::Attending Bradley :: Apply Online :: Student Life :: Our Community :: Visit Us :: A to Z :: Search :: Home
Actors in three cities perform on one stage via Internet2
In scene 5 of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, Zero, who has been hanged for killing his boss, stirs for the first time in his tomb. He asks Shrdlu, the animate corpse in the next chamber, for a cigarette to help ward off the mosquitoes. Rice’s dialogue and stage direction are simple:
Zero: Say, slip me one o’ them Camels, will you? I’m gettin’ all bit up.
Shrdlu: Certainly. [He hands Zero cigarettes and matches.]
Ignoring the fact that both Zero and Shrdlu are dead, this should be a straightforward moment in the play. In Bradley’s recent production of The Adding Machine, however, this scene takes on intriguing complexity.
Instead of both actors sitting side by side on the stage, they are projected onto panels above the stage. Their performance is live, but viewers see a video image of them. The scene is further complicated by the fact that one actor, Brad Cook, who plays Shrdlu, is in a small studio at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and Zero, played by Thomas C. Lucas, is in the Lab Theatre a floor above the main stage in Bradley’s Hartmann Center for the Performing Arts. The cigarette and matches, then, pass across 600 miles and from video screen to video screen.
At a rehearsal two weeks before the play opened, the play’s director and Bradley’s Theatre Department chair, George Brown, tells the stage manager to “ask Tommy if they are set for cigarettes—and we need to get Waterloo set for cigarettes.”
During this particular rehearsal, Lucas (Zero) is projected onto the screen. Cook (Shrdlu) is projected onto a screen next to him, but the others in the rehearsal can’t see his face—the camera isn’t adjusted properly yet. He is seated on a draped green background. As the action is happening during the production, an engineer will use sophisticated software to drop out the green background so just Shrdlu’s image can be keyed-out—and dropped onto—the appropriate scenery.
For this scene, that’s the mausoleum. Since the actors’ images are projected onto video screens, the background doesn’t have to be built of traditional set materials, such as plywood. It can also be a projected image.
Multimedia students created three-dimensional, virtual scenery to set an idyllic tone for the Elysian Fields scene, where Zero, played by Thomas C. Lucas, and Daisy, played by Lindsey Schwahn, meet in the afterlife and experience the love they could not express while alive. The production's scenery and lighting by Erich Keil and costumes by Becki Arnold also facilitated the live action of the play as well as the seamless integration of technology.
Enter Bradley’s Multimedia Department, directed by Jim Ferolo, the production’s art director and co-creator. He and his students have created computer-generated images that can be projected onto the stage to take the place of traditional scenery—and even some of the actors. In the mausoleum scene, for example, they created a vivid black and white image with rows of burial chambers, labeled with binary digits instead of names. The chambers open to reveal the live, projected actors, as well as pre-recorded segments for two smaller roles.
Explaining how a cigarette will be passed from Ontario to Illinois, Brown says: “It’s going to be an optical illusion.” He then balances a pencil on a soda can as he speaks. “For example, this is the cigarette and we want this cigarette 18 inches off the floor. The camera shot for your side ends here, and the camera shot for my side ends here, and we both have the exact same set up.” Shrdlu passes the cigarette to the edge of his screen, as Zero picks up the one sitting at the edge of his.
With all the potential problems that can result in streaming video over such a long distance, why not, as Ferolo asks “buy an airline ticket?” He answers his own question: “it is experimenting with the newest aesthetic.”
In describing the mausoleum scene, Ferolo explains: “We are going to have actors in remote locations in the tombs having conversations with each other. They will be physically a thousand miles apart, but they’ll be live, in real time on stage performing in these virtual environments and also working with live actors onstage. And that is where that dynamic and complexity really starts to happen. It’s not that we’re just doing the virtual scenery, but we are layering a keyed-out actor into the scenery. In real time they’ll be communicating with somebody that’s a thousand miles away and performing that scene live for an audience at a single location.”