Interview: Vanessa B Baylen
On Friday night I went to Death By Chocolate, an interactive murder mystery show that won an award at the Melbourne Fringe and sold out with great reviews at the hugely competitive Edinburgh Fringe. (My review of the night is here.)
In the show, guests take on the roles of detectives and mingle freely with the suspects, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. It's an experience that has lots in common with role-playing games, but creator Vanessa B Baylen arrived at this show by a completely different route.
After the jump, Vanessa answers my questions about where this show came from, and about the specific techniques and processes she's used with the performers to create the experience.
Q: What experiences led you to create this show format?
A: Not sure how far you want me to go back in time to answer this -- I have a fair few markers in my life (which is useful, as I always get asked "How did you come up with this? When?" etc, which stumps you most of the time!). The earliest comment I can make, chronologically, is that I have *always* been creative. This led me to do a Bachelor of Creative Arts at Melbourne Uni, a course where I got to play across creative writing, visual art, film/media and theatre.
There were a few things which combined to get me into creating interactive events -- I was looking for a way to stop dabbling across so many artforms (without picking just one), and I was also reflecting a fair bit on how an artist can pour weeks/months/years into a piece/project - but an audience member can just walk by, flick their eye over a painting, judge it, and be done. I was thinking a lot about Graeme Base's "children's" book, 'The Eleventh Hour', and how readers of all ages would pour over it for hours/days/weeks. I really liked how that engaged the reader, got them thinking, brought them into Base's created world. Now, I can't draw to save my life, but I wanted to give something like that book a shot. I was doing a visual art class at the time with a great bunch of students and an amazing teacher, and they pushed me away from the 2D of a book and into the 3D of installation art (a concept totally new to me). So I created "Evidence", the first interactive murder mystery installation (a.k.a. IMMI), and it went from there. Re-exploring. Seeing what worked and what didn't. And what happened if I did -- this...
Over the years I guess I've come to define myself as an interactive events creator. I find the use of actors, the sort of interaction they bring, really engages people -- but I haven't finished with exploring other elements either (the physical clues, the net, etc). I've also become much clearer with what I want to do and why -- that creating an engaging environment is really important to me, as we have so many passive forms of entertainment, but not many options in the way of brain benders. I also care about giving opportunities to people, and trying things, and pushing/exploring boundaries. I also like to bring up issues which interest me and put them in the shows, raising them to people's awareness in a way which isn't making them think any-which-what-way, but just that it's there and can be talked about. I can?t be too specific with examples, as they're secrets for characters, but things like medical conditions, choices people make / are forced into, belief systems from decades gone by and what if someone from them thought those now...
"Death By Chocolate", specifically, came about because I went along on a chocolate tour with my best friend for her birthday. This was in Melbourne (Australia) where there are certainly enough chocolate shops to warrant a tour. Anyway, I had been wondering about trying an IMMI tour, and whilst I was on the chocolate tour, I could totally see how it could work. I started working up the idea -- an IMMI with a tour and chocolate -- but it was just going to be too much for the audience, so I lost the tour bit and kept the chocolate... and soon found out I'd stumbled into quite a winning combination.
Q: How many different shows have you run based on this general format? What sets this Wellington edition of DBC apart from previous outings?
A: Evidence, Ambition, House, Passport, and Death By Chocolate (versions 1 through 4) are my repertoire to date. I'm sure, if DBC hadn't been such a big thing, I would have written a few more titles in the past 2 years, but it's sort of dominated my life.
Death By Chocolate and Ambition are the most similar, in that they both have 8-10 actors, with some amount of physical-object-clues as well. Evidence and House were both much more art installations, although with House there was a live action actor, some video, and a fair amount of interactive audio. Passport was a commissioned piece which I unfortunately didn't get to see in the flesh, as I was in Scotland prepping Death By Chocolate #3, but it had a mix of actors and objects, although not the usual ratios due to the requirements of the commission.
I rewrite DBC each time. The first rewrite was complete, and it was because I was totally unhappy with how it turned out (despite the sell out season and award) -- the plot just didn't sit right with me, the balance was all wrong. I tried fiddling, but it didn't work, so I ended up scrapping the whole thing and starting again. I had to fit this into a 5 week "holiday" I was having in New Zealand, as well, because once the "holiday" was up, I was straight onto auditions in Adelaide! Between Adelaide and Edinburgh I tweaked a bit, created or combined a few characters, but kept it mostly the same. This was primarily due to time constraints -- I find it really boring putting on something again which I've already done.
