At the Intersection of Interactive Mediums: “DIRT” Blends Games and Theater at The Tank

Do you ever wish you could have a say in how your city developed its land? Well, this month, New Yorkers finally can. At least, in the theoretical theatrical exercise of DIRT. The interactive theater piece imagines a scenario in which the East River drains, inviting audience members to develop the land as they wish.

After a run at this year’s Exponential Festival in Brooklyn, DIRT moves across the East River (still very much a river in real life) for a run this July at The Tank. Sour Milk, makers of Traffic and Feast, created the show. Consisting of Christina Tang, Anna Jastrzembski, and Carsen Joenk, Sour Milk explains what led to the new production, what they hope audiences take away, and what makes up their own recipe for interactive theater.

First, how did Sour Milk come about and its interactive shows come about? Tang, Jastrzembski, and Joenk met in 2020, as they worked on theatrical grad school projects. In a way, the pandemic necessitated their move to interactive works. Jastrzembski wrote the play Dog, which Tang adapted to a digital medium as a hypertext game called Feast. The two brought in Joenk to add a directorial eye to the proceedings. And the trio had formed.

But applying to the Exponential Festival on a whim solidified the group. Tang explains that she had wanted to develop Traffic, a hybrid theater-game piece simulating a “daily commute from hell.” She asked Jastrzembski and Joenk “if it was cool” if she added their names to the application, and it was, so they went ahead.

After getting into the Exponential Festival and presenting Traffic as an online piece and a staged show later on in 2022, the three thought about their next piece. The Exponential Festival invited them back for what would become DIRT, their third show. “The third time we have to make a company name,” Tang decided. And thus, Sour Milk was born.

Sour Milk took what they learned from Feast and Traffic and devised DIRT. The team found that Traffic especially informed their work with audience interaction. “Getting an audience into Traffic both digitally and in a room, you learn so much about how people are perceiving the idea, playing a game, or interacting with a narrative,” Joenk explains.

This changed how Sour Milk thought about conceptual ideas, game mechanics, and interactive narratives. It also led to a few questions. “How do we get an audience as close to the narrative as possible?” Tang posits. She has found that “game are the way,” as games can bring people even closer to the proceedings than theater can. As such, she views DIRT as part of “a continued exploration,” jumping off from Traffic as a show with the same basic format of audience interaction.

That said, Sour Milk still found—and has continued to find—new challenges upon approaching experiential work. For Joenk, it became “how to present people with options for participating, that feel like they hold equal weight.” She notes that DIRT deliberately doesn’t say, “Here’s our opinion.” Ideally, it shouldn’t lead audiences to one option or the other, with each option holding the same weight.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. Even something as seemingly insignificant as wording can greatly sway audiences to one choice over another. Sour Milk learned this in presenting DIRT at Loading Dock as part of the Exponential Festival last January. “[We’re] looking at the minutia of literally what language we’re presenting to people,” Joenk explains. “If something is actionable and something is more of an amorphous idea, it seems like people are more interested in the actionable word.”

“Whenever you’re making a work that’s immersive or participatory or asks something of an audience in any way, I think you do need to go in with an understanding of their psychology,” Jastrzembski adds. “What will make people comfortable and break down those walls that we all enter a theater space with?”

For DIRT, Sour Milk helps facilitate this by casting audience members as characters, specifically as denizens of New York. This character may be demographically different from the audience member who “plays” them. But this way, people don’t have to play as themselves. Nobody will judge them as they make choices in trying to rectify guilt as a gentrifier in this play about land development.

But DIRT also makes space for people who would rather sit back and watch without interacting—or who perhaps want to interact in a limited function. Audience members can participate publicly, but they can also interact privately through their mobile devices. The team stresses that interactivity is not a binary. DIRT recognizes that people may have all different comfort levels and that interactive theater doesn’t always account for these. “The word interactive can be so amorphous,” Joenk explains. “[DIRT] can be as participatory and interactive as you’re comfortable with.”

Coming back to language, Sour Milk admits that this kind of work—and DIRT itself—can pose tough to categorize. Tang has yet to find a great “three-word phrase” for describing both the format of this kind of work and what you get out of it. For example, DIRT is a participatory game in a theater, but it’s also about trying to build a local community and feeling frustrated with bureaucracy. “Everybody’s read of the show is completely dependent on who they are.”

But Sour Milk finds these unique audience experiences especially fascinating. This is part of why they wanted to stage it again, to find out what different audiences get out of it. And maybe they’ll learn if it’s a game, a show, or a game show, which Jastrzembski initially ruled out but has reconsidered over time.

“There’s a loose script but there’s also room for elements of chance. And we know we’re going to get to an ending,” Jastrzembski muses. “But we don’t know exactly what the win or the choices that they’ll make in the moment [will be].”

Regardless of what the hybrid piece classifies as, “The thing we learned from [the Exponential Festival] is that we wanted to do it again,” Tang explains. At first, Sour Milk had no plans to restage DIRT. However, in watching the audience have fun, the team wanted to keep working on it to see if that experience was a fluke or could be replicable. They were especially struck by how the audience bonded. “It made the room closer. We had to double back and go over everything; like, what made that happen?”

Still, as Sour Milk learns from past experiences in staging DIRT, the team keeps an eye on the future. Tang is particularly interested in continuing to bridge the gap between live and digital theater. While DIRT doesn’t explore this too much, it came up prevalently in TRAFFIC. In the live version, audience members participated via their phones. For the online version, they also participated via phones but had the novelty of a live chat. “We as theater people know so much about satisfaction in a room and we don’t know what it looks like in a remote function.”

Sour Milk could pontificate over the potential for participation in perpetuity. Still, they still have a widely accessible show opening. “The root of why DIRT is so fun is because it gets down to basics,” Tan explains. “There’s 10 pounds of pudding in it per show. It’s very DIY.” Sour Milk deliberately works with this aesthetic in mind. DIRT poses big ethical questions about land development, gentrification, and housing. But at the same time, giving the audience a sense of play is paramount. “At the end of the day, it’s a fun sticky little show.”