Working out Werewolf

It’s never a fun moment when you lose control of the audience, but that’s what happened in one of our first public showings for Werewolf, back in June 2021.

In Werewolf, the audience sits in a wide circle of chairs, with the three performers (the wardens) taking their places amongst them. The imaginary situation is that we’re all here to take shelter from a lycanthropy outbreak - monsters running wild outside. The show is inspired by the social game also known as Mafia, in which, over a series of days and nights, players try and eliminate secret traitors who kill by dark. 

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Our goal in this show was always clear: to create a participatory environment where we would give the audience as much agency as possible while also including a strong storyline and solid nighttime scares. The challenge was to balance active participation with theatrical storytelling. 

That night, in the community hall in Paekakariki, it was clear we hadn’t gotten the mix quite right.

Slowly at first, people cast their thoughts and opinions into the room. It was a good sized audience, and before long they were so unruly the performers could hardly get a word in amongst the crosstalk happening across the circle. When ideas weren’t heard, they came back louder. Even more worryingly, one or two people seemed to actively have it in for Joel at a personal level, and they weren’t shy about saying so. 

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Try as they might, the three actors couldn’t carve out space for the quieter or more dramatic moments which needed stillness. The word to describe it is ‘chaotic’, or as the reviewer that night generously put it, “the result is a bit unruly – even cacophonous”.

Afterwards, we all felt a bit down about it - had we created something too unwieldy and uncontrollable to function? 

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Binge’s work is often participatory, so there’s always a chance that this sort of thing can happen, especially when a show is in development.  In this case, we had work to do in terms of how to prompt and invite the audience to participate in a way that helped the show. 

Werewolf is at its core narrative-driven rather than game-based, though we try to make it feel like it’s organic. It’s inspired by the feeling of early covid lockdown: the sense that you are relying on strangers to survive while not quite knowing what the threat is or what form it might take, or trusting that everyone has the community’s interests at heart.

When making Werewolf, we liked the idea that the performers blend in among the audience. In our minds, these characters were sort of volunteer civil defense types with minimal training. But in search of a flat hierarchy to the show, it turned out we hadn’t granted the performers enough authority in the room. In turn, this made the audience unsure of their place in the show. For Binge, clarity of audience role has always been important. When the performers don’t have enough status, that leaves a vacuum into which the audience steps It wasn’t that people really wanted to misbehave or sabotage the show, it was that they didn’t know what good behaviour looked like, because we hadn’t let them know. It’s like we’d invited them to play sports without telling them all the rules, or pointing out who the referee was. 

One obvious fix was to give the wardens obvious identification that set them apart. We considered hi-vis vests but landed on armbands. 

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We also worked to establish clearer control of the room at the start, and tried to set some expectations of when the audience would be called on and when they should sit back - part of this involved creating recognisable cues based on whether the wardens were seated or standing, or what the lighting state was. 

Later, we also developed more tools (often inspired by teachers’ classroom management) to encourage quieter people to speak or to gently suggest that zealous contributors yield focus. 

‍Refining actions

When they arrive, each audience member gets a card with an instruction on it, which they keep secret, adding to the sense of distrust. 

The fun is that you don’t know who has what, or whether someone’s action is prompted by their card. We found in early showings that these cards give a real sense of liveness and volatility to the show. We wanted some actions to be triggered by certain events (in reaction to a line of dialogue, say) or at certain times (e.g. during the third night), which meant that some people would be waiting a while for their action. 

In that first public showing, we miscalculated some of these cards. Here are some of the examples. 

Several people got a version of this card:

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Cards like this made the performers' jobs hard, because we were basically asking our audience members to participate constantly without telling them when to stop. In later versions, we tried not to include cards like this, instead giving specific ‘one and done’ actions that could be discharged on a particular cue. 

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This one was a real doozy - I think we had another version of this at some point which was even more blunt. In the wrong hands, you’re basically asking for an audience member to harangue a particular performer. Not helpful, especially because it also tells that audience member what to think.

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Some cards were not disruptive as such, but were a hard ask for audience members, because it wasn’t easy to know when the ‘right’ time to participate was. So we realised it wasn’t really fair to give cards that were this open, because it was hard for people to know if they were participating in the right way. 

By being more specific, we could make it easier to sit back a bit for the rest of the show. 

We also learned that it was important that the audience is always in some way thanked for their action - once they’ve gone out a limb, they should be acknowledged. With three characters who were seldom in agreement, we set up a rule that someone should always acknowledge an particpant's action. When an audience member is confident and playful, this ‘thank you’ can come in the form of something more backhanded and playful, but the principle stands. We wanted the audience to feel like they’ve done it right, and that their participation was valued by the show.

So our big takeaway was to give clear cues, clear expectations, and to try and make the actions feel meaningful. 

This isn’t to say we haven’t had some bumpy nights since then. As long as we do the show, we’ll be compiling ways to prepare the audience and how to respond to them. But we know what we’re pursuing: a feeling of events unfolding, of confident engagement from audiences - and the adrenaline rush that goes with it.