The Oregon Trail tech week

Though from the audience, theatre can sometimes appear to be exclusively an actor's medium, every show is actually the culmination of a creative process involving numerous artists and technicians.

A few days before our rehearsals moved from the studio to the theatre, a small army of crew members assembled our set for The Oregon Trail bringing to life a school computer lab, an apartment living room, and the wild expanse of the American west. 

Good thing we had a camera set up, day and night, to document the entire process!

The Oregon Trail in PXP

PXP is an awesome blog published by the Theatre Development Fund aimed at people new to theatre, particularly young adult audience members. We love the work they do to keep theatre accessible and unpretentious. Additionally, they encourage audience members to submit responses to shows. Selected responses are posted to their blog. Justin Joyce wrote a beautiful piece on his experience seeing our production of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail. It's this kind of personal connection that makes the theatre a magical place.

The Oregon Trail - A Little Too Close To Home

By Justin Joyce

What's it about?

Is there a video game you were obsessed with as a kid? You would play it and play it. Now, you rediscover it years later and you pick up right where you left off, reliving the better days of your childhood. Suddenly, you realize that your childhood was so much better than being an adult... but your childhood sucked too. 

That's the situation of Jane when she decides that she is going to continue on The Oregon Trail. 

What'd I experience? 

Enter Name
>Justin Joyce

Enter names of your wagon-mates. 
>Just me, thanks. 

Ok. You have a series of options. You can:
A. Close this page and not finish this article. 
B. Start on the trail.
C. Feel personally targeted by the play you're seeing. 

What would you like to do?
> C.

Ok. Imagine that you are going out to see a show. Your expectations for said show are that it is an Off Broadway show based on the video game The Oregon Trail. Initially, you're expecting that it will be about someone playing the game, with some attempt at making the player's drama coincide with the drama of the people on the trail.

Then, you find yourself face-to-face with the main character of the show, and realize that everything that is terrible for this character (that the Voice of the Game narrates about from above) is a little too close to home. Part of it is the emphasis on how the character has enough privilege that her family can afford to send her college without need for loans, and all the debt that goes with that. It gets worse when the narrator describes how she got a "useless degree" in creative writing (poetry for main character, but it's just general writing for you) because she had enough privilege to waste her family's money on something like that. So now your general anxiety about how acutely you're wasting your life is being pushed just a little bit further, as you've somehow managed to see the one show in NYC that seems to poke fun at your insecurities.

Next, you can: 
A. Talk about the depression.
B. Ignore the depression.
C. Eat spaghetti. 

What would you like to do?
> A. 

Ok. Perhaps the worst part of it is the fact that the character's greatest struggle is such a dumb concept to describe for anyone who has had life handed to them, but you recognize it really well. The way they describe this strange sadness and crushing pain that sits over them fairly constantly, and you're squirming in the audience because they're just a few words off from the way you've always described it. Yet, you see that reflection of yourself in the way she jokes about killing herself, because you remember being there... and are still there sometimes when you joke about all the ways you could die right now, but you don't know how serious you are about it. Sometimes you just say it because after years of talking that way, it is just an automatic response. Other times you really are thinking about it, but those thoughts fade away too quickly for you to ever ask 'why?'

Also, there's the plot line set during the actual Oregon Trail about how damn near impossible it is to really move on from the death of a loved one, and, to be honest, that's a whole other can of worms you're not even gonna open right now.

Now, you can: 
A. Continue on the trail.
B. Continue on the trail.
C. Continue on the trail.
D. Continue on the trail.

What would you like to do?
> B. 

Ok. But it isn't all bad. Despite how tragic the scene is, it's hilarious putting the pieces together when you realize that they're gonna make the "[Blank] has died of dysentery" joke, because that's the big quote everyone remembers from the game. And the show did keep you laughing most of the time, at every nonsensical turn of the dialogue between the characters, you were right there, being jerked around by the non-sequiturs and jokes they rapid-fired at you for most of the show. 

And, in the end, you were reminded of that one thing you learned a long time ago, but it was nice to see other people reflect the same mentality: it doesn't get good. When it's bad, it honestly never gets good. When people tell you that "it gets better", they think that that means that things get good again, but that's never been what you've experienced. It gets better, yeah, but it doesn't get good. And that's pretty okay. Because lots of people are never good, just getting better. 

Sometimes it just takes a good story to get you through the next day. Maybe it's a video game or a book or a movie, a tv show, a podcast, a sock puppet... it doesn't matter. Eventually you find that end screen. And you can say to yourself: I didn't get attacked by Indians. I didn't drown fording the river. I didn't starve to death. I didn't overheat. 

