Uncovering a New Dimension: Director Peter J. Kuo on the Making of In Love and Warcraft (Part One)

-
By Allie Moss

Madhuri Shekar’s In Love and Warcraft is a play for our times. While there’s no mention of a pandemic, it expertly draws out questions of intimacy and relationship-building in virtual space. The play centers on Evie, a college senior who is navigating a budding in-person romance alongside an online relationship with her long-distance gamer boyfriend, with whom she plays World of Warcraft. By rehearsing and presenting the production on Zoom, life mirrors art as six of A.C.T.’s MFA actors are tasked with reaching through the screen to create deep connections. Peter J. Kuo, the production’s director, is profoundly aware of this overlap. “It’s not just that [the show] translates well into the online medium,” he says. “It actually shows that internet relationships have meaning and are palpable.” 

Peter J. Kuo. Photo Courtesy of Peter J. Kuo.

This play resonates for Kuo in part because he has personal experience building relationships over the internet. “My main introduction to the internet was through an online game,” Kuo says. “That’s where I made some of my early friendships.” And later, when he started making YouTube videos, online was where Kuo found a strong sense of community. “The audience members and fellow content creators became a community of friends from around the world, and we would Tinychat (the Zoom before Zoom) late into the night,” Kuo writes in an essay on Howlround. “To this day, I annually vacation in person with these friends.” 

Even though virtual relationships were a big part of his life, Kuo kept his online world separate from his IRL (in real life) theatrical career for a long time. “Theater values the ‘in-person-ness'; it’s all about in-person creation and experience, and so in a certain way, I think that part of my life and culture didn’t mesh well with theater.” However, he has noticed a shift now that everything, theater included, has been forced to move online. “Right now, it feels like because of the pandemic, things are converging, and those skills are coming together.”

And while some elements of creating a play on Zoom are very different, much remains the same. As Kuo and the cast think about how to make the two-dimensional screen feel like a three-dimensional space, they use the tools of theatricality. Kuo thinks about how our brains make patterns and tries to use those techniques to guide the audience’s attention so they can follow the story—which sounds remarkably like directing live, in-person theater. He also emphasizes the importance of encouraging actors to listen deeply to their scene partners, especially because they aren’t able to have the usual eye contact that is often foundational for building a relationship between characters.



This is part one of a two-part interview. Check back next week for more! To catch a performance of In Love and Warcraft directed by Kuo, click here. 

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die,
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me
Read more

A Hell of a Businessman: A Biography of Joe Glaser

-
By Simon Hodgson Born in 1897, Joe Glaser was the son of a successful Russian Jewish physician in Chicago. He originally intended to follow a similar career and entered medical school, but after passing out in the operating room, he realized he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. He started off in business selling used cars, but found better luck managing prizefighters. In his biography of Al Capone, Laurence Bergreen notes, “Glaser’s power to fix fights earned him a reputation as a sage of boxing, especially among reporters.” With advanced word as to which fights were fixed, Glaser could predict the results—and even the number of rounds—of many bouts in Chicago. His connections with organized crime continued in his next career change, when he began running nightclubs and whorehouses in the South Side for the Chicago Outfit, the powerful underworld gang led by Capone. Glaser’s tendency toward illegal action nearly ended his career. In 1928, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for
Read more