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experience of doing them in my body. That way I could be at
the place I needed to be when I actually entered.”
Mediation Leads to Authenticity
One common theme that emerged from discussions with
many of the artists for this article was that their experience
of the technology provided them with the opportunity to
bring a greater quality of naturalness and ease to their work,
what Tirosh calls “sincerity.” Rizwan Mirwan, an actor with
The Builders Association, echoes this sentiment when he
describes how mediated technology frees him to use “my
own natural voice” in performance, as opposed to the projected
and carefully placed speech of traditional theatre. He is
currently workshopping The Builders’ new piece, Continuous
City, at Berkeley Rep, in which he plays an Internet entrepreneur.
Mirwan, a New York–raised native of India, enthusiastically
describes how this kind of theatre allows for an almostdocumentary
level of realism. “We’re using my actual family
in video chat rooms during the piece: someone in India,
someone in London. We’re using real stories, and my real
family gossip.” For Mirwan, this allows for a truer emotional
connection to the material, as opposed to the manufactured
or imagined emotions usually required of the actor when
performing a traditional play.
While Mirwan views this technology as an opportunity to
bring the realness, for his fellow Builders Association member
Moe Angelos, it has enabled her to indulge her love for creating
characters often radically different from herself in a believable
way. Or as she puts it, “Put a wig on me and an accent,
and I’m good to go!” In the Builders’ piece Super Vision, the
40-something Angelos, who’s Caucasian, buried under layers
of latex and dark-colored makeup, played a 72-year-old Sri
Rizwan Mirwan (standing, center) is encapsulated by video in the Builders Association production
of Super Vision.
Lankan woman who communicates with her granddaughter
in the United States via Internet teleconferencing. While her
image was projected on a huge screen at the back of the
stage, Angelos herself was seated downstage in front of a
camera — something audiences often didn’t notice, focused
as they were on the mediated character. Angelos had ethical
concerns about playing a woman of a completely different
age and race, but says, “People really bought it, and I wonder
whether it was the frame that the video provided or the
old-fashioned tricks of makeup and acting?” The litmus test
arrived when a group of Sri Lankan immigrants came to see
one of the performances. “I thought they would string my ass
up, but they couldn’t have been more gracious and lovely.
I think it was the frame. I am indebted to that frame for the
success of the role.”
While 3LD and The Builders Association represent the
upper echelon of this kind of performance, video technology
has been used at all levels of theatre. New York–based playwright
and solo performer Wendy Weiner incorporated video
into her first one-woman piece, Defying Freud, at the now-
Moe Angelos acts downstage-right (lower left in this photo), but is projected on-screen during her performances in Super Vision.
www.stage-directions.com • November 2007 53