Artist Spotlight: Dan Caffrey

Name: Dan Caffrey

Pronouns: he/him/his

Hometown: New Port Richey, FL

Role in Mixily Presents: Writer of “Slime Season” (featured in New Plays For Zoom)

Current Pandemic Anthem (Musical, Culinary, Dealer’s Choice): “foolsong” by Destroyer. It’s not quite an anthem and probably doesn’t have much to do with the pandemic. But Destroyer was the last concert I went to before everything shut down, and “foolsong” is the last track on his most recent album, which came out in January of this year. There’s a sadness and weirdness to the whole record, but it’s also catchy as hell, so it also feels kind of hopeful to me. 

Also, while the song was written long before quarantine, I recently discovered that the band filmed a very COVID-related video for the song! You can find it here.

If you would, would you tell us the story of your most triumphant moment as a theatre artist during this period known as 2020? 

I graduated from UT Austin’s MFA Playwriting program in May and was lucky enough to see my thesis show open and complete its run literally the night before the school went into lockdown. The show is called Sow and Suckling and is an adult sequel to Lord of the Flies. My parents and so many of my friends, colleagues, and mentors saw the play, and on that final performance, we all went out to our regular bar in Austin—this comfy dive called Posse East. We shared food, we talked forever, we hugged each other. I was really proud of that show, and it will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the last time I got to socialize and be around the people I love without worrying too much. That was seven months ago at this point, but it feels like seven years. I’m so thankful I got to have that experience.

How has doing Zoom performance challenged you and/or made you grow as an artist?

The big, obvious one that I think all theatre artists are experiencing is that you have to switch up your tactics for Zoom—everything from timing to acting style to volume is going to be way different. But thinking specifically about myself, my piece for Mixily Presents was about an ASMRtist who’s going through an emotional breakdown during one of her videos. My wife Susan Myburgh was in it, and we wanted it to work as both a compelling short (digital) play and an actual ASMR video. It went really well and actually energized me to create my own real-life ASMR channel called SLAYsmr, where I whisper about a different horror movie I love every week for 30 minutes. ASMR is a big part of how I relax and something I’ve wanted to try my hand at for a while, but I’ve always been too scared to do so. Because it was a medium that lent itself to Zoom really well, I never would have come up with that play if not for our current circumstances, and I never would have started my own channel if I hadn’t taken the leap with New Plays For Zoom. We’re still a pretty small channel, but I’m having a lot of fun!

What’s your current thesis on livestream vs live Zoom performance vs pre-recorded video and the lines between theatre vs film vs ??? (ie: When’s the moment for you that it stops being theatre, if ever?) 

For me, the uniqueness of theatre comes more from physically being in the same space as other people (both audience members and the theatermakers) than it does from being performed in real time, if that makes sense. By that, I mean that livestreaming was around long before the pandemic and long before Zoom was our primary means of performance/communication. To put it bluntly, performing something live and online doesn’t feel all that different to me, and it definitely doesn’t make it theatre. I think it all stopped being theatre for me as soon as it wasn’t safe to be in the same space with each other. And I don’t mean that as any kind of knock against virtual performances. I’m just trying to illustrate that, online, I don’t have any strong preferences as to whether my work is being performed live or prerecorded. For instance, with New Plays For Zoom, we had a lot of audio elements that were going to sound much better prerecorded. So we filmed our piece in one take with no interruptions beforehand, then broadcast it to everyone. For readings I’ve had on Zoom where there aren’t too many tech elements, it’s made more sense to just perform live. As far as terminology, I guess I’d view it as some kind of theatre/film/conference hybrid? I

Photo Credit: Alison Drew Balletta

Sow & Suckling, Photo Credit: Steve Rogers

Sow & Suckling, Photo Credit: Lawrence Peart

Sow & Suckling, Photo Credit: Steve Rogers

don’t know—I’m being pretty stubborn about giving it any kind of label because, even though I’ve created some work I’m really proud of on Zoom, I refuse to accept it as the new normal or whatever everyone’s calling it. It’s not normal! Yes, as theatre artists, we’re doing what we have to do so we can eat and not stagnate creatively. But I’m still viewing it all as a stopgap. As an art form, theatre has survived much worse than this (including other pandemics), and it’ll come back. It will probably look a lot different regarding the institutions that produce it, but I have no concerns about theatre going extinct as a method of telling stories. 

Any secret Zoom/tech-theatre workarounds or cheats you’d be willing to share with the internet?

Haha, aren’t we pretty much all experts at this point?? I don’t know if I have any hacks that most folks don’t know. My computer is kind of old, so I haven’t even been able to switch my Zoom background yet. Sorry, I know that’s a really boring answer!

Plugs, Upcoming Shows, Website & Social Links, Here Please!:

And I’ll be (virtually) developing my play The Amphibians through UCF’s Pegasus PlayLab in the spring. I’m still awaiting dates, but it’ll be up on my website once everything’s confirmed. 

Lastly, this has nothing to do with theatre, but I have a non-fiction book about the band Radiohead coming out in December. You can pre-order it here.

www.dancaffreywrites.com | TW: @DwCaffrey | IG: @DwCaffrey | YT: SLAYsmr | Watch Slime Season Again Here