Summary

Mediated performance Patience Worth by Jennifer Schlueter and the for/word company. The media design featured live and pre-recorded facial motion capture, interactive set up for devising, and production in Unity 3D.

Performance at the Kranzberg Arts Center, St Louis, MS, photography by John Lamb

Project Team

Collaborators and Artists
Written by Jennifer Schlueter (Faculty, Theatre)
Directed by  Jennifer Schlueter & Sarah Ware
Starring: Emily Bach, Amanda Fox, Christina Ritter, Christopher Marlowe Roche, Kevin McClatchy (OSU Faculty and members of the for/word company)
Production Stage Manager: Sherée L. Greco (Faculty, Theatre)
Animations & Projection Design by:Vita Berezina-Blackburn (ACCAD staff)
Devising and Production Media Environment Design by:John Luna (MFA, Dance)
Scene Design by Brad Steinmetz (Faculty, Theatre)
Costume Design by Kristine Kearney (Faculty, Theatre)
Lighting Design by Eric Elz and Sarah Lawler*
Sound Design & Composition by Caitlyn Trevor (PhD candidate, School of Music)
Additional programming, Modeling & Motion Capture by Alice Grischenko*, Lakshika P. Udakandage*, Jeremy Baker*, Thomas Heban*
*Design DAIM MFA candidates and alumni

Project Description

The play explores the life of Pearl Curran, a housewife in early twentieth-century St Louis, also the operator of an Ouija board through which Patience Worth, a long-dead early British colonist and thwarted authoress, spoke. Over the course of two decades, a remarkably prolific Patience dictated (and, with the help of Pearl’s husband John, published) millions of words in books, poems, and plays through Pearl’s Ouija board and ultimately through Pearl’s own voice. Plumbing the rich archival holdings of the Missouri History Museum Archives, Patience Worth explores fragmented identity, sublimated love affairs, a nagging desire for fame, and the limits of credulity.

The play was developed during a series of residencies at ACCAD where the media designers experimented with integrating full body (Vicon) and facial motion capture (Faceware Tech) into the media devising environment created on the game development platform, Unity 3D.

The play premiered at the Kranzberg Arts Center, St Louis, MS, and was also shown at the Barnett Theatre, Columbus OH in 2017.

 learn more about Patience Worth for/word company