The Sunshine Coast acting company Driftwood Players has helped extend the boundaries of art and technology with its successful online production of John Lazarus’s one-act play, Babel Rap.
What could have turned into another bumbling and frustrating Zoom meeting was instead a fun and smoothly executed four-performance run from May 21 to 24. The company provided added value and a real sense of an evening at the theatre, if only for an hour or so, by smartly formatting the experience into three parts. There was a “lobby” chat among audience members before the play, then the 20-minute performance itself, followed by a “reception,” which included the audience along with actors Richard Austin and Micheal Oswald, producer Bill Forst, and director Troy Demmitt.
As in a TV drama production, Forst switched the livestream back and forth between the two actors, who were safely distanced at separate locations before their own home computers. But each performed in front of identical blue-sky-and-cloud backgrounds, which helped create the sense they were on the same set. Although there were a few bumps along the way, the tech end of things wasn’t too difficult, once he got the hang of it, Forst said. “It would be really easy for somebody who was a little more familiar with Zoom. It took me a while, for instance, to figure out how to get the thunder in the background.”
Thundering sound effects are required at climactic points in Babel Rap, but as the troupe discovered in rehearsals, Zoom will automatically switch to the computer-camera where a sound is being made. That meant that instead of showing the actors reacting to the frightening noise from heaven, the app would switch to Forst holding an iPad playing a recorded thunderclap. “It was hilarious,” said Forst, who eventually figured out a work-around.
The brief play – a comedic dialogue between two construction workers helping build the Tower of Babel – was ideally scaled for Zoom and for Driftwood’s three-part format. Longer plays with complex stories might not fare as well with the widely used new app.
Forst said the company has at least one other Zoom project in the works. He also noted that Janet Hodgkinson and Wanda Nowicki, producers of the local Off the Page theatre company, were in the audience checking out one of the Babel Rap performances. Given the unknowable future of B.C.’s health restrictions on venues like theatres, Zoom-driven productions for the right kind of project might become more of a thing on the Coast, and beyond.