Before Wellington, I had a bit of time up my sleeve, and I was also ITCHING to write something new. So I trashed who had "dunnit" for Adelaide and Edinburgh, rearranged who I wanted to keep with who I wanted to bring back in, tried to balance things out so there were enough secrets for everyone (without TOTALLY overwhelming the audience), and then, well, to be honest - I had to figure out WhoDunnit!!! Once that was settled, it was just a matter of typing up the details (yes, I know, I'm weird -- I work on paper) in time for the cast.
Oh! The Wellington season is also different because of the website. The ending of the show had always been a difficult thing -- my desire to reflect realism, to challenge that we usually instantly have things handed to us on a plate, me worrying that if the answer was out there that inevitably someone would spoil it for someone else... Through the previous seasons of DBC, there'd been a lot of finessing of the show's structure, the start and end especially, and it had become clear to me on what I need to do to compromise on what I wanted to do with the ending (of the live event) versus the closure the audience needed. Also, I've been really interested (from a distance) in ARGs for years, and so this was a really good opportunity for me to dabble into that area of creativity, too. So, although I'd had some sort of website before, the Wellington season has got an all new, full-on, interactive online experience included as part of the ticket price. In fact, it's enough of a thing in itself that we've been selling online-only-experience tickets too. ($10 from eventfinder.co.nz)
Then there are the simple, obvious-to-me, new things for Wellington: the new / local cast, and the lovely local chocolate.
Q: How did you find your performers? What audition process did you use?
A: The auditions consist of thirty minutes per person, myself (watching), a casting assistant (playing the part of the detective), and the auditionee (playing out each role in turn). Every actor does every role for their gender, regardless of age brackets. They're provided (in the audition notice / advert) a two sentence taster of each character, which is a reasonably stereotypical boxing of that person. That's all they get to go on and they have to improvise everything else. The casting assistant asks general background questions (family, job, etc) as well as questions about the night in question (who they met, what they saw). Each role is done quite quickly, as we generally have 6 roles to get through in each audition, and we like to allow time for chatting/questions as well. I sit there and take a lot of notes, making sure I cover what types of characters they're strong at, how solid their improv is, how believable their characters are, etc.
It took a few weeks to see everyone for Wellington. We had to turn away some last minute applicants, but otherwise we saw everyone else -- I've found, for the sort of actors I look for, that experience rarely links up with ability so I can?t really shortlist people without seeing them. What I mean by that is that I've had some incredible first time actors who totally compare to some of the people I've seen in the business for decades. Also, some really experienced actors just can?t do what I need them to do. An IMMI / WhoDunnit Events actor needs to be really good at both improv and deep character work, and that's not a blend that actors often seem to get experience doing elsewhere.
As a side note - I'm massively happy with this cast. It's one of the best I've ever worked with.
Q: How were the performers prepared for the show? What did the rehearsals comprise of?
A: They each get their own little booklet, which contains everything that is essential to their character. This includes personality stuff, as well as any essential background, all of their secrets, etc. The booklet is content that I've created; the stuff that makes the thing work as a whole.
The first thing the actors have to do is take the skeleton I've given them and flesh it out. In some cases that means creating childhoods, in other cases it's filling in their life for the past 10 years. Whatever it is that changes a stickman into a Caravaggio, that's what they do -- they flesh it out. They have guidance from me re this (to ensure they don't accidently create something that will muck up the plot), and they also have each other.
We have a rehearsal process, which is time to workshop through specific elements of the characters: physicality, voice, thoughts, etc. There are rehearsals where we act out memories, and others where we test the actors in order to prepare them for whatever the audience may throw at them. We act out the night in question, itself, so they all have the same common memory (within the humanness of memory, itself, of course). There's chocolate tasting and the test audience and improv games and brain-bending warm ups and laughter and madness. There's organising costumes, and "what would your character do?", and creating signatures for their bank cards, and finding out their postcode and favourite colour. There's filling up their bags with "stuff" after I've filled it with clues. Basically, I do as much as I can to prepare them and to turn the characters from ideas into people. I don't believe in first night being a trial and the final week being the performance -- I think of every night as real and I prepare my casts to be able to give it their all from day one.
We also have to talk through a lot of odd questions which come up because of the nature of this genre; about lying, and remembering, and what ifs. And then we do it -- and I laugh because no matter how well I've prepared them, it never seems to be what they expected. The lovely thing is that every night is always, truly, different, and I think this cast has especially enjoyed the challenges, delights, and super-aliveness that this type of theatre has brought them.
Q: Each suspect has a depth of knowledge and getting information out of them is intended to be the central challenge in the show. How structured is this process? Are the performers "programmed" to respond consistently to certain questions or certain types of approach, or do performers decide in the moment how they will respond, even if it means that the same question on different nights will elicit radically different answers? What other guidance do you give performers about giving out information?
