I Wrote a Participatory Play For My Friends And All You Get Is This Lousy Illuminating Thoughtful Captivating Eloquent Revelatory Engrossing Essay

For my 38th birthday this past September, I invited a few dozen close and hopefully soon-to-be-close friends to participate in a table read of my new original play, Wake Up and Dream! Or: An Odyssey to the End of Imagination. Except for the title, no one knew anything about this play. Its contents were a complete surprise to everyone, including that they would all be reading characters named for themselves. In the story, a very handsome, talented, creative genius named Jason saves the world with the help of his adulatory friends.

I’ll tell you up front: it’s probably not worth your time to read this play. The narrative is a thin pretext for celebrating those in attendance, mainly me. So why should you keep reading?

Because in ways I’ll describe shortly, I haven’t come across anything quite like Wake Up and Dream! In the process of making it, I encountered some unique challenges and made some surprising discoveries that I am putting down in words, both to collect my thoughts and for the benefit of anyone else who might be curious. If the premise of Wake Up and Dream! sounds at all interesting to you, dear reader, I hope you will trust me with the next twenty-ish minutes of your life.

Birthday As Project

Until last fall, I hadn’t celebrated my birthday for nearly a decade. What is so special about a date you share with more than twenty million people? I have a hard time getting excited about celebrating my birthday unless I can do so on my own terms.¹

The first seeds of Wake Up and Dream! were planted by a recounting of Kara Jefts' The Betty Awards by mutual friend Angela Washko. As I remember it, The Betty Awards was an annual event in Troy, NY in which Kara, on the occasion of her birthday, awarded trophies to all of her friends. At the end of each ceremony, Jefts accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award. Genius!

Inspired by The Betty Awards, I came up with the idea of writing a play where all my friends had to say whatever I wrote for them, including effusive praise for me, the main character, like my: arresting confidence exceptional wisdom remarkable boldness impressive decisiveness singular focus unmatched bravery extraordinary determination breathtaking creativity cunning wit

Writing Your Friends

My first notes date to 2014, but I started writing in earnest five years later, after separating from two life-defining projects: my museum job of twelve years and an art collective I’d help lead for eight years. I was particularly keen to define my community in the shadow of these changes, and the project took on new urgency.

I put in many more hours than you might expect agonizing over what were probably very unimportant concerns. I wasn’t making this for an anonymous public, after all, but for the people I most care about in this world and for whom I have the deepest respect. I couldn’t waste their time with something slapdash.

Not only was I writing for my friends, I was writing my friends as themselves into the play! The first pages of a play typically describe the story’s characters. I used this standard element to tell each of my friends why I found them special, describing their unique character, talents, and traits. It’s one thing to privately reflect someone back to them; it’s another to do this publicly for a number of people, where all of them can compare what you wrote about them to everyone else. Anything less than perfect would be an insult! I cannot exaggerate how excruciating this was to write.²

Frequent collaborator and king of internet comedy Mike Lacher was the only person who had any idea what the project was about. He generously read multiple drafts and gave excellent feedback that, when I was smart, I incorporated into the play. Even my partner was kept completely in the dark for the entire multi-year process. (Any time Larissa walked into the room while I was writing, I would dramatically minimize the window or shut my laptop. This became a bit.)

Personal Commitment

Designing an experience that required a number of specific people all gathering at the same time was its own unique challenge. It was easy to get stuck in a particular thought loop: how do I make someone an integral part of an event if I can’t be sure they’ll be there? Part of the solution was to write lines for stand-in characters named “A”, “B”, “C”, etc. and then assign and customize them once the RSVP deadline passed. (This required a hilariously complicated spreadsheet.)

Friends were given three weeks to confirm that they would be present, and then I had two weeks to finalize the script and print, bind, and highlight each participant’s lines. Pre-highlighting lines was a last-minute idea, but it ended up being key to the success of the night. If you’ve never read a script before, it takes a lot of effort to stay engaged and get your lines right. And if you’re so focused on your own lines, you miss out on what everyone else is saying! The pre-highlighting kept readers passively aware of their coming lines, gave them space to commit and perform, and ensured the momentum of the play.