I didn't die of dysentery. 

Once you get to that point, it's nice to look forward and see the next green light, move forward, until you see the big accomplishment...

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE MADE IT TO OREGON!

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Bekah Brunstetter in NY Theatre Guide

In this fantastic interview with NY Theatre Guide, The Oregon Trail playwright Bekah Brunstetter discusses the important things, like the best sandwiches and LA spin classes for playwrights.

Discovering the Artist: Playwright Bekah Brunstetter of ‘The Oregon Trail’

By: Megan Lohne

With her previous productions of “Oorah!” at The Atlantic and “Be A Good Little Widow” at Ars Nova, Brunstetter has a playful, earnest, and thought-provoking voice that continues to grow. Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing the latest incarnation of her play “The Oregon Trail” at The McGinn/Cazale Theatre, produced by The Fault Line Theater, now playing through February 12th.

This comedrama, directed by Geordie Broadwater, follows the story of Jane, a 13-year- old in the 90s, and another Jane from the 1830s (played by the delightfully perfect Emily Louise Perkins). While 90s Jane navigates “The Oregon Trail” computer game to fill her lonely afternoon, 1830s Jane traverses the real Oregon Trail, losing her possessions, family, and joy along the way. It’s an honest, funny, heartbreaking piece about earning sadness and our human entitlement to feel things deeply.

Currently writing for the hit “This is Us” on NBC, my old grad school mate took a few moments to answer my questions about success, process, and DUH, sandwiches.

Where did you first get the idea for “The Oregon Trail”?

It started in grad school (with you!) when we had an assignment, I think, to write the first ten minutes of a new play that took place in a very specific location. I’d been thinking about sadness a lot at that point, and to what extent the “easiness” of life now allows us to indulge that feeling, whereas on the Oregon Trail, it was certainly harder to say you didn’t feel like getting out of the wagon in the morning. And so I thought it might be interesting to juxtapose a young woman now with a young woman then, and really have them occupy the same space, like physically and emotionally, and then see what happened.

What is your writing process like/re-writing?

I always begin with the ending, that’s the thing I know first. And so I just try and get there, to that ending. My first drafts are very VERY not meticulous. I just kinda get it all out, and oftentimes the characters sound like each other, and are sometimes arch and not fleshed out. I’m more focused on what I’m trying to say and what the images are and all of the verbal diarrhea of the first draft. I don’t actually fix or figure out my play until I’m in a room with actors, who then really help me figure out fully what kind of humans my characters are.

What’s the first play that made you cry?

Oh man, that is a great question. I think it was “Children of Eden,” which is a musical about Adam and Eve. I was in in it high school – I was a chorus person, I was supposed to be a frog or maybe algae, I was like crawling and sliding around on the floor. And to me the songs are so beautiful, because the characters are trying to figure out what the hell life even IS, what it is supposed to be; they are dealing with temptation, trying to figure out what’s right and wrong. And that really resonated with me at the time, so I cried a lot when I was supposed to be singing, but I guess it kind of worked.

What is most important for you in a relationship with your director?

I need someone I can have a drink with, hang with, and reveal way too much personal information and then THEY reveal two much personal information and then we laugh and feel like not just collaborators, but friends. Someone that I can be myself around, for sure.

Other passions aside from writing?

I love to cook/bake/experiment in those realms. I love reality baking shows and am most recently clinically obsessed with Vivian Howard, an award-winning chef from my home state of NC, who is transforming the food scene down there with her beautiful farm-to- table restaurant in Kinston. I am passionate about making her foods and thinking about what life lessons I can glean from her work ethic. And also food. FOOOOOOOD.

I am equally passionate about spinning. Not in circles. On a bike. Sheila Callaghan went from being my favorite lady playwright to my favorite lady playwright and ALSO my spinning teacher. She teaches at a place in LA and is completely amazing. Sometimes, her classes are half playwrights, and that is always weird and fun.

What has the transition from stage to TV writing been like? If you could give advice to young writers attempting to make the same leap, what would it be?

I’d say it’s been pretty painless because writing is writing, though TV certainly has a different language and set of rules that must be learned. But it’s character, and story, and dialogue, which playwrights know. I really love being a hired hand, helping someone execute their grand vision. I love that it’s not just on me, I love the collaborative nature of it. But I’ve definitely had to learn the form. The structure of a good episode of television, one that is economical, that keeps people guessing, is definitely not something that comes naturally to me, but something that’s been awesome to learn, as it’s helped my plays get tighter.

