Switchboard: A New Experimental Play About The Politics of Memory
By Rivka Yeker
Switchboard is a new experimental play created by Annie Share and Sivan Spector. It uses puppetry and neo-futurist aesthetics to convey a conversation between a real historical Chicago tragedy and everyday heartbreak. It also explores the ways in which memory is oftentimes murky - and yet it is all we have. The performance was first produced at the Neo-Futurist Theater, and is now being adapted to the Steppenwolf stage. Learn more about the show here (and make sure to buy your tickets)!
What are the politics of memory and remembering? What gets to exist in the public consciousness? & What is erased from history?
First, who is involved in Switchboard right now for the Steppenwolf production?
Sivan: Me and Annie, obviously, we are performing in it. We also co-wrote the show and co-designed and made the puppets. We have an amazing musician, composer, and light designer, that's all one person, Spencer Meeks, who wrote all the original sounds for the show and is also doing the light design. We also have our director, Anna Gellman, who has also been with us for the entire process. And we have a bunch of other amazing friends who are helping us along the way, helping us make puppets and all that good stuff.
Like DIY collaborative effort.
Annie: Exactly.
I saw the original Switchboard, which was fun… and I cried. I remember when Annie started pitching it to me and was just like, “Oh, we're doing this show based on this random tragedy that occurred.” And it's something I’ve never even heard of, despite being a Chicago(land) person my whole life. How did you discover this tragic incident and also what made you think you can make a play about it?
Annie: I first learned about the Eastland Disaster when I was a Segway tour guide. So this was one of my Summer 2021 gig economy jobs. We gave tours downtown and we also gave Halloween Haunted Segway tours - that's when I first learned about the Eastland because we would visit a sort of memorial plaque that's very small and very discreet on the river. 844 people drowned in the ship and then the ship never left the dock. It happened right downtown, right at Clark and LaSalle and I was just so fixated on this disaster, but specifically the fact that no one knew about it, that it was this huge, massive incident of death that no one talked about and people were really unfamiliar with. And I was like, wow, what are the politics of memory and remembering? What gets to exist in the public consciousness and what is erased from history?
…Which made me just start doing a lot of research about it. I started looking up stories or content about it and it was still kind of a struggle to find anything.
Sivan: We met during a Purim show and the second year of it, Annie, you approached me and you were like, I really want us to collaborate, it was so fun to make all these big puppets. I want to do more of it. And we were kind of tossing around some ideas, like what can we do? And you were like, well, I've always wanted to write a show about this thing. And then we got some books from the library and kind of did some digging and started reading a lot about it.
And at that point, we kind of started mining our own personal stories because the show is in the style of the Neo-Futurists in the sense that it's very autobiographical. Once we started finding those connections, we were like, oh, we really want to write a show about this.
Annie: Yeah, I think something that's driven a lot of my work is finding just a point of inspiration or a source and then finding all of the ways I can connect or disconnect from that source. So it's just such a ripe story for so many different points of connection because it's about love and loss and grief and humanity and bureaucracy and shame and technology. That part of the process of creating the show was figuring out what are our unique touch points.
Right. ‘Cause that's kind of how you approach your Neo-Futurist work too, right?
Annie: Yeah.
Tell me more about your work at Neo-Futurists.
Annie: I've been in the Neo-Futurist Ensemble since 2020 and I'm the current Associate Artistic Director. In Neo-Futurist work, we don't play characters. It's all autobiographical. We're telling true stories from our lives, stories informed by our own lived experiences. This is an example of a Neo-Futurist primetime, which is a full length show in that aesthetic, rather than the two minute plays we usually perform in our regular show, The Infinite Wrench. That’s a challenge that we also thought puppetry would serve in this show - wanting to bring these real historical figures into the room, real people tied to the disaster without playing them or pretending to be them or having them as characters and having them represented on stage through puppetry, through shadow, expands the world of the stage and allows us to bring them into the room. We can project ourselves onto them and have them be present and active layers in the show without fiction.
That's interesting. And then you work with the Chicago Children's Theater. How has that showed up in your work and how are you exploring your own?
Sivan: I mean, with the Chicago Children's Theater, I mostly do admin and teaching. So I don't think, It quite shows up as directly as with Annie, but I think what's been really fun in collaborating between us is that I really have a mindset of kind of playfulness and throwing shit at the wall and seeing what works especially when it comes to making puppets and it's just been so fun to experiment and explore because I think we have really complementary kind of skills and work styles and I think that has influenced our writing and everything.
Tell me about the puppet kind of creating process.
Annie: Another challenge of using puppetry within the Neo-Futurist aesthetic is having no suspension of disbelief, meaning, just like we're not pretending to be characters, we’re not pretending that there’s no puppeteer, which has informed a lot of the design where you're seeing us manually operate a lot of these puppets or they're completely clear, so you see the puppeteer completely. They're not obfuscated by anything. We use a lot of overhead projector, shadow puppets, and remaking all the tentacles is the current challenge.
Sivan: No spoilers.
