A clue from Forum Theatre’s Walking the City of Silence and Stone
By DCist Contributor Jonelle Walker
You’re getting on the Metro somewhere inside the District of Columbia. That’s the only safe place for you to be, the narrator informs you. Or, perhaps that’s not exactly true. She says that she’s lied to you a few times already.
Thus begins your journey through Forum Theatre’s serialized, site-specific podcast/play/walking tour: Walking the City of Silence and Stone. This innovative undertaking, written by playwright Stephen Spotswood and directed by Jess Jung, not only leads you through D.C. landmarks, but also into a great big mystery.
At the center of that mystery is a woman, not-at-all coincidentally named Natalie Washington. When you meet her on a Metro platform, she hands you a notebook and immediately falls onto the tracks. Did she kill herself? Was she murdered? Or, is there a much more mystical and malevolent force at play? As you follow Natalie’s story to a different D.C. location each episode, from the National Mall to the Congressional Cemetery, it’s up to you to figure it out.
What Walking the City does so well and so immediately is how it makes the listener the protagonist. It’s the keenest use of the solitary experience of podcast listening, and Spotswood nails how best to use the form to the advantage of the story. It favorably reminds of cult podcast Welcome to Night Vale’s excellent mirror episodes “A Story About You” and “A Story About Them.”
In addition to providing an in-ear companion to you on your tour of the city, each episode is attended by engrossing supplementary materials you could call clues: Maps, photos, and pages from Natalie’s notebook. Through these clues, the audience becomes an active participant in the story’s telling, making this play one of the most unique and thrilling theater experiences this writer has ever encountered in Washington.
Though Walking the City has arrived on the D.C. theater scene just as the podcast is receiving its due recognition as a genre, the piece can trace its roots back to 2012, where it began its incubation as part of the National New Play Network (NNPN) at Woolly Mammoth. “We were asked to write short … walking podcast plays for NNPN’s National Showcase, which played host to artistic directors from theaters across the country,” recalls playwright Stephen Sportswood. “Each short play took listeners in one of the four cardinal directions from Woolly’s front door.” Fatefully, the playwright chose south, towards the National Mall, which became the location for episode two.
How did this innovative theater piece make its way to Forum Theatre? No complicated conspiracy theory: Spotswood brought his podcast/play idea —;only bigger—to Forum Artistic Director Michael Dove, who loved it and selected it for the 2014-2015 season.
Walking the City’s largest deviation from the standard theatrical form is that sound is the primary spectacle. Sound Designer Thomas Sowers (recently nominated for two Helen Hayes Awards) crafts an unsettling, but completely immersive binaural soundscape. As you follow Natalie Washington’s story in episodes three and four, Sowers shines in the darker moments. Throughout a particularly unnerving recitation of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Sowers slowly, deftly distorts an otherwise friendly voice for the listener into something truly terrifying.
Part mystery, part ghost story, the piece wields these darker moments to confront a D.C. that is rarely seen in film, television, or plays. “In D.C., this alienating effect, this distance between the smallest, most vulnerable and the strong and powerful, seems particularly heightened,” says Spotswood. “That’s one of the big goals of the piece—to take the familiar streets and monuments and make them strange enough that you start thinking about the city in a different way …. Maybe from the point of view of someone for whom life in this city is neither easy or safe.”
In the play’s recently released fourth installment, the strange and unsafe elements of Walking the City come to a head with the introduction of a menacing figure called the King of Worms. By the time he’s introduced by this moniker, the King of Worms already feels like a consistently looming presence over both the piece and the history of D.C. as “he” and “him.”
He is forewarned, too, in Yeats’ beast that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born,” as read by Ms. Washington herself. The play will continue in installments through the summer, and it seems that this King may be as complex a mystery to unravel as what happened to Natalie.
As Walking the City continues to reveal itself, it seems unfair to call this article its review. Let’s just say it’s your next supplemental note from Natalie, hopefully guiding you toward this excellent theatrical offering.
In the digital entrepreneurial spirit, Walking the City opens up a universe of non-traditional theatrical delivery systems for theater companies large and small. The best part? You could do it from your computer at home. Spotswood notes that this ease of access is a boon for consumers and creators: “Now that those barriers to creation are gone, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of interesting, innovative work being put out there.”
You’re putting in your headphones and gearing up for your commute. It’s early in the winter of 2015, and you start to download the fifth installment of Walking the City of Silence and Stone from Forum Theatre’s Website. As you dive into your next mission to solve the death of Natalie Washington you wonder how this is all going to end.
The playwright’s already figured it out; Will you?
Walking the City of Silence and Stone is available episodically as a pay-what-you-will download from Forum Theatre’s website.
