’s investing them with agency, etc. But I felt like Shepherd’s role underscored that duality — a human actor who can’t quite make sense.

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What about you, our readers; what did you think of A Piece of Work? Did you make it to the end? Did you walk out? Did you hope that Shepherd was about to speak when he returned to the stage? Did you relish every “O” like Ives’s monkey, Kafka, who types page after page of the letter K? Did the algorithms create a more perfect Hamlet on Friday or Saturday night? Would you like to participate in a post-show survey? Now’s your chance.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

At On the Boards, A Piece of Work Challenges Noble Reason, Finite Faculty

Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen's A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)
Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)

In A Piece of Work (formerly False Peach) Annie Dorsen aims to push the limits of the definition of theatre. For many in the audience at On The Boards on Thursday night she exceeded those limits. Some expressed this by walking out, others by nodding off. In the end the applause was sustained if polite.

Dorsen has given considerable thought to what she’s attempting in this work, most notably in her essay On Algorithmic Theatre (published in Yale’s Theater magazine, 42:3) but the theory is only valuable inasmuch as it plays out in performance.

The performance of A Piece of Work consists of two distinct parts. In the first part, which is less than a quarter of the running time, Scott Shepherd delivers a very present and deeply felt performance of a jumbled repetitive take on the text of Hamlet, focused mostly on the play’s (and perhaps all of theatre’s) most famous and iconic soliloquy. His performance is broken up by the projection of code on a drop upstage and seems derived from the algorithms associated with that code that drive the rest of the show.

The rest of the performance consists of words projected on that drop as they are vocalized by what sounds like computer-generated voices. The words are often accompanied by character names. Sometimes specific areas of the stage are illuminated and underscoring and sound effects are heard suggesting preordained relationships between words, sound, light, and atmosphere effects such as wind and fog.

Though much of the performance follows the chronology of Hamlet the words rarely hold together to follow Shakespeare’s script for more than a phrase or two. The algorithms that govern them would seem to be written to avoid clarity.

Dorsen’s essay suggests that she’s interested in engaging the audience by giving us work to do in order to form meaning, however she doesn’t give us enough sense of success in that work to feel any hope for satisfying achievement. The audience’s interest in the work gives way to boredom.

For those familiar with Hamlet much of the audience’s work is not so much in making meaning as reconstructing a pre-existing meaning. We attend with the expectation of a relationship with the play we know therefore we spend our energy looking for the familiar rather than creating the new. We reassemble the play in our minds, identifying a phrase and working to place it in the expected order and attach it to the appropriate character.

Great works of theatre often take a thing we know, whether a universal story or a well-known plot, and change small pieces of it in order to help us see it and our world anew. A Piece of Work takes the opposite approach, reordering the context and fabric of the piece to raise questions about larger structures including our understanding of the performer/audience relationship.

One way A Piece of Work jostles the performer/audience relationship is in its dependence on the written word. In this regard Shepherd’s involvement is striking as he is best known for his role in Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. This highly lauded adaptation of The Great Gatsby is performed by actors who say every word of the novel as it comes to life in a workday spent waiting for computer repairs.

Shepherd, in the role of the narrator, Nick Caraway, had the lion’s share of the work in Gatz, which the New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as the “…layering of a novel’s world onto your own everyday environment” as when a novel “…so absorbs you that you start to imagine everyone around you as a character in it.” A Piece of Work does the opposite. Here the words disorient and disconnect as when attention drifts from the page and it suddenly becomes apparent that one has read the same passage several times over.

The projections of text make this as much a reading exercise as a performance. The words are performing objects, doubling their audible selves. The shape of the word Polonious becomes associated with an aggravated, aged voice delivering that character’s lines; it becomes the performing object or puppet of that character. The lights catch areas of the stage suggesting the place where those words are acted and the play unfolds. It is an extreme form of puppetry but is it theatre?

In her essay, Dorsen notes that “algorithmic performance creates an asymmetric relationship, in which the human spectator confronts something that can’t confront her back.” In other words, the performance is one-sided: the computer produces and the audience observes and responds.

Dorsen refers to Peter Brook’s suggestion that theatre requires no more than one person observing another. In performance A Piece of Work evinces the notion that this theory requires revision. In fact such theorists as Susan Bennett and Daphna Ben Chaim have suggested that the distinction between the theatrical and the simply performative lies in the communal interaction of performer and audience.

It is not enough for one person to watch another in order to make theatre. The observed must be aware of that observation and respond to it. Dorsen and company ask audiences to give their attention but we receive no attention in return and so the deal falls apart. A Piece of Work feels less like theatre than a temporal art installations in the dark corner of the museum that one peeks into for a time before walking out, which may be all we owe it.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Welcome to the Hamletmachine, Says Annie Dorsen

Annie Dorsen
Annie Dorsen

Annie Dorsen‘s heart goes out to our computing machines, or it would if she weren’t against those stale old dichotomies like head versus heart. I mentioned something about a show’s emotional appeal, as compared to its intellectual or conceptual impact, and she pointed out that all thought has an emotional basis, it’s what we care to think about.

In conversation, she describes her new show at On the Boards, called False Peach (aka A Piece of Work), as, variously, about ghosts, about subjectivity, about theatre, about mourning the death of a parent, and about embodiment, ephemerality, and language. “It” runs February 21 through 24, but in an important sense, it doesn’t: The show will be substantively different each night.

Here is what we know. False Peach uses the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It stars, in the traditional sense, a single performer: Scott Shepherd (you may remember him from such shows as Gatz, the eight-hour theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby). But the creative team that Dorsen has assembled — the “perfect dinner party” she calls the collaboration — were all enlisted to create a “hamletmachine” that would perform-parse False Peach differently each night.

How this is accomplished becomes quickly dizzying; essentially every word of Hamlet was tagged with a host of properties. Thanks to systems programming by Mark Hansen, the text has been integrated with Greg Beller‘s sound composition, Jim Findlay‘s scenography, and Bruno Pocheron and Ruth Waldeyer’s lighting design. Who speaks what lines when, what sounds are heard, what lighting cues are given, are all decisions made on the fly by the hamletmachine each night.

One of Dorsen’s previous shows, Hello Hi There, featured two laptops running chatbots (who between them are discussing a 1971 Foucault and Chomsky debate in language that sounds not unlike two beer-fogged grad students). That was a beachhead in algorithmic theatre and its exploration of communication, agency, and meaning. False Peach takes everything a step farther, pushing the boundaries of theatre and of human consciousness. It’s a truly experimental work, in that Dorsen and her team can pre-state as much as they want, but the show is so complex, they can’t hope to know the outcome.

Nor can they hope to direct the way the audience makes sense of the work. The frontier that Dorsen is operating on, populated by technological bodies, is simultaneously an area where sense-making and affect are distributed to the audience, and yet one where technology can produce meaningful statements (in at least a statistical sense), can act.

Some of the emotional impact of Hello Hi There, Dorsen said, was from the audience realizing that the chatbots didn’t know what they were saying, while at the same time getting something out of their conversation. For one audience member, that might be amusing. For another, it might feel like standing on the brink of a revolution in consciousness.

When you step back to take in False Peach, that brinksmanship seems to have been encoded in theatre all along. Plays are, as Dorsen says, a sort of nested algorithmic functions: assigned roles, entrances (on) and exits (off), environmental signals. It’s all there, but piecemeal, artisanal. How perfect, then, to take Hamlet, its revolutionary inner world, its theories of mind, and return contingency to it. The language of Hamlet is a ghost that haunts all theatre, Dorsen observes — what happens when you put the ghost into the machine?

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