CELINE SONG: My play had just opened and we had
CELINE SONG: one proper performance post opening and
CELINE SONG: then we had our day off and then we had one
CELINE SONG: performance. And then the next day we
CELINE SONG: learned that everything is going to be shutting
CELINE SONG: down, including my show. So my show closed.
AARON MALKIN: In the immediate aftermath of the shutdown, in the middle of March, we
AARON MALKIN: started having conversations about what we wanted to do
AARON MALKIN: and how we wanted to be making space and sustaining community
AARON MALKIN: while we couldn't be in space together.
AARON MALKIN: And when it became clear that we were not
AARON MALKIN: going to be able to pick up
AARON MALKIN: rehearsals and productions as we thought,
AARON MALKIN: we really sat down to think about what we wanted this year to be.
YANG-YANG CHEN: The energy doesn't disappear, right, the energy of what
YANG-YANG CHEN: everyone is collectively trying to do doesn't disappear, but you
YANG-YANG CHEN: also don't know where to direct any of that energy to.
YANG-YANG CHEN: So right after it happened, I was still you know, it
YANG-YANG CHEN: was if you told me 30 days, we're going to prepare for day 31 and
YANG-YANG CHEN: what has to happen next. And thank god there's other really smart
YANG-YANG CHEN: people whose jobs it is to say, actually, it'll
YANG-YANG CHEN: be 90. So you should be also preparing for 91 and actually it'll
YANG-YANG CHEN: be a year and a half. So what do we do next? You know?
AARON MALKIN: And we came up with this idea of the Artistic Instigator
AARON MALKIN: Initiative, which was a way to get a little bit
AARON MALKIN: of money in the hands of artists.
AARON MALKIN: We gave the Artistic Instigators $2,500
AARON MALKIN: a grant to just kind of imagine.
AARON MALKIN: And said, come back to us with your idea and we will do
AARON MALKIN: what we can to realize the idea.
YANG-YANG CHEN: To me, it made complete sense from my a NYTW point
YANG-YANG CHEN: of view, right. We've always striven to be artist
YANG-YANG CHEN: focused, artist centric.
YANG-YANG CHEN: And as Jim tells it, it's we turn to the artist for them to,
YANG-YANG CHEN: for their thoughts and their feelings on how theatre should be
YANG-YANG CHEN: created and how theatre should be experienced in this time
YANG-YANG CHEN: and this year, year and a half, whatever it may be.
YANG-YANG CHEN: So it made complete sense to me that
YANG-YANG CHEN: we put the fate of what our theatre could do
YANG-YANG CHEN: in this time in their hands.
AARON MALKIN: We went to many of the artists who we had long
AARON MALKIN: relationships with and the artists whose work was cut short
AARON MALKIN: or postponed by the pandemic.
AARON MALKIN: But Celine, given her ingenuity
AARON MALKIN: and creativity, was an obvious choice, as somebody who I
AARON MALKIN: was really curious, we were all really curious, what would she think
AARON MALKIN: of in this moment?
CELINE SONG: They had told me that they were open to anything
CELINE SONG: new, anything wild, any
CELINE SONG: kind of medium, any kind of a thing, and then I had floated the idea
CELINE SONG: that maybe I want to do something in video game space.
CELINE SONG: And I think that they didn't
CELINE SONG: New York Theatre Workshop didn't necessarily know what
CELINE SONG: I meant by that.
CELINE SONG: And then in one of the conversations, I was like, they might just say,
CELINE SONG: this is a terrible idea.
AARON MALKIN: And she said, I want to do a play on Twitch.
AARON MALKIN: And I said, let's check to make sure that's OK.
AARON MALKIN: And we check to make sure that, you know, we could figure that out
AARON MALKIN: and we could. And so she said, I want to do The Seagull.
AARON MALKIN: And we said, that's wonderful.
AARON MALKIN: I'm so excited. How can we help?
AARON MALKIN: What can we do to make this happen?
CELINE SONG: But I hope it's good.
AARON MALKIN: A whisper.
CELINE SONG: Oh, you're twice as loud as I am.
CELINE SONG: OK, what can we do about this?
CELINE SONG: I don't know what we can do.