Very much still learning, though. I have yet to sell a pilot/come up with my own show, because my ideas are all plays and refuse to be shows, but I’m working on it! To young writers: don’t bother with spec scripts, focus on YOUR voice, and write a pilot to a show that ONLY YOU COULD WRITE. Shut out every other show you’ve ever seen, pretend you’ve just been born, and write from that place.

If you could eat a sandwich with any living artist, who, and what would you ask (seriously though, what’s on the sandwich)?

Megan, you are making my day with these wonderful questions. First and foremost, it would be a sharp grilled cheese on wheat bread with sharp mustard and basil and sliced heirloom tomatoes with a little Sriracha to dip it into on the side. Secondly, I would have this sandwich with Sarah Ruhl, and I would ask her what it’s like inside of her head, and how her ideas come to her.

When you think of the word success, what does that mean to you?

Oh man, what a fleeting and elusive word. Even when I’m supposed to feel “successful,” it always feels like whatever I’ve done is not enough, that I must do more. I’ve definitely been redefining it for myself as of late, shaping it into something I could actually find myself feeling. I think for a writer, success is always having a mind that is open and absorbing things and turning those things into stories, characters, and moments. As long as my brain is still doing that, Je suis success.

Biggest accomplishment?

Honestly, after years of kissing the wrong ones and turning them into plays, I somehow managed to land and subsequently marry the kindest, most loyal, most handsome of men. (Aww vomit/sorry I just got married/I’m sorry!)

Five years from now, you will_____________.

Hopefully still be writing, but also surrounded by cake flour. I would also like to have a yard and a window looking over it.

Favorite book/play/movie/animal?

“Love in the Time of Cholera”/”Dead Evan Hansen” is my new favorite/”The Sound of Music”/basic tie between fat cats and fat dogs.

What was the hardest scene you ever had to write?

I’m working on a play right now about same-sex marriage in NC, and those who oppose it — it’s an attempt to humanize those people, but also show how they could maybe change — and every scene, so far, is the hardest I’ve ever had to write.

Who are the first names of the four other members in your “Oregon Trail” Party?

Julien Patton, Gavin Rossdale, Claire Danes, God.

How do you think the game culture shaped the 80s/90s kids?

Well, it shaped us WELL. We are well-shaped. No really, I love that we were kids without cell phones. I think we have slightly less ADD and are good at problem solving.

Finally, what’s your favorite curse word (how could I not ask? – remember, this is a family publication)?

Cheese and Criminy. It’s what my Dad says instead of Jesus Christ. It’s the best.

“The Oregon Trail” is currently playing through February 12, 2017 at The McGinn/Cazale Theatre. For more information and tickets, click here.

Bekah Brunstetter chats with TDF

Bekah Brunstetter chatted with TDF Stages about sadness, survival, and The Oregon Trail. A limited number of tickets each night are available at a 50% discount to TDF Members. You can find out more over at www.tdf.org.

Life Is Hard, But At Least You're Not a Pioneer

By Josh Austin

A new play blends covered wagons and modern technology

You've named your travel companions, chosen an occupation, and sensibly spent $400 at the general store on oxen, food, ammunition, and winter clothing. You set off west from Independence, Missouri, ready for an adventure. And then – whoops – you get a message on your screen that says you've died of dysentery. So it goes in The Oregon Trail.

Anyone who had a computer in the 80s or 90s is likely to remember this particular game, where players tried to get a group of settlers safely across the country in 1848. Half the fun – and more than half the point – came from the difficulty in completing the journey. No matter how much you prepared, the game insisted, life was always going to be hard.

That theme has transferred from the monitor to the stage in Bekah Brunstetter's new play, also called The Oregon Trail. Presented by the Fault Line Theatre and now in performances at the WP Theater until February 12, it juxtaposes pioneer life with the modern day.

"At the time when I started really working on this [script], I was seeing, in my peer group, a lot of sadness," Brunstetter says. "This feeling of listlessness and a sense of feeling lost and not quite knowing we're on the earth and what our function is, which of course is a common thing in your twenties. The play is about where that feeling comes from and how we deal with it and how that has changed between 1848 and now."

Within the show, the audience meets two Janes. There's Then Jane (played by Emily Louise Perkins), who is travelling the trail, covered wagon and all, alongside her family. There's also Jane (Liba Vaynberg), a contemporary teenager. When we meet them, both girls are unhappy with their lot in life, struggling to understand their place, and dealing with their own sadness and frustration. 

Liba Vaynberg in The Oregon Trail. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. 

