Today we’d like to introduce you to Deirdre Lyons.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’m an actor in Los Angeles, I had moved there from Seattle in 1998. During my years in LA, I spent time between my day job, acting in random projects whenever I could and producing. We had done our own theater production and several short films that went to some festivals around the world as well as a reality show and web series that we tried pitching to companies, sadly those really went nowhere but I’m still super proud of all of them and how much they taught me. Film and TV was a huge nut to crack in LA and even though I’d been in LA for decades, the gatekeepers where many and strict, which is understandable because when a role goes out on a breakdown, they can get 3,000 submissions from agents all clicking to submit their actor’s thumbnail, which have replaced physical headshot photos, it’s just an overwhelming amount of actors. You see, acting isn’t the hard part, getting the audition is, as the numbers are staggering. So I found a different niche and started getting a little traction there.
Since 2016, I’d been fortunate enough to be working steadily with a lot of the major immersive theater companies in Los Angeles. JFI Productions, Speakeasy Society, Spybrunch, CoAct, all incredible companies. It was the end of October in 2019, there were no whispers of some mysterious illness and things were status quo. I had just finished Haus of Creep with JFI productions and, as always happens, I get a bit of the blues as I mourn the closing of a show and a bit anxious as I wonder what, if anything, would be next, so I started putting my feelers out, first to a friend who happened to mention something at a party and also a blind email to another person who was heading up a very unusual project that was using several other immersive actors from around town that I already knew. And, crazy enough, I was cast in both shows almost simultaneously in December of 2019. The first was Tyra Banks immersive opus Model Land in Santa Monica and the other was an unusual gig as a live actor in a Virtual Reality game (for want of a better word) called The Under Presents.
Fast forward to 2020, we were heavy into rehearsals for Model Land, and I was already doing shifts in The Under Presents, I had even purchased my own Virtual Reality headset and was doing them from home as their work hub was in Pasadena and Model Land was in Santa Monica and my home was in between those two very far, especially in Los Angeles traffic, locations. They were both part-time gigs, so all of this was a careful balancing act, but I was determined to make the schedule for both of these creative gigs work because I couldn’t choose between them, they were very cool opportunities. And then the Pandemic hit. In LA, the fateful shutdown happened on Thursday, March 12th and on March 18th Model Land let all the actors go without ever having opened and while I hope that someday they will be able pick up where they left off, I don’t know if that will ever happen. But this very strange and miraculous world of The Under Presents was still open, a bright little spark of light in a very dark world for many. Tender Claws, the company that created The Under Presents, sent out into the world this wonderous bit of magic exactly when all of us who participate in The Under needed it.
Working in this new VR world was crazy and amazing. I had never been much of a gamer as a child, so my experience with controllers and movement was limited to joysticks with our Atari when I was a child and some arcade games that ended up being too expensive to play on a regular basis. It was beyond frustrating to try and act while manipulating this Avatar that moved more like a puppet and scroll through menus. But somehow, I suspected that this was one of those situations where I would just have to jump in without thinking. So I intentionally ignored that internal voice that panicked with terror when the producer turned to me during one of our first rehearsals and said, do you want to go first? And I said ‘Sure!’ and again when she said, do you want to start your first shift today? I said ‘Absolutely.’ Even though I wanted to kill the controllers and everything I prepared in advance went straight out of my head when I got into VR. Tender Claws is an incredible company, they stepped up to help their actors survive. They added a Variety Hour that we did for a month, giving many of us very needed extra hours to perform in this delightful world. It was selected as a finalist for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media was recognized by the VR Awards and won VR Experience of the year.
And then they decided to take a step farther and created something that had never been done before, a live, part scripted/part improvised, immersive experience that audiences attend from home, using a virtual reality headset called ‘The Under Presents: Tempest.’ It worked like a one person show, with up to 6 audience to keep it intimate and stable, as this new VR world has certain technical limitations, but with different locations at the click of a button and character avatars that could be changed, we could play different roles in different sets, all of it was a joy, doing live theater for people all over the world, engulfed in a Shakespearean story that blurred the lines between real and imaginary as we played an actor, out of work due to the state of the world, and wanting to rehearse for our one production that hadn’t been canceled, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and had to be ready when the world reopened again. We asked if the audience would help us rehearse and they never said no. We cast them in roles, we took them to imaginary places, we played games. It was a delight! Every show was different due to audience input and personality as well as our own circumstances and story framing. Each of our 11 Prospero’s and Prospera’s had a different take on how the story should be told, allowing for our own creativity and repeatable audience opportunity as many wanted to see each actor’s take on the show.
