Playwright-TYLER OLSEN

                                         Tyler Olsen backstage at "Crime and Punishment".

 

From left to right:

"Crime and Punishment" creators Joanna Harmon, Noah Bremer and Tyler Olsen 

                        

 

The "Tea Room"  where audience could gather and get mentally

prepared to enter "Crime and Punishment" and enjoy tea of course.

 

A special seating area for THE NAKED ONES, those who paid for the extra experience of 

The $100 man. 

 

Cast members from left to right

Joann Oudekerk, Nadia Honary, Susie Campbell, Brian Watson-Jones and Christopher Barton

 

 

Cast Member:

Candace Barrett Birk

Cast Member:

Stephanie Fellner 

All Photos by Ted Dewberry

It’s a challenge for me to describe just what Crime and Punishment was, even though I was an actor in it!  Crime and Punishment, inspired by the Dostoyevsky novel of the same name was an immersive play in 2015 created by the team of Tyler Olsen, Noah Bremer and Joanna Harmon.  What do I mean by immersive?  This was not a play where you could sit and passively enjoy the performance.  To experience the play you,the masked audience member, had to actively find the performances (or stumble upon it by accident).  Audience members could explore as much or as little as they wanted in the very large set modeled after the grimy St. Petersburg of the novel.  Just the sets alone were worth the price of admission, but with the sound effects, smells pumped in to the space and the stunning performances, the experience was life-altering for those lucky enough to experience it with an open mind.  Writing this article, I just can’t be objective.  I am still haunted by this play.  Through my brief foray into stage acting (I’m a screen and novel writer), I stumbled upon a very rare gem indeed.  I reached out to Tyler Olsen, the playwright who was presented with problems never faced by writers of traditional theater.  By definition, an audience member would never hear most of the dialogue.  It was physically impossible to be everywhere at once.  How does a writer wrap their head around such things?  I asked him a few questions to get a clearer picture of the process of immersive theater and "Crime and Punishment" in particular.

TED
“How did you even begin the process of writing this kind of interactive theater?”

TYLER OLSEN
“Noah, Joanna and I spent many many hours together creating very general character arcs for all the characters. These included emotional arcs as well as plot points.  Most of it was based on the book, but there was also a lot of invention, as not every character in the book has a full line- they come in and out of the pages, but they were always in the world of the show, so they needed things to do. Lizveta is a perfect example- she dies very early on in the book, but the idea of her haunted Raskolnikov throughout, so although she was dead, she continued on in the story.  Once we had the basic road map laid out (and it didn't include any of the minor characters), I then took that and started writing. As a playwright, all of my early writings were farces, which meant that they were very heavy plot shows- lots of high speed escapes, fast ins and outs, etc. They're still some of my favorite things to write, and I've gotten pretty good at judging how long things take (i.e. traveling in space, costume changes, physical business, etc.) For C&P, I started with one character- I think it was Raskolinkov's sister, Dunya, and just started writing her storyline. If she met somebody else from the story, I'd make a note of it, but keep writing until I ran out of steam for Dunya.  Then I would take whoever she had met along the way and think, OK, how did they get to that point?  I'd then either start with them from the beginning, or the moments just prior to them meeting Dunya, and write that. Inevitably, they would also meet new characters along the way, and so it would ripple out from
there.“



TED
“Interactive theater is fairly new frontier for theater.  During the writing process, how did you weigh the storytelling aspects of the script against the reality that it was physically impossible for patrons to watch all of your work being performed since the actors were spread out across such a large space?”


TYLER OLSEN
“(One clarification- C&P was IMMERSIVE theater, not interactive. In interactive, the non-trained spectator has a direct effect on the narrative, which was not the case in C&P). As for the question:  This was always a consideration. However, right from the outset, we knew that this was the reality- no one was ever going to see the whole thing. So instead, we focused on creating a similar emotional journey to be for the audience to go on, regardless of where they were.  Then we looked at the characters, and weighed in on how their relationship with the audience could reinforce that feeling.”


TED
“As an actor in C&P, the sound played a huge part in not only the timing of the play but in the mood.  Did you previsualize or pre-auditorialize the soundtrack while you were writing or was it something you left for the sound design team to figure out?”


TYLER OLSEN
“This was all Michael Croswell, and he hit it out of the park! There was definitely input from us, but the richness of the design was totally his art!”


TED
“There were three levels of ticket prices, the highest of which was the $100 MAN.  As an actor, I had a few interactions with that character.  Was that role scripted or ad-libbed?  What was your process in creating that character?”


TYLER OLSEN
“This character was almost completely improvisational, and was based entirely on reading/anticipating the desires of the $100 patron and the show they wanted to see. This was about giving audiences a key into the world that nobody else had- someone who could get you anywhere and knew where all the action was.  Chris Barton and Brian Watson Jones created this whole experience to dynamically with the existing show, while adding elements that no one else would ever see...”

TED
“With such an intense interactive experience under their belt, what did you want the audience members to leave C&P with once they ascended the stairs back to the real world?”


TYLER OLSEN
“I wanted them to be excited, overwhelmed, and open to a new kind of performance experience!”


TED
“What advice could you give to someone that wants to do an interactive play, but doesn't know where to begin?”

TYLER OLSEN
“There's a few questions I would have them ask themselves, as this kind of work requires a colossal amount of time and resources to pull off well. The biggest question is WHY? What does making it immersive or interactive do for the story besides making it "cool".  After that, I think our approach of emotional arch to general plot to character arcs to writing worked really well.   Oh, and to let them know to not make any other plans- this work is consuming and never ending!  We worked for almost 2 years on the one-hour show that Crime and Punishment became.!  And, I'd  tell them to work with people who have done it before.  Jeff Wirth with Interactive Playlab in NYC is an amazing authority on this work, having studied and taught it for over 30 years and is an tremendous resource for anybody looking to do this work!"