Scripts that change a play on the fly: Deirdra Kiai’s ‘Coffee: A Misunderstanding’

Theater that evolves, with new twists delivered via WiFi.

That’s the core of what Santa Cruz’s Deirdra Kiai demoed at the NYU Game Innovation Lab’s Indie Tech Talk #22. Kiai has a work called “Coffee: A Misunderstanding.” It’s a game and a theatrical performance that changes with its players.

The short piece is ostensibly about two people meeting at a small coffee shop outside a generic geek festival called “AwesomeCon.”

“Coffee” was presented more as game than theater, but it had elements of both. It’s a situation, however, where seeing it as a game makes any glitches that arise more entertaining than they would be if it were seen strictly as theater.

Kiai spoke to the ways in which glitches, both human and code-based, make each performance unique.

“Pacing isn’t quite as smooth as it would be,” Kiai said, with regard to performing from a script, “but I kind of like seeing how it plays out.”

The performance raised the question of whether theaters may one day show plays whose plot and structure varies widely from night to night. Could this be a use for Google Glass? Actors get prompts for lines on the fly as the director responds to whatever stimuli the night calls for? Maybe.

Here’s the game’s trailer, which gives a good sense for how it works:

One of the piece’s characters is a semi-well known webcomic creator. The other is an attendee and aspiring chiptunes creator. The latter introduces himself (or herself) to the former and they start talking.

The actors are chosen from the audience. They read their lines from a mobile device. At times the lines are explicit, though they also appeared at times to be just guidance. Meanwhile, two other players, also chosen from the audience, make decisions about the course of the conversation. They are called “drivers.”

As if that’s not enough, Kiai provides even broader guidance for the piece — by locking or unlocking different features of the script/game as it goes.

When we watched, Kiai was opening up different levels of complexity with each performance. There’s also the ability to introduce background events if a performance is getting a little dull.

And then there’s a band.

Kiai invites musicians to set the tone for the piece. They also have a screen. The screen doesn’t have musical notations. Kiai described it as text-based instructions, loose descriptions of a mood to set.

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The game runs on a Node.js server, over an ad-hoc WiFi network. The actors (“puppets”) and the players (“drivers”) are all using mobile devices, while Kiai governs the show from her Mac.

The audience also gets to see the instructions for the actors projected onto a screen, with additional game elements like the classic “Achievement Unlocked” motif, signaling key turning points in the story.

The people serving as puppets in the performances clearly had different levels of comfort and acumen with being on stage, but that was actually part of the charm. For viewers, it’s as much about watching how the “puppets” react to the script as it comes to them as it is about how they perform it.

Kiai went through it a few times, so you saw everything from people trying to play their character seriously to those who started laughing at every other new line.

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Kiai came to town for NYU Game Center’s PRACTICE conference, giving a talk on “Designing Awkwardness.” There’s a lot of awkwardness in “Coffee.” Whether it’s characters getting a bit confrontational or strangely open, or just completely changing the subject, as if the other person hadn’t even been speaking.

During the Q&A, Kiai explained that “Coffee” started as a single-player game, where the player could choose to be either character and move through the conversation. Then Kiai thought it could be done as a multi-person performance. There’s a system behind it called the Performotron, which is available on GitHub.

Here’s the full presentation: