Jake Barton, who has done the projections and collaborated, with Michael Yeargan, on the sets for McNeal, studied performance at Northwestern in the early 1990s. “But I essentially left the theater when I was 23,” he told me, “and started designing museums.” Barton founded Local Projects, an exhibition and media firm, and much high-profile work ensued: for the National September 11th Memorial Museum, for example, and with such partners as Frank Gehry and Bjarke Ingels.
What has drawn Barton back to the theater? “It happened that Ayad” – Ayad Akhtar, the McNeal playwright – “saw me do a talk in Sun Valley, Idaho. We had off-the-cuff conversations about AI and about how AI was changing things. My firm did all the experience centers for IBM Watson for over a decade, and I’d been tracking on AI for about 15 years.”
Two weeks after the Sun Valley meeting, Akhtar sent Barton his new play. “We had a few conversations about it,” the designer said. “Then I met with Bart Sher” – the director of McNeal. Almost immediately, Sher asked Barton to do the projections for the production.
This was not the first encounter between Sher and Barton. They had met at the Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis, when Barton was 22. As it turns out, Barton had also met Yeargan, his McNeal co-set designer, as a young man. “I met Michael through my mother,” Barton said. “She owns an art gallery and had sold him a painting. Michael wanted me to come to Yale to further study set design but my path went in a very different direction.”
How did that path – all that fine work ensuring that museumgoers have enhanced experiences – influence Barton’s designs for McNeal?
“A lot of work that I’ve done is first and foremost about emotional storytelling,” Barton replied. “For example, the use of holograms at a level of scale that makes the size of the Beaumont not alien to me. With McNeal, we have hybridized virtual sets and characters in a way that theater has been evolving toward. McNeal reflects the state of hybridization we now have with technology in our lives.”
But a museum experience and a theater experience are not exact parallels. “When I work for a museum, the protagonist is the visitor,” Barton said. “With McNeal, we have scripted actors playing fictional characters plus an audience.”
Barton stressed that McNeal doesn’t use AI merely to impress theatergoers. “In a movie, you can use special effects to shock and awe people – as a spectacular element. Or you can use them in service of the emotional journey of the characters. With McNeal, it’s definitely the latter. The play is literally about people’s relationship to technology. The characters’ emotional journey is really altered by how they think about AI.”
Barton talked about AI and the theater with such verve that I couldn’t help but share his enthusiasm. “Audiences needn’t be afraid of new techniques,” he said. “The evolution of human taste waxes and wanes on different approaches. Every new advancement creates some degree of loss. There’s a quote from Marshall McLuhan: ‘Every extension is also an amputation.’”
The design of McNeal marks a thrilling advance in the use of the Beaumont stage. “The typical theatrical production here or most places,” Barton said, “employs projections and sets as textures that surround the characters. In this case, the AI is a character unto itself.” He continued: “The core of the play concerns the relationship between the scenery and the projections and the story they’re telling in tandem with the story being told about the main character – Jacob McNeal. The addition of AI gives you something richer and more fascinating.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