CELINE SONG: Oh, I know what we can do.
CELINE SONG: I feel like I always knew The Sims had a lot of
CELINE SONG: theatrical potential and I know that because I'm a very,
CELINE SONG: in my nature, very theatrical person.
CELINE SONG: And I was always interested in playing The Sims like a theatre
CELINE SONG: person.
CELINE SONG: You can play The Sims in many different ways.
CELINE SONG: Some people spend their whole their whole experience of playing The
CELINE SONG: Sims, decorating the house.
CELINE SONG: Some people like have a really specific
CELINE SONG: human features that they want to, like, design onto a character.
CELINE SONG: There are so many different ways to play The Sims, which is what's
CELINE SONG: amazing about the game. But I always knew that the way that I like to
CELINE SONG: play is to get them to like cause drama.
CELINE SONG: I would like often like create situations where the Sims,
CELINE SONG: who become very obsessed with each other, like they will fall in
CELINE SONG: love, some very dramatic stuff.
YANG-YANG CHEN: She had very specific ideas about the piece and the platform
YANG-YANG CHEN: and why Checkhov was so specific to why Sims would be
YANG-YANG CHEN: successful in bringing these characters to life.
YANG-YANG CHEN: So right after that initial meeting, we had another
YANG-YANG CHEN: essentially a production meeting with Celine because we were so far
YANG-YANG CHEN: down on the producing side of things, you know, there were no rights
YANG-YANG CHEN: to speak of.
YANG-YANG CHEN: We had to do a lot of research about what
YANG-YANG CHEN: The Sims was and how Twitch worked.
CELINE SONG: I thought that because
CELINE SONG: of some of the rules that are in The Sims, it's a lot harder.
CELINE SONG: It's very hard to do murder, death,
CELINE SONG: [laughs]
CELINE SONG: duels and things like that. So I sort of knew that
CELINE SONG: a lot of the things that happen in Shakespeare or, you
CELINE SONG: know, a lot of the other classics may not be quite
CELINE SONG: suited to The Sims
CELINE SONG: as Chekhov is. Checkhov is very suited for The Sims.
CELINE SONG: Here we go.
CELINE SONG: So now that we have to begun, I'm going to start from sort of
CELINE SONG: scratch for sort of who my characters
CELINE SONG: are going to be. So I'm going to start with Constantine, actually.
[Sims gibberish]
CELINE SONG: There's something about this guy that I'm really feeling.
CELINE SONG: I had a sense of, like how I was going to try
CELINE SONG: to do a certain thing.
CELINE SONG: So I had a plan.
CELINE SONG: It did feel like it was writing or something,
CELINE SONG: but sort of really quickly, it was like really quick writing.
YANG-YANG CHEN: So for the callers, Celine had wanted
YANG-YANG CHEN: either playwrights or theatre makers
YANG-YANG CHEN: or people who were gamers or had a specific interest
YANG-YANG CHEN: in Chekhov or better yet, all three.
JEREMY O. HARRIS: Are you going to have a moment when someone WooHoos?
CELINE SONG: Yes. So basically, the thing that I was thinking
CELINE SONG: about was that I was going to have Trigorin, Nina.
CELINE SONG: They're going to have to WooHoo because I want Trigorin to impregnate
CELINE SONG: Nina. That happens in the play, right?
JEREMY O. HARRIS: Oh, my God.
CELINE SONG: So they're going to have a baby.
JEREMY O. HARRIS: Have you seen all the different things you can eat to make it a
JEREMY O. HARRIS: different type of baby or to have twins?
CELINE SONG: No, what?
JEREMY O. HARRIS: So like if you eat apples, if you eat apples during the first trimester,
JEREMY O. HARRIS: you'll have like a girl, I think.
JEREMY O. HARRIS: yeah, you have to look, I'll send you a Sim's cheat code website
JEREMY O. HARRIS: that has all the details and all of, like, weird like
JEREMY O. HARRIS: cheats inside of it.
YANG-YANG CHEN: We wanted the chat to be robust.
