Third-year students from the Theatre Arts and Performance program performed She Kills Monsters: Virtual Realms on December 4 and 5. However, with COVID-19 protocols in place, this performance was carried out virtually, which added an entirely new level of difficulty, as well as creativity, to the performance.
She Kills Monsters: Virtual Realms by Qui Nguyen tells the story of Agnes Evans, a young woman who loses her sister, Tilly, to whom she was never very close. After her death, Agnes discovers a notebook of Tilly’s that contains a Dungeons and Dragons scenario that she created, to which Agnes decides to play in order to learn more about her sister.
The play has been successfully performed on stage for years, but due to the pandemic, it was re-written this past Spring for an online modality. Patrick Robinson, Program Coordinator of Theatre Arts and Performance, explains that from the beginning, they knew they were going to be working online, and so this helped narrow down what play would be best. “Finding the right play for this group of actors still had a lot of the same challenges; you’re looking for a play that can fit a particular group of actors and we wanted a play that could have an ensemble feel where everyone could have an equal amount of stage time,” he says.
There were a number of reasons as to why She Kills Monsters: Virtual Realms was chosen, but Patrick says, “It’s a really fun play for actors to jump into because you have all of these characters and every character is playing a character as well, so there’s so much theatricality built into this play with layers and layers of character.” As well, having the play re-written to cater to an online audience certainly helped with the decision making. Patrick explains, “Because the playwright had known it was going to be performed online, it lends itself to individuals working at home in their own little Zoom boxes. Everyone had to be responsible for their costumes and a set that could appear and be harmonized across the Zoom platform. When the audience was watching, they were watching it in Gallery View, so they were seeing a bunch of boxes on their screen, and the actors were all talking to each other and engaging with each other, but obviously not in the same location.”
As you can imagine, preparing for a play that is entirely online is not an easy task. However, Patrick is extremely proud of everyone involved. “Our Director’s name was Jeff Miller, and he is one of the faculty at the theatre program. We definitely had rehearsals during class time, but Jeff put in an incredible amount of extra time into this project and worked with the students, doubling the amount of official hours, which was extremely generous of him. It’s above and beyond the call of duty, but in terms of the project, allowed it to really come off the page and gave the students the opportunity to really delve into their characters and learn to tell the story.”
Performing theatre online is certainly something the students, even the seasoned performers, had to get used to, and Patrick says that this understandably took some time to learn. However, this also brought some amazing opportunities. “Our students, at the beginning of their careers, are pioneering this work and they have the opportunity to be at the beginning of something that is not likely to go away, as I think this pandemic is going to change the arts in a lot of ways. I’m sure we’re going to go back to the studio, and I’m sure we’re going to go back to live performance, but I also think we are learning so much and we will bring a lot of the work that we did this way, to the arts.”
Patrick mentions that some of the factors that were really beneficial in having the performance online included the audience communication in advance of the show, as well as the nature of the advertisements being entirely online. “It kind of reorients everybody’s thinking – audience and performer alike – to the idea that we’re living in an online world, and to do a play, which is written as an online play, completes the picture.
After performing the play a total of three times, Patrick applauds the students for their hard work. “The students really rose to the occasion, and I was really proud of the work they put into it. There were a lot of long hours in rehearsal in the weeks leading up to it, and certainly hours that required a lot of energy and focus. The students remained focused and energized, and they really supported one another.”
Another benefit that added to the overall performance was the audience. Patrick says, “One of the things that was amazing about doing the show online from a production perspective, is that we were able to reach a much larger audience. Our past theatre productions have usually maxed out at about twenty-five audience members because of the spaces we perform in, and that’s the number of patrons we could accommodate. But because we’re performing online, we used the Webinar Zoom feature so that it could accommodate a vast number of people. During our opening night, we had forty-three people, and our last night we had thirty-six, which is higher than we ever had before. We had audience members calling into our webinar from Chile, Indonesia, and all across Canada and Ontario, who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend our show in downtown Toronto. That was a really exciting thing for our students because most of our audience members, of course, are somehow connected to our students.”
Thoughts from some of the students involved:
“I think the biggest challenge for all of us was realizing that a platform like Zoom isn't really designed for theatre. It was a constant struggle just to keep our show going at times, and putting on a play with 11 cast members is hard enough as is. Covering a missed line or cue is easy, but how do you cover for when an actor's Wi-Fi cuts out halfway through their monologue? We were practically reinventing the wheel, and we didn't even realize it. Doing a 75-minute play on Zoom is like fitting a square peg in a round hole. There's no trick, no easy solution to the problem, you just have to keep pushing. And we did, and people loved it, and when we were done, we all ran to a separate zoom meeting to just scream because we couldn't believe what we had just accomplished. Was it perfect? Of course not. There will always be things we wish we did better, or that we should've done differently, but that's not the point. It was fun. I had fun. My castmates and my director had fun. The audience had fun. Everyone had fun, and at the end of the day that's the most you can ever ask from any theatre performance, virtual or otherwise.”
- Carter Vandenberg (Role: Chuck Biggs & Sound Design)
“This was the most challenging role I’ve ever played yet, especially being online. I had a lot of fun with this crazy succubi and I’m looking forward to performing it in person.”
- Benjamin Velasco (Role: Evil Tina)
“It’s always a euphoric experience to finish showings of plays together, and I just wish we had a studio to run into as usual to start screaming our heads off and jumping up and down together as if the audience couldn’t clearly hear us a hallway away. But I could still feel all the joy and I had faith and knew that my class was on the same cloud I was. No matter how far apart we actually are. Those nights, we were truly together.”
– Cydney Woolley (Role: Vera)
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Everyone involved in this production deserves a standing ovation for the work put into it. Although an online format takes some getting used to, we know the creativity and storytelling remained as strong as ever. Congratulations!
By: Alexandra Few