There was a built-in audience for the show as the players from The Under Presents had created a community. They used a chat board on a popular platform called Discord where they stayed current on all their favorite characters in The Under, compare lore, got to know each other and post alerts about actor sightings so they can jump into headset and try to find them and were actively trying to see who could win the ultimate prize, to see all the 11 different actors Tempest shows first. We even got to perform during the Raindance film festival where it won ‘Best Storytelling Experience.’ I knew how incredibly lucky I was during those first few months of the pandemic, knowing that I currently had a performing job while so many didn’t, I still am. But I got even luckier when I was cast in another live VR production called Finding Pandora X. Which was a whole other type of production, more like a traditional play with several characters. There was a backstage crew and a lot more technical challenges, but with the leadership of our amazing director, Kiira Benzing, our production managed to win Best Immersive Experience in Venice VR Expanded, the official Virtual Reality competition section of the 77th Venice International Film Festival.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Being at the tip of the spear with this technology has created some incredibly challenging hurtles, it seems every show we are always juggling issues and problems. Since doing The Under Presents, The Under Presents: Tempest and Finding Pandora X, we have started producing our own live immersive theater in Virtual Reality on a social platform called VRChat. While Tender Claws created a platform for The Under Presents and The Under Presents: Tempest, we did not have those resources, so we took inspiration from Finding Pandora X and produced on VRChat, using it for something that it was never really meant for, so, I thought it would be fun to go through the behind the scenes mishaps on one show we did at the beginning of our run for Krampusnacht, our Holiday show. It started right at the top of the show when we had an audience member who got stuck in their own instance (which is a copy of the world, of which there can be many) and we were waiting while one of our other team members tried to get a hold of them and get them into the right instance. So I vamped, and I vamped, I painfully vamped with all the other guests for twice as long as that scene is supposed to go, as we almost had him, they were working, but nope!
We didn’t ever get them him in and had to reschedule him for another show (which did happen and he had a grand time). I continued with my orientation and I got to the part where I tell everyone how to clone our ‘display model’ avatar, and I’m going through the instructions and tell them to point at and choose ‘clone public avatar’ when I realize that this option is grayed out, which usually means that the setting has to be changed. I mute my in show mic and yell to my husband who is in headset in the living room as he is also in the show, but not in the orientation part, “the display model won’t clone, get Braden to change the settings” and then back to show, and one of our other actors pops in and it seems somehow the cloning happened. So we then head into the next section of the show and I hear coming through the discord in my ear because I have my Oculus earbud in one ear for the show and a Bluetooth one in my other ear so I can hear our Stage Manager updates, and he’s telling me that he’s been kicked out of the world, this can happen randomly for no reason, and even though he’s sent a bunch of requests to get back in, he just can’t and is stuck there.
But we keep pressing on hoping he’ll be able to get back in. We get through the next scene all right and move to the following one and I immediately saw that I hadn’t hit our universal trigger button and that none of the triggers that I should see, and the audience shouldn’t see, would be available to me. Ugh. And I’m thinking how I can get around that as we continue on, we get to the part where our Stage Manager plays a role in the show and he’s not there, I yell to my husband in the living room again “we’re skipping the shutter wak-o-mole, do your next line.” We get to the scene where I’m supposed to trigger the dramatic white light during one of the scenes between Krampus and St. Nick. I’m madly looking for the mic button on my phone where I’m connected to everyone, which has gone to its black screen saver to tell Eliot to hit the trigger as he’d finished his scene and could do it, but the discord has disconnected. Oh well, I yell again to my husband in the living room “No white light, just keep going” and we do. Yikes! Then we get to the part where the Stage Manager is supposed to trigger the door for our next scene…and nothing. I’m yelling…’Help, How do we get out of Christmas Past’ for about two minutes before anyone realizes we are stuck there because we lost our stage manager.
