My name is Betsy. I write for theater. Sometimes people ask me what I’m doing, and why.
There are a lot of layers to that question.
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Why do you make art?
I make art because I like pretty things.
There are a lot of ways people try to justify making art as pro-social and I hate them all. As soon as you start talking about how art should exist because of the good it does in the world, it becomes like vegetables, or education. My art is not good for you. My art is like chocolate cake, or the anarchist’s cookbook. It’s pure unjustifiable decadence with a hint of pyrotechnics.
Why do you create escapism?
I create escapism because people want to escape. Because pleasure should be strange and varied, and I want to expand into the infinite space of things that pull people into better worlds. Or worlds where they are better, where they are the hero.
I create escapism because it makes people joyful.
What kind of art do you make?
I make immersive theater. Interactive theater. Participatory theater.
…I make larps.
LARP stands for Live-Action Role Play, but I hate that acronym: it sounds like sex or academia. I’m hoping someday larp will become its own word, and everyone can forget it once was an initialization.
To steal the definition of larp from my own damn page: “A larp, or Live-Action Role Play, is a medium for telling stories — somewhat like a novel, a play, or a narrative videogame. In a larp, the writers create a dramatic scenario with a setting, characters, and rules of engagement. Each of the players then takes on the role of a different character, and together they improvisationally play out the scenario to its conclusion. The larp provides a structure that guides this improvisation, but the ending of the story depends on the choices made by the players as they play out their roles, and may be different every time the larp is played.”
But why do you write larps?
I tried writing books and stage shows and found them suffocating: I don’t like shoving my perspective on a passive audience. I’d rather assume that people are going to push the boundaries and play with what I’ve made: I’d rather leave room for that.
Plus creating a story that people can be in gives them joy. Being part of a narrative is intoxicating and new, the way a novel ain’t.
Okay, but why do you write larps people play over the phone?
Well, I started writing phone larps a little before coronavirus quarantine, because I was in New York and the rent on spaces was Too Damn High. Renting studios in particular wasn’t worth it: I’m not handy in the slightest, I can’t make the sort of pretty props that make a space visceral and unreal. If I rent a room with blank white walls, it will look like a room with blank white walls, and that’s boring.
And then there was the coronavirus quarantine, and suddenly everything was digital, and I really liked how phones worked there. Phones felt old-fashioned; videochat was the medium du jour, but videochat had become the medium du jour during the pandemic, so they felt a little sterile, a little too-new. Phones could be used by anachronistic wizards, they could be used by spirit mediums and people from 1923. Phones had a history; they could be part of the larps instead of just a medium of convenience. Phones were accessible to people whose wifi was crap: by not being the medium du jour, they marked us out as a little unusual.
And then, you can create a hell of a world over the phone with a minimum of technology. Forget set dressing: we just needed Audacity. Phones have been around long enough that we’re used to filling in the world from what comes through our ears. The sounds of a cafe in Caracas could transport people: Spanish chatter, glasses clinking, music, cars, a backfiring truck.
It was visceral in a way a video would have to be VR to replicate.
What larps have you written that people play over the phone?
Do you have any credentials I can look up somewhere?
I was a speaker at NoProscenium’s 2020 HEREfest. That’s gotta count for something, right?