Even as present-day Jane enters her mid-20s, the perils both women face, however different, leave them in similar emotional states. Then Jane battles the frontier, while Jane finds herself unemployed and trying to get a handle on her depression.

"I thought it would be interesting to compare feeling that way now versus feeling that way on the Oregon Trail," the playwright says. "If you're on the trail with your family, where every day is a fight to survive, you can't say that you don't want to get out of the wagon in the morning. You kind of have to." 

One scene in particular underscores the emotional intersections between the characters. Jane, nestled under a mound of blankets in an air-conditioned apartment, has been lying around binge-watching some show (probably Planet Earth or America's Next Top Model, according to Brunstetter). After six hours, she's feeling unfulfilled, uninspired, lazy, and sad. All of the emotions, Brunstetter notes, one often feels after lying around for half a day. (There's even a study that suggests binge watching is bad for your mental state.) Meanwhile, Then Jane has been tasked with starting a fire so that her family can eat breakfast. Unable to light the fire, she feels useless and discouraged.

"They're both frustrated," Brunstetter says. "The scope of their individual frustration cannot be more different: 'I need to light this fire so that my family can eat' versus 'I don't know what to do with this moment of my life that's been gifted to me.' My goal is to compare those two."

However, it is not Brunstetter's wish to cast judgement on either one of the women, particularly present-day Jane, whose situation is obviously less dire. "Though we're not necessarily hunting for our food and lighting fires for it, there's still a place for sadness because we're human beings," she says. "And even though our lives are easier, it's going to be a part of the experience."

After all, the playwright adds, it's our ancestors—including the ones who've trekked the trail—that have allowed us access to an easier life. If we remember that as we play the game, the journey can be much more satisfying.

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Village Voice Review

Did you catch the review in The Village Voice of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail today? If you missed it, we've got you covered! Check it out below:

Fault Line Theatre's 'Oregon Trail' Tracks Sadness Across Centuries

By: Nicole Serratore

Like the classic computer game The Oregon Trail, life is full of unpleasant surprises: There are rivers to forge, diseased to battle, bad decisions to regret, and dead ends to find our way out of. Bekah Brunstetter’s touching dramedy of the same title, now playing at Fault Line Theatre, uses the game as a device to ask how we keep pressing forward in the face of life’s many obstacles.

The play shifts between the 1848 pioneer world of the game and the real world, ca. 1997. We meet “Now Jane” (Liba Vaynberg), an aimless teen besotted with the clueless Billy (Juan Arturo), plagued by an indescribable sadness, and obsessed with the titular game.

Meanwhile, in 1848, “Then Jane” (Emily Louise Perkins) shares something akin to Now Jane’s depression: After the loss of her mother, she faces the arduous journey of a wagon trail from Missouri to Oregon with her father (Jimmy King) and older sister, Mary Anne (Laura Ramadei).

Oscillating between each Jane and Mary Anne’s struggle to “be a person in the world,” Brunstetter explores how depression is carried in these women’s bodies and how they articulate that sorrow in their respective eras. Their shared despondence resonates at times, though in this production, the 1800’s segments never feel as sharply drawn as the contemporary scenes.

Now Jane finds herself, as an adult, unemployed, living Mary Anne’s den, still directionless, and maybe still pining for her junior high crush. The Omnipotent Voice of The Oregon Trail (Craig Wesley Divino), heard but not seen, serves as a sometimes helpful (but more often frustrating) guide for Now Jane, offering her options to proceed in the the vernacular of The Oregon Trail; “You have a broken spirit. How would you like to fix it?” When she is dissatisfied with the options, she shouts “Control-Alt-Delete” at him, but her life isn’t a game; it continues, without a reset, never turning out like she wants.

But despite the darker themes, Brunstetter peppers the play with ample humor. Her strength is in the quippy dialogue and the focus on the winsome Now Jane, which Vaynberg painfully and accurately captures, particularly the teenage awkwardness of being uncomfortable in your own body. Even as she grows into an adult, her constant shuffling and slouching bears this mark. In one moment when things finally seem to be going her away, she casts off the gray and beams. It’s subtle work and Vaynberg navigates it well. Ramadei shows similar range and flexibility with her two Mary Annes: the pioneer version bounds across the stage with forced perkiness and delusional optimism, but Ramadei shades modern Mary Anne with a darker motivation.

When the play clicks its engaging, but that fascination can ebb and flow, and the themes tend to circle the wagon (sometimes literally) without gaining depth. But there is a sincerity and warmth to these young women, who display strength in their survival of the game of life.

