Building an Engaging Zoom World: Lessons from Dramaturging a Digital Love’s Labour’s Lost

Abstract

Building an Engaging Zoom World: Lessons from Dramaturging a Digital Love’s Labour’s Lost Mike Poblete (bio) While digital performance is not new, the era of “Zoom theatre” that has arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic is. What makes this new form of theatre unique is that it is socially distant and streamed over ubiquitous technology. Since the start of the pandemic, much has been written on its acting, directing, design, and production challenges, but little research has been offered on the nature of digital world–building from a dramaturgical perspective. In this note, I outline a few challenges to audience engagement I observed while watching the limited Zoom theatre available to me during the spring and early summer of 2020. I discuss how I helped apply these concepts to an August 2020 production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Kat Rothman and live streamed as part of the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival (HSF). There are several current options available for streaming live digital performance: Streamyard offers a lot of versatility to directors and designers, and streams to common viewing platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, these platforms encourage audiences to view passively. Reflecting on live versus recorded performance, performance studies and feminist scholar Peggy Phelan observes that “the spectator’s response cannot alter the pre-recorded or the remote performance, and in this fundamental sense, these representations are indifferent to the response of the other” (575). This is to say, a big part of theatre is how audiences affect the performance through their relationships with the performers and one another. If an audience member cannot affect a performance by watching it over a one-way streaming platform like YouTube or Facebook, one might question whether it can truly be called theatre. For this reason, I recommended Zoom to our director due to its interactive capabilities, such as video streaming, video conferencing, and a chat function. There is also additional software commonly used with Zoom that offers more versatility to designers and directors, such as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). These supplements come with their own complications, however, and given the low budget for Love’s Labour’s Lost, we felt our best option was to use Zoom Webinar with no additional streaming software. Zoom Webinar is an upgraded service of the standard free Zoom platform designed for webinars catering to hundreds of attendees, and it allows for more selective viewing of panelists, or in our case, actors. It is not, however, designed for theatre. As of this writing, the theatre community is badly in need of a digital platform that is designed for live theatrical performance and interactivity. Quite a few theatre-makers and -coders, such as Eamonn Farrell of Anonymous Ensemble, are working toward a long-term solution. To date, nothing readily affordable is designed for live performance, so Zoom provided the best option for us. Having chosen Zoom, then, I turned to considering how that medium might affect my role as dramaturg. My vision for dramaturgy aligns with that of several scholar-dramaturgs. Matthew Spangler, for example, calls the dramaturg “the mind’s eye of the audience” (“Dramaturgy in Dialogue” n.p.). Tori Haring-Smith explains that “a production dramaturg must assure that both director and spectator understand the rules of meaning-making within a script or production” (46). For Love’s Labour’s Lost, I approached the challenge of Zoom dramaturgy by committing to being the eyes of the audience and advising the director on how to make the play understandable and engaging for audiences over Zoom. [End Page 153] The HSF, created to honor University of Hawai’i Emeritus Professor Terence Knapp, has presented three of Shakespeare’s full-length plays by and for the community of O’ahu every summer since 2001. The festival had never attempted to perform digital theatre before and was open to experimentation. With this creative mandate, we embarked creating the digital world of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The plot concerns King Ferdinand of the fictional Austeria (Kat had decided to move this world away from Navarre, as written, to provide some escapism) and his trusted advisors pledging to lock themselves indoors for three years...