Last weekend, a couple sitting in a sport utility vehicle parked by Red's Bar downtown got into a fight after a few drinks.
The man in the driver's seat was in denial. He kept pleading in an inebriated, childlike way, to go to McDonald's. His partner in the passenger seat kept asking for the keys. The minor disagreement kept spiraling into larger ones. The man in the driver's seat, became exasperated: "Everyone treats me like an idiot, not just you. Why are the numbers are stacked that way?" he said, the pain on his face visible, and his voice probably audible to a group chatting on the street in front of the bar. The quarrel came to an open-ended resolution, but one that would be repeated within an hour.
This wasn't real. It was "honestly i love you to death" a 10-minute play by Emily Feldman. The man behind the wheel was Jeremy Sher, a local actor and all-around theater-maker. His partner was Matt McDaniel, who finished his master's degree in theater at the University of Montana last semester.
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The short play was one of five you could see last weekend during "Buckle Up," the new "Plays on Tap" series from the Montana Repertory Theatre, the professional company in residence at the University of Montana. All were staged in parked cars, with actors in the front, and the audience in the back seat.
The concept was novel but simple enough. You showed up at the Northside KettleHouse and were handed a map, roughly a 2-mile walking loop around downtown Missoula and the Westside. You headed to a specific car and arrived at an appointed time, hopped into the backseat, and a play began with no introduction.
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"Buckle Up" is the brainchild of the Rep's new artistic director, Michael Legg.
He produced site-specific short plays in Kentucky at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, a center for contemporary American theater. As head of the professional training company, he worked in new-play development, and is connected with emerging writers around the country who were open to writing a short, brand-new play that could be staged in the front seat of a car.
The writers, scripts and casts were notably diverse in terms of race, gender and sexuality, something that Legg had emphasized when he applied for the job.
He didn't give the writers very many limitations other than a cap on the number of actors; that the car needed to stay parked; and to give him some advance notice if they wanted their car parked in front of, say, a bar or a church.
Legg found a perfectly appropriate site for Mara Nelson-Greenberg's "Dinosaur Hats," outside Piehole pizza place on North Higgins Avenue.
Antonio Armagno played Jay, and Jalynn Nelson was Izzy. They're juniors in the theater program, playing college students parked outside of a restaurant.
Jay and Izzy are close friends who've known each so long they're stocked with each other's embarrassing secrets. Their conversation, with absurd humor and confessional weight, hinges on learning to be yourself in that painful, undergraduate way.
Among the characters, the aging Buick and the ready-made set of downtown Missoula, it felt like the shoot of an independent film. At points, Jay got out of the car to see who was in the restaurant. It ended with reconciliation and an absurd dance in homemade hats right in the street.
At one point on Friday night, the yelling in the car could be heard down the block, and pedestrians seemed startled that they might be witnessing an un-staged scene. On Sunday, a man bicycled past with music playing on external speakers. Armagno casually glanced toward him, just like the audience.
You'd expect a theater director to say that their art form is more intimate than television, but Legg used a counter-intuitive analogy. He said the plays would be "like sitting on your couch watching Netflix, except it's live — but the same level of intimacy."
After Armagno finished the line, "Kay, now let's get out of here. People are starting to stare," a Rep physical attendant in a neon vest opened the car door and ushered the audience on to the next site.
There's not time to clap, really, which is one thing Legg is considering for "Room Service," the April installment of "Plays on Tap." It's the same concept, but with hotel rooms instead of cars.
"One thing I didn’t anticipate is how strongly we’re conditioned to behave at the end of plays — the actors told me that the people in the backseat wanted to applaud or to tell them they did a good job or just to talk to them afterwards," Legg wrote in an email. "I love those impulses, but I really wanted the people in the backseat to feel like voyeurs who watch these important moments and then slip away, as opposed to feeling like theatre audiences."
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Socializing and talking about the plays is an important part of his whole plan. Halfway through the walking loop, you return to the KettleHouse for an intermission, when you can have a beer and talk about the experience.