The play was bound in a striking cover designed and printed by Lena Hawkins. I sealed each printed play in a clear cellophane bag with a visible “Hello My Name Is” sticker indicating to whom it belonged. I also asked Lena to make an 8.5”x11” poster, and I adapted her design for custom printed cups. (I have extra posters and cups, if you'd like one!)

The Birthday Affordance

Very early in the writing process, I decided that I would cast a professional actor to read my character’s lines. Auditioning actors for the role was the first time I heard someone else read my script aloud. Anyone who has quietly stewed over a project in loneliness for years knows the special mix of exhilaration and relief that comes when it meets another person and comes alive.

This was also the first time I realized how this whole project hinged on what I now call the Birthday Affordance. At the start of each (online) audition, I introduced Wake Up and Dream! as an elaborate prank to make my friends gratuitously compliment me. You should have seen the blank stares I received from these actors! “This sad man”, I imagined them thinking, “wrote a whole play so that his so-called friends would say nice things about him? And he’s hiring an actor to be part of it?” When I explained that this was all part of a birthday party, the signs of recognition and relief were immediate. I had discovered the fundamental affordance of the birthday: a date being within some proximity to your birth date allows you to rope your friends into enthusiastically going along with whatever you want to do. It affords a day-long window of socially acceptable, bossy self-celebration.

I quickly cast a young actor named David Young who came to the role with experience performing Shakespeare and musical theater. He intuitively understood the cadence and tone of the text and easily navigated the bathetic silliness of the story, bringing the exaggerated character of Jason to life with epic aplomb. It turns out we also look alike!

Select all squares with

disarmingly handsome dudes

photo by Larissa Hayden

The Big Reveals

Nathan Austin and Danielle Isadora of the Tideland Institute generously allowed me to host the event on their WWII-era tugboat, the Shoofly Pie. It was a pandemic-safe way to gather (outdoors), a perfect location for a story that is largely set on the water, and an all around stunning setting. (I almost jumped the gun and hosted the reading as a Zoom event in 2020, but I’m glad I waited a year so we could gather in person.)

When friends arrived at a suspicious address in industrial Brooklyn, they passed through a tall chain-link rolling gate into a sketchy parking lot filled with stacks of toppling marble architectural ornaments. Framed posters guided new arrivals to the dock, where Larissa greeted them and gave them their packets with instructions to keep them sealed until instructed otherwise. Attendees were invited to pour themselves craft cocktails by Threesome Tollbooth.

When the time arrived, I asked attendees to find a seat and open their packets. Hidden behind each visible “Hello My Name Is” sticker was one or more additional stickers with the names of more characters: this time, recognizable pop culture figures or made-up mythical creatures. Cheers (and groans) erupted as attendees discovered the other character(s) they would be reading. Then as participants flipped through the play and found their character descriptions, their exclamations turned into heartfelt “awws”.

The biggest laugh of the night came when I revealed that David, whom I had seated on an elevated platform above everyone else, was hired to read the part of Jason. But this decision had a second, more strategic, purpose: it freed me up to read the stage directions. This allowed me to set the tone and pace of the reading, and it gave me a sort of veto power in case anyone deviated from the script. It also cemented my role as puppet master. For the next 45 minutes, I watched from the sidelines as dozens of people praised an actor I had hired to stand in for myself.

The story itself... I leave to the imagination, to the memory of those who attended, and to be discovered by future participants. I will only say that the story holds the main character, Jason, in very high regard, perhaps for good reason.

photo by Nick Normal

A Reportedly Overwhelming Success

After the conclusion of the reading, we ate and drank into the night. With the help of the character descriptions I’d written, several of my friends met each other for the first time.

For the rest of the evening, my friends kept saying nice things to me, even though they were no longer reading words I had written for them. Many told me that their already high expectations had been greatly exceeded. This was a small epistemological conundrum: how could I be convinced that everyone actually had a great time? The premise of the birthday affordance is that everyone must enthusiastically do what you want. How could I be convinced of the authenticity of their words?

