“I have a soft spot, in my core,” confessed multimedia theatre artist Jared Mezzocchi, “for any script that has been said to be ‘impossible.’”
By the time Mezzocchi came aboard Froggy, a pulpy thriller set partly inside a violent underground video game, Jennifer Haley’s form-blending new work had been in development for a decade. But the team had yet to quite crack it. Haley’s fractured narrative follows a spirited, rootless filmmaker, the titular Froggy, who is fixated on the disappearance of her boyfriend Michael one year prior. (Or perhaps he just ghosted her?) Froggy grows obsessed with Michael’s final role, a motion-capture performance in a gruesome video game called Final Redemption. As Froggy investigates the game’s producer and falls down deeper, darker rabbit holes, she must also confront buried traumas from her own past.
Best known for her widely produced sci-fi crime drama The Nether, Haley was inspired by Dutch psychological thriller The Vanishing and Dan Clowes’s graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, two surrealist stories centered around missing women.
“In both cases, it was men who lost women and went off in search of them,” said Haley. “So I wanted to flip that around.”
But it wasn’t the story per se as the form of Haley’s show that was challenging. Written as a graphic novel, Haley’s text moves fluidly between flashback, video game cutscenes, and live gameplay—all of it narrated by Froggy’s noir-ish, hardboiled voiceover. Indeed, Haley didn’t craft the script in a word processing program but in Adobe InDesign. When she sent out early drafts in 2009, she was met with silence or bafflement from a few artistic directors.
“There was kind of a big question mark over people’s heads,” she said with a laugh.
An exception: director Matt M. Morrow, who signed on to help Haley develop Froggy from its inception. Appointed artistic director of Center REP in Walnut Creek, Calif., in spring 2023, Morrow has directed the play’s world premiere at Center REP as part of her inaugural season, where it runs through March 9.
The two met at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in 2008 when Morrow directed a workshop of Haley’s play Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom—another video-game inspired work, in which suburban teenagers became addicted to an online horror game. Morrow and Haley became quick friends, and Haley shared her earliest ideas for Froggy.
Recalled Morrow, “She said, ‘Hey, I have this crazy thing that I wrote at MacDowell—I don’t know what it is. See if you can make sense of it.’”
Far from baffled, Morrow was thrilled by the comic panel structure, sound effect balloons (“Groan,” “CRACK,” “HOOOOONK!”), and hard-boiled dialogue. She also connected with the emotional journey that lives underneath that playfulness.
“Froggy is, at its essence, about a woman grappling with grief,” said Morrow. “Grief is such a mysterious process. The way Froggy is figuring out her story is by casting herself as the hero. I do that all the time!”
Morrow shepherded Froggy through developmental workshops at New York City’s Page 73 in 2010 and the (now-defunct) Sundance Theatre Program in 2011. Composer Nathan Leigh joined the project at Sundance, composing (in one week) a swirling, cinematic score that remains part of the show.
Settling on a visual language for Froggy proved a longer process. For a time, the team was excited about creating a full gaming engine for scenes set inside Final Redemption, and explored motion capture technology to track the actors’ movements in real time. It was Mezzocchi who urged a more theatrical approach, albeit still tech heavy. Haley recruited him after seeing Mezzocchi’s projection work on Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s 2016 production of The Nether.
“Ultimately, the point of the video game is to reinforce ideas around masculinity, and men feeling like they need to be a ‘hero,’” said Haley. “The narrative is moved along by the story within the game, not so much the gameplay itself.”
So Mezzocchi and team crafted a blending of live performance, projections, live cameras, and live Foley effects to conjure the gameplay experience.
“We are using live cameras to place people into video game atmospheres, and then the stage itself is very fractured” to capture Froggy’s mindset, said Mezzochi. “We have to create a language for the audience to understand all these different worlds very quickly.”
Two fully staged workshops at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, a teen residency program where Mezzochi was producing artistic director, were further clarifying for the team.
“That workshop was a proof of concept that actually, kids aged 8 to 18 can read something that elders in our industry say is impossible and, with ease, make the thing,” said Mezzocchi.
“They tested the dramaturgy in a way that I don’t think adults could,” concurred Morrow. “Who knew that we needed some teenagers?”
Mezzocchi is now best known for shutdown-era digital work, including Zoom-based ghost story Someone Else’s House and Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm (later revived in person at Vineyard Theatre in 2024). But while he happily embraces his reputation as digital theatre’s strongest advocate and practitioner, Mezzocchi’s use of technology is always dramaturgically driven. For the recent En Garde Arts and Vineyard Theatre co-production The Wind and the Rain, the story of local watering hole Sunny’s Bar performed on a Red Hook barge, Mezzochi collaborated with Gancher on the mechanics of the piece in much the same way the pair collaborated on Troll Farm.
“The online work is site-specific, same as working on a boat—where are the plugs, what happens when it rains, and how do we use all of that?” he said. “I don’t see a difference between the boat and the Zoom.”
Mezzocchi gave up a tenured position at University of Maryland last year, and also stepped away from his artistic leadership role at Andy’s Summer Playhouse (he remains involved in a producing capacity). A packed slate of projects like Froggy motivated that leap into the unknown. Looking ahead, he is also developing multimedia play AZAD with playwright Sona Tatoyan, among other in-person projects that also engage his digital muscles.
“These first couple of years are me putting a hard effort into in-person, venue-centric performance making, going and making work at theatres,” said Mezzocchi. Then, as the industry settles a bit more (“if it ever does”), he hopes to weave his digital mission in more fully with in-person work.
“This is a moment in theatre where it’s trying to figure itself out, and I’d like to be a participant in that,” he said.
For Morrow, Froggy is integral to an inaugural season at Center REP driven by themes of mischief, magic and mayhem. After years of gestation, her appointment at Center REP allowed Froggy to finally find a home.
“I understand the character of Froggy on a fundamental level,” said Morrow. “I love her, and I’m rooting for her.”
For Haley, this multimedia staging is just one of many possibilities for a work she crafted to be staged any number of ways.
“It could be done without projection design, it could be done with puppets,” she said. “I don’t think Froggy will get done as widely as The Nether—but I’m hoping some adventurous groups take it on, and we’ll see what they do.”
And the name? Why, it must be asked, is her protagonist named Froggy?
“That was just one of those intuitive things—I don’t know,” shrugged Haley with a smile. “That was just her name.”
Joey Sims (he/him) has written for The Brooklyn Rail, Vulture, Into, Queerty, TheaterMania, New York Theatre Guide, and TDF Stages. Joey is an alumnus of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and runs a theatre Substack called Transitions.
