Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2020 - 24

Farrell's current home streaming set-up. | Photo courtesy of Eamonn Farrell.

rights to present one live web streamed
performance of the work. Directly following this performance, Jeffrey Horowitz,
the artistic director of Theatre for a New
Audience, contacted the Bard team to inquire about remounting the streamplay.
Several weeks later, Bard's Mad Forest
"transferred" to a three performance offBroadway run with its original design
team and student cast, but with audiences in the thousands.
When the student production of Mad
Forest transferred to a run at Theatre for
a New Audience, a lot changed in terms
of how we ran and presented the streamplay but the aesthetics of the design were
largely untouched.

Trailblazing a New Technology

As Zoom rehearsals began, it became
clear that Tata's filmic vision for the
piece needed a more responsive means
to interface with Zoom than could be
Production Team
Ashley Tata - Director
Afsoon Pajoufar - Scenic Designer
Ásta Bennie Hostetter - Costume Designer
Abigail Hoke-Brady - Lighting Designer
Paul Pinto - Compositions and Sound Design
Daniel Safer - Movement Direction
Eamonn Farrell - Video Design
Vanessa C. Hart - Production Stage Manager
Andy Carluccio - Video Programming
Connor Martin - Video Operation

accomplished with manually employing
Zoom's built in "Spotlight" feature, which
allows an operator to control which
speaker the audience sees at any given
time. Farrell had been discussing the
possibility of modifying Zoom with his
former student at UVA, Andy Carluccio,
a talented Drama and Computer Science
double major. Carluccio thought he might
be able to code a custom modification of
Zoom that could respond to OSC (Open
Sound Control) commands. This modified version of Zoom would allow for
faster, more fluid switches between camera feeds. The coding of this modification
was fast-tracked, and within a week, the
Mad Forest team was working with a
prototype of ZoomOSC. The process of
rehearsing Mad Forest online ran parallel to the development of the ZoomOSC
software with a steady series of feature
requests and implementations.
The team also developed a
Shane Crittenden - Properties Master
Anisha Hosangady* - Assistant Stage Manager
Maggie McFarland* - Assistant Stage Manager/
Sound Operator
Laila Perlman* and Angela Woodack* - Assistant
Directors
*appearing courtesy of Actor's Equity Association.

24 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | SUMMER 2020

methodology for rehearsing a play in
the new medium. Each performer was
assigned a channel number that corresponded to their Zoom feeds, referred
to as "cameras." The director created a
script marked up with hundreds of camera cues, and Bard hired a technician
to become the ZoomOSC operator on a
rented PC laptop. Since Zoom's Spotlight
feature switches Zoom feeds for all of the
participants in a meeting, the Zoom operator was able to switch the video feeds
remotely. The operator was an integral
part of the rehearsal process and had to
learn the complex video cues based on
spoken lines, physical actions, and more
subtle timings. Cues that corresponded
with other technical events were called
by the stage manager, but for the most
part, the Zoom operator took his cues
autonomously.
The intrepid stage manager, Vanessa
Hart, developed a system for online rehearsal that included a protocol for using
breakout rooms for designers to meet
with students individually. The production also accrued multiple lines of communication including various chat/text
platforms, phones, and Discord (an invaluable online audio chat app).
One significant challenge that the
production faced was student performers' access to sufficient equipment and
high-speed Internet. This is where Bard's
production staff really shone as they procured and delivered Ethernet dongles,
Ethernet cables of sufficient length to
plug into routers, $30 Bluetooth headphones/mics for each performer, and
even a production laptop for a student
whose Chromebook could not perform
the needed video processing. Getting all
of the students on an equal digital footing was an essential aspect of creating
the fluid, seamless streamplay that Mad
Forest became.

Rethinking Design Processes

Meanwhile, the rest of the production
team adapted their roles to the new medium and delved into the process under the
premise that they would be able to successfully translate their knowledge base
as theatre professionals into the creation
of a streamplay. Farrell streamed almost
all the rehearsals to a private stream so
the designers could monitor the final
product. This had the added benefit of
creating an archive of rehearsal videos

Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2020

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