Here’s what ultimately persuaded me: over the ensuing weeks, multiple friends excitedly conveyed their ideas for how I could make Wake Up and Dream! better next time. Whenever someone is invested enough in what I’ve made that they volunteer their time to tell me how they think I could improve it, I take it as a sincere compliment.

Five Considerations of Mechanics

1. Irony

To be absolutely clear, in case there is any confusion: I do not think I am so special that I deserve all these really great people saying all the over-the-top things I told them to say about me. I do not think these unqualified compliments accurately describe me.

But I wish they did! Surely all of us wish the same for ourselves. And I think we find pleasure in telling the people we care about that they are extraordinary, but we don’t often have contexts for doing so. Further, I think when we shower people with unqualified compliments, which we all know are not true, we come to see that they are actually maybe a little bit true after all.

So while this project is dripping in irony, I don’t think it’s the corrosive, defensive kind. I think it’s the kind of irony that can let us playfully, safely try on ideas together that help us see the best in one another (though in this case, mostly me).³

2. Danger

For some time now I’ve strived to make work where “the stakes are real”. I want to create participatory experiences that don’t require suspending your disbelief, where the danger, whatever its degree, is as presented.⁴

While it’s true that Wake Up and Dream!, the play, is a fictional narrative, the focus of the event wasn’t really the story. It was how participants responded to the ways they are written into the story, as they discovered them in real-time. Participants knew very little going into the experience. Would they be characterized in unfair ways? Would they be pressured to speak or act in ways that made them uncomfortable in front of their peers? This was a very real danger.

Additionally, it wasn’t a given that participants would cooperate as I intended. There was a real risk, and it was briefly realized a couple of times, that my friends would veer off-script or otherwise attempt to sabotage the play. This is part of what made the event exciting to me: how any one person had the power to break the delicate social contract we were under together and undermine the finely-tuned experience I had designed.

Even the physical location helped set this context: attendees had to walk through an unwelcoming industrial parking lot to get to the dock and over a scary-looking plank without guardrails to board the boat.

3. Trust

Of course, if you want to create real stakes, you need participants to really trust you, or at least trust the situation you’ve created. While my friends trusted me enough to show up, I think they were rightly skeptical of my intentions at first. They were giving me a lot of power, and I needed to earn their trust!

What several participants told me afterward was that the effort that went into designing, printing, and binding the booklet, the pre-highlighting of each character’s lines, the individualized cellophane bags, and the generous character descriptions communicated a care and commitment they wanted to reciprocate. It was the time and dedication and energy I had very evidently put into this project that earned their trust.

4. Ritual

I conceive of Wake Up and Dream! as an annual ritual, which makes writing an essay about it at this moment in time pretty challenging! What can you say about a tradition when you’ve only performed it once? The salient parts of a tradition emerge through repetition.

By most accounts, the event was really special; could repeating it make it less special? Or suppose the table read wasn’t successful as an individual work: could it become more successful through repetition? What will it mean to friends who return year after year? Which parts will they look forward to? Which parts will they dread? How do I balance making the work legible for newcomers while making it new and interesting enough for repeat participants? Will I even like this project in the future?

Perhaps I’ll have to write more essays! (Another ritual!)

5. Choice

If we judged the interactivity of Wake Up and Dream! like we do games or other interactive media, we might say it was a linear story with no choice points.⁶ Participants simply read their assigned, pre-written lines, and the story proceeded as designed.

But I disagree with this assessment: participants regularly made choices. They chose to read their lines (or not, or to say something else all together). And they chose the intent with which to read them (e.g. sarcastically, earnestly, dramatically, etc.). These choices, though they largely aligned with my intentions, were still very meaningful.⁷

What a nuanced and perceptive take, Jason! You

Four Considerations of Medium

1. Immersive Theater

What cultural form was Wake Up and Dream! exactly? My closest reference during the writing process was immersive theater.⁸ This seems intuitive on its face: participants performed as characters in a fictional story.