Annie: You know, we're on a shoestring budget. So it's using literal garbage to make a lot of these puppets. Chicken wire. Newspaper, papier mâché, donated wires that we got from tech stores - it looks scrappy and it's supposed to look scrappy.
Sivan: On the initial design, one of our big puppets, we got a lot of help from Chio Cabrera, who's a puppeteer in the city, and she was just really helpful and just believing in us, and being like, yeah, just try it out.
Annie: And being like, yeah, zip ties are amazing. Any object can be a puppet once you bestow meaning on it, which is something we also kind of talk about in the play, how objects become… A pipe or a jello cup or even a CD, like all of those can take on a medium.
So usually with the Neo-Futurists, Annie, you are doing an autobiographical story that's based primarily on you, but in this production, you both are incorporating moments of your life. So how is it to kind of fuse together and do that as a collaborative effort?
Sivan: I think it's really enriched the show overall because I think, like Annie said earlier, there are so many stories to tell within the story of the Eastland, and I think that the stories that me and Annie are each telling about it are actually very different and are looking at taking meaning from different parts of the disaster.
Annie: I think so much of why the Eastland disaster was forgotten is because people are like, it's irrelevant, but its rich, ripe themes are relevant for many reasons. So our own unique touch points bring it into the modern day, I suppose.
They're kind of random people, but they're not.
Sivan: I think part of what we're exploring is like, well, what makes somebody a random person who's forgotten in history? And what makes somebody be remembered? We had a talkback with some people from the Eastland Disaster Historical Society. And one of those people is the granddaughter of an Eastland survivor. So her grandmother was like, 12 or something. She was a child. Trapped in the hull of the ship, treading water for 6 hours or something. And she survived, and her great grandmother's sister survived too, and she was telling us something that I thought was really interesting, which is that her grandmother was so eager to talk about it, and was really a fun-loving person whereas the sister who had been through the exact same thing had a really different response.
I think that's also part of what we're looking at - the things that stick with us when we lose something, when we do experience rupture and loss.
Annie: Something we focus a lot more on in this rewrite is: each of us are individually in conversation with the Eastand's source, but how can we more establish us being in direct conversation with each other and how are our stories similar? How are they different? What are the points of tension? I think that's a little bit more present in this iteration.
It's interesting because seeing the play, it made me feel every emotion, even relating to your story of your first love and this heartbreak of losing a friend you knew. You're talking about your own experiences of love and grief and shame, self awareness, et cetera, et cetera. As an audience member, I went into it not knowing what the hell to expect. I thought it was just going to be historical fiction. Being able to experience that bandwidth of emotions, the story itself imprinted on my brain. And so I'm curious what you want people to leave with when they see it?
Sivan: I think we want people to leave with questions about their own life and questions about what they remember and don't remember and what sticks with them and what doesn't.
Annie: Yeah, something I've been thinking about is: I don't think there's anything actionable I want or need the audience to leave with, but I think I want the audience to leave with reassessment of what feels urgent in their lives.
Sivan: One thing that I really love in particular about the Neo-Futurist aesthetic is there is some audience interaction. We're not pretending. There's no fourth wall, really. That's what's so special. We get to have a really unique experience with the audience every night and I want people to feel that they've been part of telling the story in a way too.
When was the idea of Neo-Futurists born?
Annie: The Neo-Futurists are in our 37th year. So it's been a very long time since people have been creating this type of work, I'm certain forever, but Neo-Futurist theater started 37 years ago. And there's a couple other ones around the country, but this is the original. It started in Chicago.
What was the core idea of when the New-Futurist theater was created? What did they want?
Annie: We have certain tenets that we practice: honesty, truth on stage, brevity, transformation, risk and chance, liveness. One of my fellow ensemble members, Emma Casey, said this in response to the Infinite Wrench, which is our show that we do 50 weeks a year every year: “The goal of the Wrench, which I think is the goal of Neo-Futurism at large, is to be a collage of all of humanity. And that's why it has to change every week because humanity changes constantly. And it's also an impossible task.” And I think in a microcosmic way, that's a goal that we're doing inside the show. One single story can also be a reflection of all of humanity, but it's impossible to do it, which is why we must do it again.
Sivan: I think that going back to what we want the audience to leave with, I want them to leave with a feeling that their stories matter, too, and just to become more aware of their being in the world.
And so you're going to be a Steppenwolf experimental garage or?
Annie: It’s through their Lookout series, it's in the 1700 theater, which is right behind the front bar. And there'll be 10 performances between November 22nd and December 14th, we're off the weekend of Thanksgiving and everyone should come. We sold out our run at the Neo-Futurist before the show even opened last time. So we're developing a sense of urgency.
Get your tickets fast!
Sivan: Last thing is… it's the same show as we did last February, but it is going to be different. So even if you saw the show then, I think it's evolved a lot after sitting with the story.
Annie: We sent out a survey to all audience members after the show last time asking what was confusing, what felt like it was missing, and we really did incorporate a lot of that feedback. So we hope you come and see it again, or come and see it for the first time.