Earlier this week, Monday December 16th, the bottlerag.org team attended the first ever Play Date hosted by The Moot Point Project. The Moot Point Project is a new local theater company co-founded by Megan Dille and True Smith, and the Play Date is just one event the dynamic duo hosts. This week’s Play Date was held at the Lil Coffea Shop on South Downing Street and was set to start at 7:00 pm. We were sure to arrive a couple minutes early, so we could order food and drinks before the event began 😉
The Play Date follows a structure of a traditional table read mixed with a college discussion class. The vibe was intimate, all the attendees clustered around a narrow table. Moot Point provided party favors, miniature notebooks with funky stickers and pens. We started with a warm-up, people took turns thinking of a color while everyone else tried to read their mind. After this, we were instructed to some up our feelings on Artificial Intelligence in one sentence. I wrote: Could be good, usually bad. Though, we kept our sentiments secret for the duration of the play.
This week we all read Marjorie Prime, a piece that tackles the ethical dilemmas posed by Artificial Intelligence and Language Learning Models and their growing pervasiveness in our day-to-day lives. Volunteers were chosen to read each of the four characters. While Megan read the stage directions.
The play takes place in a not-so-distant future and follows the story of middle-aged couple Tess and Jon as they care for Tess’s elderly mother, Marjorie. In the first scene, Marjorie is talking to a character she seems to believe is her deceased husband, though it appears to the audience that Marjorie has dementia. In the next scene, it is revealed that Marjorie is speaking to an AI replica. As the play unfolds, the lines between who is “real” and who is not become increasingly blurred.
I got to read for Tess. Initially, I found the act of reading aloud, in-character, daunting. I hadn’t done anything like it since college, maybe high school. The tension quickly melted away as the scenes progressed, each of the readers discovered their character more and more, and we discovered a sense of community as well. By the second part of the play, the whole group was chatting about the play, joking about the characters, asking questions and making predictions.
The conversation was the most rewarding part of the evening. The play had several layers and moving parts, and keeping track of all the pieces alone was a challenge. Having the opportunity to discuss the piece with a group not only aided in my overall understanding of the play, but it also added an element of whimsy, like we were all working together to solve a riddle.
After the reading wrapped up, Megan and True were kind enough to sit with bottlerag.org for an interview, shedding more light on The Moot Point Project’s mission:
What led you to Moot Point Project?
Megan: I started my degree in August of 2020, so there was absolutely nothing happening on campus (University of Northern Colorado). It was just super boring, super sad really. And I had heard on tours of the school that there were so many student groups and so much student life within the School of Theater, and I wasn’t seeing any of that. So I decided, well, what the hell, I’m bored. I might as well figure out what these student groups are. And in doing that, I realized that most student groups are no longer active due to the pandemic.
It’s really not that hard to start one of your own. Just gotta fill out some forms and convince a faculty member to sign up. And so that’s what I did. I created a student group called Shenanigans. We made like immersive, weird theater and weird plays with a bunch of my friends. And we did that throughout, my sophomore, junior and senior years of school, we produced- I want to say like, close to ten plays.
When I graduated this past May, moved down to Denver, I still wanted to find an avenue to create exciting, weird theater in Denver. And I didn’t see that in the professional companies around here. So I decided to make my own. It’s really as easy as making an Instagram account.
True: My background is: theater is my favorite thing in the whole world. I am so lucky that I get to do my special interest every day of my life- in different ways. The same story as Megan. I think that’s part of the reason we work well together. I just wanted to do weird theater. There wasn’t enough weird theater.
Where does the name “The Moot Point Project” come from?
Megan: We call ourselves “The Moot Point Project” because we aim to prove that the limits of traditional theater are, in fact,
Said in unison:
a moot point.
We aim to create experimental and expressionist theater in Denver, Colorado, because living in New York City is fucking expensive. That’s also part of the reason I’m passionate about this.
And I’m passionate about this because theater, especially eccentric like this sort of experimental theater, is so traditionally expensive and it’s not accessible. People have to be like…in the know and pay a lot of money, or you have to live in New York to see some weird shit that touches people.
True: So, like, why not bring it to Denver? Because if anything, it’s for the people. But it’s also for me and Megan. We found a strong community of people at UNC who loved highly expressionist art. And we moved to Denver and we had a very hard time because we didn’t know who here enjoys that same expressionist art. And we figured if we made our own group and we started building a community with things like this, Play Dates, and we would pull those people out of the weeds like we did when we started our student groups back in school.
Plus, oh my God, being in your 20s and living in a city and not having friends, it’s so sad, so lame.
You keep bringing up terms like “expressionist” and “experimental” in regards your art. What do these words mean to you?
Megan: For me, I say experimental and expressionist, because when I go to create something, there is, of course, a sense of vulnerability. And that time when you’re being so vulnerable, it’s very easy to get bogged down in how people are perceiving you or how the details are going to work out in X Y Z.
You get stuck in your head and then what you create is no longer that same piece of vulnerability. If you, at least for me, instead focus on just expressing whatever you’re feeling, whatever feels right in that moment, someone will understand, someone will see it, and even if they don’t understand what you intended, they will pull their own meaning out of that.