A: Sure. No, the actors are not programmed, but neither is it haphazard. In developing their character, that develops how that person would respond in any given situation. I mean, stick your niece and uncle in a murder enquiry and you know they'll react differently. Put them through similar questions for a few hours, and they will possibly give different answers, but it will be consistent to who they are and what's happened. That's how it is for the suspects/characters. Yes, we have made sure that there is a way to access every secret -- but that way may never be done during a season and the actor has not failed just because it's never come out. And like the niece/uncle parallel, they're affected by what's happened. For example, we've had nights where any given character has had the usual intro questions, then at some point some good detective digging has uncovered something upsetting. Pretty straight line here, for the experience of the character. Then, however, some other detective (who has been focusing on one of the other 7 suspects) waddles over and asks something REALLY BASIC. Now, of course, this newbie is going to get quite a different emotional reaction than the first people of the night did... but not radically different re the truth. Maybe more frustration, maybe even relief to go back to "easy" territory... The experience of each suspect throughout the night is as authentic as we can make it.
A common misconception is that the show is scripted, either in part (ie, an "act" at the start) or whole (ie, these events must occur at these times during the night). It's not the case. The action, the information, the -- everything, is created between the audience and actors according to the roles they've each taken. Generally, sure, there is an explosion of some sort at some point (a fight, a breakdown, a "something"), but that has happened naturally because of what has been found out and how. What sort of audience we have is a huge factor to what happens of a night, as that dictates what comes out.
There are some "rules" that are in place to make sure the whole thing doesn't run a total muck, but I try to keep them quite invisible, as I think that putting a lot of false structure around an "improvised" event feels very false. So, there's safety stuff -- no touching (pushing, biting). There's basic practical's -- the suspects must remain in the house (and not just go home). The actors likewise know they must not let their characters hide in a locked toilet all night. There are a few people around who can help out for whatever situation (fight, breakdown, drunk audience member). But the stuff I think you're asking about would be... that the suspects aren't allowed to lie. And by "lie" we mean -- they cannot create new truths. I explain this, in rehearsals, to the cast as follows:
Okay, so we're in the show world and our audience doesn't know exactly how similar the world they are/were in is to the show world. You guys are helping them with this reality, so you can?t lie about it, because they cannot know better to correct you. Eg, our sky (like the real world sky) is blue. Saying it's purple is a lie, but some of your secrets -- where's the line between lie and truth? So, to make it clear, what you may not do is make up a new truth.... a believable alternative to the truth. Saying you saved the money, when in fact you robbed a bank... they cannot know you've made up a new truth so you're not allowed to. You can avoid. You can tell part of the truth. You can distract. That's all fine. But don't break character and don't create a new truth.
They're the only rules, really, for the actors. Don't break character and don't create a new truth.
Q: What are some of the things guests have done in the show that surprised you?
A: The Wellington audiences, on the whole, have all gone straight into the evidence room and stayed there for 30-90 minutes. That's new, and a bit odd, as obviously there are a whole lot of suspects to speak to and that's always been the most popular facet so far. We think that maybe it's because Wellington audiences are more cautious -- they don't want to ask stupid questions, so they start with something physical and ask really pointy questions later on instead.
What else? Well, I've had shows (not this season, yet) where people have turned up in some level of detective costume -- that's quite fun and lovely to see. There was a bubble-pipe once. :) There were times (Adelaide especially) where a whole slew of people became mates with a really obnoxious character, and joined in with them insulting quiet characters. That was worrying. I think it's the times when people really go into the world, that's when the interesting stuff happens. That, and when there's a collision with the show world and the real world.
But there's totally random moments too. We had a guy this season who decided a part of the chocolate display was made of plastic, started juggling it, it smashed on the floor and then realised - nope, it's made of chocolate. There was a night during Ambition where someone for whatever reason looked under a carpet and found a baby nappy safety pin and went on this huge tangent about that. Or people who rip up the furniture looking for clues. We had someone get obsessed about a suspect's shoes, in Edinburgh, and get permission for them to be taken off and inspected. People also argue with the suspects, sure they are lying about bizarre details... like the colour of lipstick, or that something doesn't smell like what it is. Even if it is what we've said it is.
Our most common, wonderful, sometimes baffling surprise, is the theories detectives come up with. I mean, besides the really common ones which come up again and again. No, the singular ones where someone has put a few details (rightly or wrongly) together in a way we've not come across before. That's lovely and clever.
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Thanks Vanessa for taking the time to answer these questions!
If you're in the Wellington, I strongly recommend the show - it's an excellent experience. It's on this Thursday through Sunday. Find out more here!