One attendee was Jefferson White, who worked with Legg at the Actors Theatre and is in the area shooting the second season of "Yellowstone." He plays Jimmy, a young screw-up who is recruited into Kevin Costner's gang of ranch hands.
White pointed out that one location, the Conoco gas station parking lot on North Orange Street, is the kind of set a filmmaker would envy, with the backdrop of a highway interchange and looming foothills.
Usually when he watches a play in a normal theater setting, he wants to be closer to the performers. "What a gift to sort of having so many of the barriers to connecting with a character removed," he said.
"It has an intimacy that I don't think you could experience in any other medium, or with any other structure," he said. He compared it to sitting with someone in normal conversation, when you can read their body language.
"In a situation like this, you're so close to the performers that they're acting with their eyebrows and their ears, like everything. The way they breathe," he said.
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Legg didn't give the cast members too much advice about working so close to the audience.
"I just wanted them to be present with each other in those moments and let the audience experience the intimacy that came out of the conversations that were happening in the front seat. My goal was to just let these plays be experienced by the audience and then have them move on to the next one," he wrote in an email.
Watching an argument at close range, as Legg intended, does create a sense of voyeurism.
Curen Feliciani, an undergraduate theater major who went to see "Buckle Up" on Sunday, said there were moments during one piece where it was "almost like invading their space," he said. "There were parts when I wanted to look down."
Sher, who acted in that first play, said it's "another great piece of tension that this format offers."
"We know it's artifice when we go to see theater, it's make-believe, and yet with that close proximity, we feel like we're invading privacy, we're interlopers or something, when it's all a construct. It's a play."
Having the audience right in the back seat, "you could totally, totally feel apprehension, awkwardness, delight; this may be overstating it, but maybe reverence or a sense of a respect, not wanting to disrupt things. But you could tell people wanted to react," but felt self-conscious.
Sher, who worked in the Chicago theater world before moving to Missoula, said that from an actors' perspective, "Buckle Up" was unique.
Feldman's script unfolds in about 12 minutes, and within that limit has about five miniature iterations of the same encounter, where you see "the entire span of a relationship."
Legg, who started in July, wants to work with more playwrights and produce new work here in Missoula. "Buckle Up" was intended as an introduction to the community, a way of bringing the Rep out into the city instead of asking them to come to campus. The site-specific concept was new to Missoula, but appeared to pay off. The intentionally limited-seat production sold out, with 150 slots among Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
"If we think we have enough demand, we might remount these right before 'Room Service' goes up, so that people who missed it this time around can check it out," he said.
After the run, Legg's largest takeaway was that "Missoulians are game for something new and exciting, so we’re definitely going to do more nontraditional theatre out in the community."
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Claire Kiechel's "Absolute Event," a science-fiction tinged story, was performed by seniors Morgan Solonar and Hudson Therriault. The site faced the Ceretana building and the North Hills. Legg had the cast members use their own cars, and encouraged them not to spruce them up too much. The vintage-and-showing-it 1980s Subaru station wagon, complete with a "coexist" sticker, fit seamlessly into its Westside surroundings.
Which seat you chose created a different experience. As Solonar unfurled a monologue about their relationship, you might only be able to see Therriault's reaction: a frozen mask of shock and quivering eyes.
Over at the Conoco for Sam Myers' "People Love Us," you'd have a very different experience if you sat behind Brit Garner. She breaks the fourth wall by turning right around toward you and addressing you for several minutes. She and her acting partner, Annika Hanson, enter into a complicated run of dialogue, sometimes speaking in unison and sometimes not, for a word or two. In another self-aware touch, they're talking about the intimate nature of conversations in cars, and land on a sentiment that Myers likely hopes you agree with:
"And that feeling is never something you would articulate or say out loud to anyone because it's embarrassing or whatever, but you also sense that everyone in the car, the people crammed in the backseat, they're also thinking embarrassing thoughts about how special it is to be driving around in a full car," they said.