But the experience wasn’t really about that story, and we weren’t chasing actors around (the core interaction I’d ascribe to immersive theater). In fact, I would propose that Wake Up and Dream! is more participatory than most immersive theater. Sure, in immersive theater you’re making choices about where to go, what to look at, etc. But it’s still a consumptive, rather than generative, act insofar as you, the audience member, don’t have any real role in the way things are unfolding. Wake Up and Dream! was at least a little more participatory in that regard, I think?

2. Closet Play

For many reasons, it’s impossible to stage this play. Perhaps the most important concern is simply one of audience: anyone performing in the production would be backstage half the time, unable to see it performed. And who else would want to come to see such a personalized play that wasn’t already a character in it?

So one way to consider Wake Up and Dream! is in the tradition of the closet play: a genre of writing that takes the form of a stage play in order to “stimulate the theatrical imagination” but that is intended to be read aloud as a group.⁹

3. Social Practice

The core idea of social practice is that its medium is social relationships. From this perspective, we can ignore the plot, the (fictional) characters, the diction and style and all the other ways you might assess a piece of writing, and focus on what I think everyone was really paying attention to that afternoon: the actual people who were performing, what their lines and performances said about our relationships, and how the text played with those relationships in specific ways.¹⁰

This, to me, is the strongest explanation for why Wake Up and Dream! necessarily has to be about my friends and why it can’t be adapted for someone else.¹¹ (But I mean, if you pay me enough, I can certainly try!)

4. Game

Game designers talk about the “magic circle”, a space where the rules of the real world are suspended, or at least deemphasized, and the artificial rules of a game have force. Perhaps we were playing a game.

There were incentives, a structure, play, choices, feedback, and of course rules. The foundation of this game was a dare: would you read your lines as written or deviate from them? Perhaps participants would get more attention and a bigger laugh if they sabotaged rather than collaborated?

A few participants, whom I don’t begrudge in the slightest, attempted this. I judge their attempts largely unsuccessful: our momentum slowed, and the awkwardness as we figured out how to proceed was unpleasant. There seemed to be an implicit incentive to keep moving—to participate as expected—if not out of respect for the social contract, then at the very least as a path of least resistance.¹²

Fixing It

I’ve been warned about how much non-creative work it takes to sustain an annual tradition, but I’m at least going to give it a shot. Whether the printed plays will be as elaborate or the venue as special or the drinks as fancy remains to be seen. At the very least I’ll be revising some sections, if not majorly reworking the plot. (I have lots of feedback to sift through!)

I dread preparing the character list, because I will have to sit down and decide whom I still consider a friend. Wake Up and Dream! is a snapshot of my relationships at one moment in time fixed in words on paper. This butts up against the reality that relationships are ever-changing!¹³ I don’t expect that all my friends today will be my friends forever. This is not a judgment on them or on me; it is the way things go! (What is the threshold that separates friend from acquaintance, anyway?¹⁴)

But I do look forward to watching this story, and the tradition of reading it together, evolve as my and my friends’ interests and values change. Hopefully I've made something with enough adaptability and momentum. Only time will tell!

photo by Hannah Frishberg

I'll Take Your Questions Now!

Q: But how do I read the play?

A: You get invited to the event.

Q: I thought you gave all your work away for free?

A: It is free, but it's only available to a specific audience.

This isn’t my typical way of working. I loath artificial scarcity, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I think this essay is more valuable to you than reading the play, so I’m offering it to you instead. The play is just a blueprint for the experience.

(But if you really want to read the play, reach out and we can make that happen.)

Q: What's up with all the interactive gimmicks?

A: I consider them small examples of procedural rhetoric. I included them so that you might experience the interesting gray area between the voluntary and the compulsory that participants navigated throughout the table read.

Q: Is there any other documentation of the event?

A: Yes, here are a few more photos taken by participants. You can also listen to an audio recording if you participated in the reading. (The password is the answer to this question: What powers the ship in the play?)

photo by Nick Normal

Q: Can I ask you other questions?

A: Always.