YANG-YANG CHEN: Every time that she had mentioned something specific like
YANG-YANG CHEN: this part of this part of the text, or
YANG-YANG CHEN: if you want to read more like welcome if you want to read more and
YANG-YANG CHEN: don't know anything about The Seagull, maybe read the Wikipedia, you
YANG-YANG CHEN: know. So there was there was we wanted it to be simultaneous like
YANG-YANG CHEN: that. So we had sort of a run of show
YANG-YANG CHEN: document that there were links involved and other
YANG-YANG CHEN: things and that I would post simultaneous to
YANG-YANG CHEN: when Celine would be talking about it.
YANG-YANG CHEN: But there was by no means a script.
YANG-YANG CHEN: I mean, that's very obvious. You know, when you watch the piece.
AARON MALKIN: The capacity to form a community that
AARON MALKIN: transcended borders, transcended
AARON MALKIN: time zones. You know, I think the beauty of theatre
AARON MALKIN: in the conventional sense is that you're in space together and
AARON MALKIN: the limitation is that you have to be in space together.
AARON MALKIN: And so that we could create a community that came together
AARON MALKIN: around this experiment from all over the globe
AARON MALKIN: was really exciting and something
AARON MALKIN: that I hope we figure out how to continue
AARON MALKIN: when we are back in space together.
CELINE SONG: And in fact, that's actually really accurate to the play, right?
CELINE SONG: Like Nina's the one who's really coming in hard on Trigorin, it's
CELINE SONG: not the other way around.
CELINE SONG: So maybe that's what I'm going to do.
JEREMY O. HARRIS: Because like the thing, too, is that I know, for
JEREMY O. HARRIS: me at least when I play the game, I always had to get people in throuples, and
JEREMY O. HARRIS: it's made very difficult.
JEREMY O. HARRIS: If they have romance at all in their aspirations or they're like
JEREMY O. HARRIS: who they are. And so you have to have, what's the one
JEREMY O. HARRIS: that's kind of like I'm a cheater?
JEREMY O. HARRIS: They all have to have that emoji.
CELINE SONG: The I am like I want to have as many
CELINE SONG: like uncommitted relationships as possible like fear of commitment.
CELINE SONG: That's the one
AARON MALKIN: The Seagull was such a good choice for The Sims in particular,
AARON MALKIN: because it is about these interpersonal
AARON MALKIN: relationships and it's not about there are dramatic things
AARON MALKIN: that happen. But the play, I think, as I feel is true
AARON MALKIN: of Chekov's more broadly, is what is happening between those
AARON MALKIN: dramatic events, what's happening as the characters are
AARON MALKIN: sitting and waiting.
AARON MALKIN: And we did a lot of sitting and waiting, you
AARON MALKIN: know, which we could not have anticipated.
AARON MALKIN: But the second evening of the event really became about
AARON MALKIN: waiting for Masha to have a baby.
AARON MALKIN: Masha was a relatively minor character in Chekhov's original play
AARON MALKIN: and waiting for Constantine
AARON MALKIN: to die.
CELINE SONG: Last minutes of his life.
AARON MALKIN: And then Celine ultimately said, you know, I know how Constantine is
AARON MALKIN: going to die. And I didn't know what that was until we started
AARON MALKIN: watching. And she filled the space with these special seagull
AARON MALKIN: mods and watching him slowly go crazy
AARON MALKIN: at his computer while these birds appeared and then disappeared and
AARON MALKIN: appear and disappear and all these things that we could not have
AARON MALKIN: anticipated.
CELINE SONG: Okay, here we go.
CELINE SONG: Then we're going to wait for death to come. He's like what's up with all those seagulls?
AARON MALKIN: It was an act of sitting and waiting, and it was not dramatic
AARON MALKIN: in a conventional sense, and I think that honored
AARON MALKIN: what was new about what Chekhov was doing in the late
AARON MALKIN: 19th, early 20th centuries.
AARON MALKIN: In a way that was really unexpected
AARON MALKIN: and beautiful.
CELINE SONG: So the monologue is Trigorin's monologue which is performed
CELINE SONG: by amazing Emily Kuroda, who was in Endlings
CELINE SONG: as Go Min, Endlings is my play and also
CELINE SONG: it's from act two. It's from act two, sorry, actually, this speech is
CELINE SONG: from act two, but I'm going to play it right now.