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The Oregon Trail in the New York Times

Check out what The New York Times thought about our production of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail.

‘The Oregon Trail’ Traverses Tough Terrain in Two Different Eras

By: Alexis Soloski

Being a teenage girl is the worst! The unrequited crushes, the cascading hormones, the constant threat of cholera. In Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” produced by Fault Line Theater, Jane (Liba Vaynberg), a 13-year-old in the 1990s, is playing the titular game — a wildly popular piece of edutainment software that taught a generation of kids about pioneer life — in her school’s computer lab.

Meanwhile, a century and a half earlier, another Jane (Emily Louise Perkins) prepares to traverse the country in a covered wagon. Both Janes are self-involved, a little whiny and burdened with a goody-goody big sister (Laura Ramadei). Only one of them has to worry about whether or not her team of oxen can ford the river.

The play, directed by Geordie Broadwater, is a feisty, formally inventive comedy. As Jane plays the game, the computer voice presents her with increasingly personal choices. Would she like to begin her journey in March, April or May? — “when the sun starts to smolder and your bangs stick to your face no matter what you do, and you are disgusting.”

Ms. Brunstetter, a writer for the NBC show “This Is Us,” has scripted earlier plays — “Be a Good Little Widow,”“Oohrah!”— that include characters who seem to act not according to their own whims and desires, but to set up the next joke. As a consequence the work has felt stilted and sometimes precious.

“The Oregon Trail” is a great improvement, particularly in its nifty first half-hour. In Ms. Vaynberg’s expressive hands, contemporary Jane’s sly humor and cringing embarrassment feel wonderfully real and raw, horrible and funny, as in her woeful description of the onset of menarche: “It’s like when your body starts to tell you the truth about your life.” Her encounter with Billy (Juan Arturo), a sweaty devil-may-care soccer player, is a wincing delight.

After that, the play makes a forward leap to Jane’s thwarted adulthood and becomes a more formulaic piece about whether it’s O.K. to indulge in suffering when you haven’t actually suffered anything. The parallels between pioneer days and the present become more pointed, and the language Ms. Brunstetter uses in the 1840s scenes, which is neither period-appropriate nor playfully anachronistic, starts to irk, as do the sorrows of present-day Jane, who should have been packed off to a therapist years ago.

“I watch too much TV,” this Jane complains. “Nothing is fair.” Well, at least she doesn’t have to worry if she’ll have enough venison to make it through the winter.

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What We're Seeing: DANNYKRISDONNAVERONICA

As we head into tech for our New York premiere of Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail, we want to wish our friends at the Wheelhouse Theater Company a very happy opening tonight as they begin their run of DANNYKRISDONNAVERONICA at the 4th Street Theatre downtown. Do not miss this show! You may even notice our ol' pal Ben Mehl from our production of At The Table a year and a half ago.

January 7-28, 2017
4th Street Theater
83 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003

A Little About The Show

In a bucolic Brooklyn park Kris and Danny meet for their children's first play date. While commiserating, a precarious emotional relationship forms between them, but when one of their children is inexplicably injured, the sequential fall-out incites their spouses, Donna and Veronica, along a self-destructive path in search of the superfluous truth. DANNYKRISDONNAVERONICA is an offbeat meditation on the confounding business of contemporary parenthood.

Cast:

• Suzy Jane Hunt
• Ben Mehl
• Rachel Mewbron
• Liz Wisan

Creative:

• Directed by Jeff Wise
• Written by Lawrence Dial

The Oregon Trail in Rehearsal - Week 2

Happy New Years! After a couple days off for Christmas, the second week of rehearsal for Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail sped onwards. Taking a look back this week, Geordie talks to co-artistic director Aaron Rossini about the challenges in staging a play that pulls inspiration from a video game.

Also...

Tickets are now on sale! You can grab them over here. All preview performances are only $9!

The Oregon Trail in Rehearsal - Week 1

The first week of rehearsal for Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail has come to an end.

We sat down with director Geordie Broadwater to find out exactly what The Oregon Trail is all about.

For regular behind the scenes updates, be sure to follow us on Instagram!

'A Face in the Clouds" workshop

This past Wednesday we sat down at ART/NY's Brooklyn rehearsal studio and worked through a new play by Kareem Fahmy. Led by co-artistic director Aaron Rossini and featuring the talents of Charles Socarides, Kathryn Kates, RJ Brown, Philippe Bowgen, Marianna McClellan and our own John Racioppo, we had a great afternoon reading over the play and discussing the script.

We can't wait to see what direction Kareem takes this new play!