Keep an Eye On: Aaron Loeb by / Sam Hurwitt

In 2007 Aaron Loeb’s play First Person Shooter debuted at SF Playhouse to critical raves and a Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award for best new play. It went on to a recent run at Sacramento’s Capital Stage, and later this month the play will be produced by City Lights Theatre Company in San Jose.

Now SF Playhouse is in the middle of its second world premiere by the Berkeley playwright, Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party.

Set in rural Illinois, the land of Lincoln, Loeb’s play imagines a third-grade teacher who winds up outing President Lincoln as gay in the school Christmas pageant, setting off a huge public outcry and high-profile trial. Told in three acts in whatever order is voted by the audience, the show also delivers dance numbers as the title promises.

“The play is strongly in dialogue with Inherit the Wind,” Loeb says. “I love that story, about this small town where this innocent little teacher is put on trial, and these titans from across the country show up to fight out their legal battle over the fate of this unimportant person. So the three major characters of the play are broadly the same kind as in Inherit the Wind: the prosecutor, the defense attorney and the big-city reporter who comes into town to cover the trial. Obviously the defendant is a character but is not one of the primary characters.”

The shuffling three-act structure takes each character’s story in turn, and Loeb describes one part as comedy, another as romance and the third (or second, or first) as tragedy.

“It has that sense of democracy as well,” he says. “The play is about politics, and the audience is voting on a choice where they’re not sure what the consequences will be. They get to discover the consequences of their vote after they’ve made it, which is what a lot of the time our democracy feels like.”

Loeb works as a video game developer, chief operations officer of Planet Moon Studios, and First Person Shooter has an obvious connection with his day job, focusing on the perceived connection between a school shooting and the violent video games that are singled out as a training ground for the killer. There’s much less of a clear connection with Abraham Lincoln’s subject matter, but its structure is definitely informed by Loeb’s creative endeavors in other media.

“Part of the ability to write Abe Lincoln in a nonlinear fashion—where you can actually get the story built different ways depending on in what order you see the parts of the story—that’s something that’s been very influenced by my video game writing,” Loeb says. “In video games you don’t know which way the player is going to go. You want to try to build the story of your game in such a way that they can actually go left down the hall, see part A of the story, go back, go right down the hall and see part B of the story, or have seen part B first and then part A. There’s complication to video game writing, because it is driven by player determination rather than by your presentational whim, that I think is very interesting for theatre writing. Another aspect of video game writing that very much influenced my ability to create theatre is that you start thinking a lot about how to rapidly and visually make things clear to your audience member. Exposition is clearly the enemy in video games. So it’s useful to learn tricks to make sure that the audience member is running along with you and learning what’s going on while experiencing, rather than having to stop for a little while to get a tutorial from the play about how to watch it.”

Like First Person, Abraham Lincoln started as a full-length commission by PlayGround, the Bay Area theatre company that has a pool of playwrights produce 10-minute plays on an assigned topic over a few days each month and gives the best of the resultant plays staged readings at Berkeley Rep with professional actors and directors within a week. Loeb has been active in the PlayGround writers’ pool since 2002.

First Person Shooter was also Loeb’s first professional full-length production, although his full-length play Brown was staged at La Val’s Subterranean in 2005 as part of Crowded Fire’s Matchbox Workshop series.

“Prior to that I’d been involved in a touring theatre company, a local theatre company in Illinois where I grew up. I’d go back in the summers from college, and I’d be a cowriter on a lot of full-length plays. One of the groups that I was involved with when I was going to school at NYU, we had productions at La Mama, and actually at the Playground Theatre in Manhattan—totally unaffiliated. So I’d had a number of full-length plays that I’d worked on as a collaborator with other people.”

The first of those plays was more than 20 years ago, when Loeb was in his teens.

“When I was in high school in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, one year the school decided for the fall play the students would actually write the play, which was called Exhibit E: A Society of Hinges,” Loeb says. “Weirdly, that same year Tina Howe, who was nominated for a Tony that year [for her 1987 play Coastal Disturbances]—and also happened to graduate from my high school, which was a very small school—came back to my high school to speak, and we got to perform some scenes from these plays that we were writing for Tina Howe, which was a pretty exciting thing to do at 14. So pretty much when I was 14 I knew I wanted to be a playwright. The first play I wrote by myself was called Road Trip. It was a play about three friends of mine, and it was them 10 years later going on a road trip together. It was just pretty much a platform for them arguing about my 14-year-old take on philosophy.”

He went on to study playwriting at NYU, but then put playwriting aside for about five years to work as a journalist covering the video game industry, and then to move from writing about games to writing the games themselves. It was through his sister, local actor Gwen Loeb, that he started up as a playwright again.

“My sister was performing in the Best of PlayGround festival, and she said, ‘Hey, you should think about writing for these people. You can just send then a 10-minute play and maybe they’ll perform it,'” he recalls. “I thought that was pretty cool, so because of PlayGround I actually got back into writing plays.”

Besides the usual short plays for PlayGround and video game writing, Loeb and one of his fellow PlayGround playwrights, Geetha Reddy, are cowriting a play called Blastosphere! next year for Central Works. True to the Berkeley company’s method, they’ll develop the play in collaboration with the cast and director Jon Tracy, with whom Loeb worked on First Person Shooter.

“It’s about fertility,” he says. “Blastosphere is part of the earliest process of zygotic formation. It’s just a word we all fell in love with.”