CELINE SONG: And it’s performed by Emily Kuroda, who's amazing, and she was also
CELINE SONG: on Gilmore Girls, but more importantly, she was in Endlings
CELINE SONG: as Go Min.
EMILY KURODA: I have a feeling for nature,
EMILY KURODA: it arouses a passion in me, an irresistible
EMILY KURODA: urge to write.
EMILY KURODA: But, I'm not just a landscape
EMILY KURODA: artist, I'm a member of society as well.
EMILY KURODA: I love my country and my people.
EMILY KURODA: As an author, I feel duty bound to speak out about
EMILY KURODA: them, about their sufferings, their future, about
EMILY KURODA: science and the rights of men and so on and so forth.
EMILY KURODA: I try to cover them all.
EMILY KURODA: I do my best, but there's always somebody
EMILY KURODA: after me. Angry.
EMILY KURODA: And I raced back and forth like a fox at bay.
EMILY KURODA: I watched science and society forge ahead while I
EMILY KURODA: dropped farther and farther behind.
YANG-YANG CHEN: Celine and said, hey, wouldn't it be great if
YANG-YANG CHEN: we had someone read this?
YANG-YANG CHEN: Like, can we do it live?
YANG-YANG CHEN: How should we what's the best way to go about it?
YANG-YANG CHEN: Who should we get? And it was five hours
YANG-YANG CHEN: until the start of night two.
YANG-YANG CHEN: And of course, Emily Kuroda was one of our beautiful Endlings
YANG-YANG CHEN: and a wonderful actress.
YANG-YANG CHEN: And so we threw some ideas around.
YANG-YANG CHEN: We settled on a specific monologue.
YANG-YANG CHEN: Emily was at Costco and said, oh, my god, I
YANG-YANG CHEN: would love to do it. She had watched Night One and
YANG-YANG CHEN: was so engrossed by it.
YANG-YANG CHEN: So she went home, taped it, sent it to us, and
YANG-YANG CHEN: it made it into the show that night.
CELINE SONG: I think this is an opportunity for all of us to sort of realize
CELINE SONG: that theatre is actually just like a room in New
CELINE SONG: York somewhere that we're calling theatre.
CELINE SONG: And actually the theatre is something that is happening because
CELINE SONG: of the people who are putting authorship behind it.
CELINE SONG: So I feel like to sort of try to
CELINE SONG: define and grieve the whatever idea of theatre
CELINE SONG: that existed before doesn't make a lot of sense because
CELINE SONG: theatre is both fully alive even at this moment,
CELINE SONG: and shut down.
CELINE SONG: And that contradiction is a very real part of what's been happening
CELINE SONG: to us in theatre.
AARON MALKIN: One of the things that felt exciting to me
AARON MALKIN: in putting together this initiative broadly was that none of us
AARON MALKIN: had ever done this before. So there is no this is what works and
AARON MALKIN: this is what doesn't work.
AARON MALKIN: And so getting to play with
AARON MALKIN: folks in that way has been really
AARON MALKIN: inspiring and challenging and
AARON MALKIN: rejuvenating and restorative amidst everything else
AARON MALKIN: that is going on around us.
YANG-YANG CHEN: As we talk about expanding traditional theatrical
YANG-YANG CHEN: forms and who gets to participate in theatre, who gets to make
YANG-YANG CHEN: it, who gets to see it, that
YANG-YANG CHEN: ultimately the form is not determined by
YANG-YANG CHEN: the people it's always been determined by.
YANG-YANG CHEN: And I think ultimately that starts with
YANG-YANG CHEN: ideas, that starts with the thirst for
YANG-YANG CHEN: artistic expression in ways that
YANG-YANG CHEN: we never considered before and didn't seem possible before.
YANG-YANG CHEN: Now we know that a lot of things are possible and
YANG-YANG CHEN: that we shouldn't forget these lessons when everyone
YANG-YANG CHEN: goes back to work because not everyone is going to go back to work,
YANG-YANG CHEN: unfortunately.
YANG-YANG CHEN: So it comes from ideas first and then ultimately
YANG-YANG CHEN: resources to make it happen.