True: All we have in the world is art. No, I mean, I could get emotional about it, but I- I won’t. Art has been commoditized so much that honestly, everything you see is rotating around maybe the same five playhouses and it’s all traditionally picked to get people in seats to make money and keep a running theater, which is so real and so valid, and that art is also important, but to me it’s like, damn it, not everybody fits into the small frame that society feels is good theater enough to spend their money on.
So I was like, why would I not go to the full limits of my imagination and other artists’ imagination by reading absurdist pieces and things that are just straight through? Something that truly makes the person think.
Have you read this essay by Oscar Wilde? I won’t go on too long– I mean, you can borrow it if you want, but there’s this whole section, where he goes on and on and on about pretty much exactly what you’re saying, where he’s saying that art should be, like the ultimate expression of our humanity but because art is commodified, like said, we’re working to create art, sell it. And so people are only making or that will sell. Yeah. So we get a lot of the same stories over and over.
True: And it’s so it’s so frustrating. It’s that it’s inherently ingrained in us as human beings to tell a story. It’s been in us since day one as, like a form of survival. And the fact that it’s now commercialized and the fact that people have, like insecurities about singing and dancing and drawing and making art, even though that’s like the purest natural form of self-expression, but they feel so many insecurities that they don’t do that. And I feel like that is a big reason why things are just so dark in this world. Because people don’t allow themselves to express themselves fully.
I’m really interested in this sort of idea of eliminating cringe, but also, you know, because Art, I don’t like the word “cringe”.
True: I know exactly what you’re talking about, but I think people should be more comfortable with it.
We put this pressure on ourselves to be the best actor or the best performers, that limits us. And I definitely felt that when I was participating with you guys because I volunteered to read on a whim, I didn’t think about it. And then as soon as we got into it, I got nervous. It was really nice to have these standards for yourselves and then be in a safe space that it’s so low stakes that I can experiment with acting when I haven’t done something that in a long time
True: It’s fun because deep down everybody just wants to play. Like deep down there’s like a little child in us that just wants to do things without being fucking criticized. I also think Megan and I make really strong directors when it comes to that point of view, is because we consider the person so much, what they’re willing to go and do the things that make you seem cringey– like I had four women roll around in a pile of avocados and smashing them on each other, and, at first they were like, this is going to be so lame. But they were like, okay, girl. And they committed it. And it was so cool. It was because they felt like they could do that, and they could make art and not be judged. And people didn’t like it, and people left in the middle of it. But I was like, that means you’re doing a good job disturbing people, and not in a way that it’s like triggering a bad, but in a way that it’s like, hello, like there’s issues that exist and you’re just on TikTok.
Megan: There was this, this great quote from an old professor who said he would rather have someone hate his work than find it boring, and he told me once that I hate your work, but at least it wasn’t boring. And yeah, that is truly how you overcome cringe.
True: I mean, if you just look at it from a social media/TikTok perspective, it’s cringe as hell to put a haunted-house play in a dorm, or make people roll around in avocados, but those are things people talk about.
You two have both mentioned that the concept for Play Dates originated from your love of reading plays together. Can you each share your favorite play you’ve read together?
Megan: I think one of my personal favorites is called Information for Foreigners written by Griselda Gamble. And I ended up directing this last November, and it was something a professor had given me like a year before.
We read it in like maybe January of 2023, and I’d read it like a thousand times. And I was like, oh, this is such a great academic think piece, like, I’m going to be a good student. I’m going to direct it for my like final project. And in order to prepare for that, I got a bunch of friends together, and True was one of them. And we were going to do a first meeting and just get some preliminary stuff down. And I remember sitting there reading her, I was reading, I was listening to this piece being read, and my body was wracked with chills to hear this story I had read hundreds of times. It finally felt real.
True: Because plays are meant to be read out loud!
My favorite time was when we read White Rabbit, Red rabbit, because that’s the first play that the Moot Point Project produced, and it’s a one person show, but the actor doesn’t get to play until they’re on stage and they are not supposed to know anything about it. So it was like this kind of a debate, because at the core, I guess I love attention. So part of me was like, oh, I’m going to want to perform this. But I was like, also producing would be so amazing, so I was like, Megan, if I read it, I’ll never be able to perform it.
Megan: But she performed it for me!
True: And I was on cloud nine, and Megan and I had such a fun time, and it was like, I remember we were like, oh shit oh shit. And at the end we’re like, okay, yeah, we’re going to do it. Like we have to do it. It’s really good. And, because our brains are beautiful, we’re like, oh my God, we should do this for charity because we don’t need money. And then we did it.
Megan: It was great. And we do need money. So if you guys want to send us something that’s cool, but we didn’t. We- we lost a lot of money on White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. But damn it, it was worth it. It was worth it.
Do you have any parting words for the readers of bottlerag.org?
Megan: Just go stupid, go crazy.
True: Kiss an animal– with its consent.
The Moot Point Project will continue hosting Play Dates every third Monday of the month, the next one will take place on January 20th. They currently have more original pieces in the works. For more information follow them on Instagram and Tiktok:
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