Finally, we continue to the end and all’s going well as we get to the climax of the play, and then someone decides to clone Krampus and we have two of them. Which I guess is okay, but a little disconcerting to have two of them (note to self, tell everyone to turn off their ‘allow cloning’ options) and I say to our new Krampus…”Oh no! You are becoming Krampus, the darkness is spreading” or some other such thing and they turned back. But luckily that was very close to the end of our show and we finished! Now…I know that is a lot to go through and it’s just an example from one show. But this isn’t a one off, in many of the VR shows I’ve been in, there has been lots of behind the scenes chaos, it’s happened over and over again over the last year in different ways. I used to struggle with trying to be perfect. Wanting everything to go right. Wanting everything to be in place before I show anyone else my work, to a point that some of that work was never shown. And working in VR has allowed me to give myself the gift of imperfection. Because this is a new technology and we are all at the tip of the spear, I’ve come to expect it and embrace along with the realization that perfection is an unrealistic and boring goal, built on a foundation of fear, and it is especially true in VR.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I learned about the possibility of producing in VR from Finding Pandora X, which was hosted in a social platform in VR called VRChat. Prior to that, I had thought it would need to be something that one created their own platform for, like in The Under Presents and The Under Presents: Tempest which is an app you download from the Oculus store or on Steam for all other headsets. There are several of these social platforms, Altspace, Facebook Horizons which is beta, Mozilla Hubs and others. None of them are perfect, for example, Altspace is very stable and you can get quite a few people in an instance because it uses a standard Avatar that has no legs or arms but you can change their hair or clothes, I can see Altspace being very good for a comedy, or perhaps a drama.
We produced in VRChat even though it tends to be glitchy, as we wanted to be able to use very specific Avatars that take up more computing power. Putting up a play in VR is surprisingly like producing a play in real life, except that there are no rental fees, permits, storage costs, or leases to be signed, when you are finished with the show, the set can just stay there and it can be used at a later date if you decide to bring the show back. Virtual Reality is a whole new platform for storytelling, with a potentially global audience. For example, I was in Los Angeles, performing at the Venice Film Festival, for a juror in Japan as one example. And as more people enter the VR world, particularly with the introduction of the relatively inexpensive Oculus Quest 2, I believe the future here is bright and wide open as creatives enter this new storytelling platform.
Like film in the 20’s and computing in the 70’s, it took decades to figure out the best uses for the computer and now almost every household has one, decades to figure out the best way of making a movie and now we have fast cuts and computer-generated graphics. There isn’t a lot of people making VR theater that’s available outside of a film festival or museum, just under ten companies that I can find, so there aren’t many gatekeepers and there is a sense of community here instead of competition. You can directly email or direct message someone in the industry and they will likely respond. People reach out all the time to ask me questions about VR theater as everyone is trying to figure it out and we’ll have a virtual coffee and share information. Some disadvantages are that it is more difficult to build an audience in VR as it is so new, the worlds are limited to the amount of people that can see a show because of computing power, and the worlds can be glitchy, can fall apart or freeze on you and do other strange random things.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I realize that a lot of this is luck. That I, by accident and chance, ended up working in VR during an unprecedented time, creating a new art form and venue for entertainment. If I’d never started working with JFI Productions back with their show Entry, that got me into immersive theater, if I hadn’t been cast in their subsequent production of the incredibly popular The Willows and continued on with immersive theater after, I never would have been in a position to be cast in The Under Presents. As an actor in LA, looking to just try and get an audition, I know that luck is what you need to get you anywhere, to meet the right person, to get the opportunity for the audition, to be seen and cast in a popular production. Yes, I’ve thought a lot about luck, and it has allowed me to let go of some of the pressure I put on myself, to allow my expectations to be fluid and adapt my definition of success. We cannot control our luck, but we can control how we treat ourselves and others. For it is ultimately that, the wings of others, that will bring the luck you were not expecting, as long as you are willing to embrace it even though it will probably look much different than you expected it too.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.deirdrevlyons.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deirdre_lyons/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DeirdreVLyons
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/deirdrelyons
Image Credits
Stephen Butchko Joe Hunting Tender Claws Braden Roy Carlos Austin
