He could have made a video game. Instead, he wrote a playable play

It's billed as a "play you can play," and that curious claim is true. Opening tonight, No Save Points is the latest production from Outside the March, the Toronto-based theatre company known for immersive and experimental projects including Trojan Girls and The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, and their new show combines live performance with the mechanics of old-school video gaming. 

There are times during the performance when any willing member of the audience can snatch the controls — a hacked Gameboy Colour — sending directions to the performer on stage. That's Sébastien Heins, OtM's associate artistic director and the show's creator and star. 

In one game-ified scene, Heins plays a masked avenger who scrambles up and down ladders like Donkey Kong. In another, he powers a 3D cartoon avatar via motion-capture technology — a tiny animated game sprite that's projected on stage as part of a digital side-scrolling adventure. 

In both of those examples, it's the crowd's responsibility to pull the strings — or push the buttons, as it were. Up, down, right, left — super jump. If you don't work the controls, Heins won't go anywhere. And yet, there's more to this show than gaming gimmickry. 

At its core, No Save Points is a heartfelt memoir, a story about Heins's relationship with his mother and how he reckoned with the hereditary illness that disrupted her life. Huntington's Disease is the big-boss villain here, and when Heins learns of his mom's devastating diagnosis, he retreats from reality with video games. In the play, those escapist moments are staged as four interactive acts, allegories for the emotional turmoil roiling within.

It's a plot device that requires a tremendous performance from Heins, as he juggles the emotional heft of the narrative with physical feats and improvised crowd work. But it's a challenge he was determined to pull off. As he tells CBC Arts, even in the earliest stages of the show's development, he knew he wanted to make a show that audiences could play like Nintendo. 

"I've always thought that theatre could learn something from video games," he says. The question was, how could he pull it off?

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"It started as an artistic challenge," says Heins. "It was like, I love video games and I've played them for a long time. How do I have that feeling when I'm in the theatre?"

He began working out that puzzle in 2019, when he first pitched OtM on an interactive concept that would become No Save Points, and by 2020, he had enough material to play test with an audience. That summer, he presented a virtual performance at the Kick and Push Festival. The production (The Itinerary) was game-ified with the help of a phone app, a program that allowed viewers to choose the performer's actions with the press of a button. 

"What [the show] was trying to do then, it's still doing now — putting the control over the performance in the hands of the audience." But The Itinerary told a completely different story. That show was a stand-alone sci-fi drama. Heins played a man trapped in a room, facing certain death — a premise that resurfaces in one of No Save Points' playable scenes. 

"The question that we were asking wasn't 'How do I get out of here?' The question is 'What do we do with the time that we have?'" 

"It became apparent through doing the playtest that I wanted to talk more explicitly about my mom," Heins says, and he began to expand the project into much more personal territory. 

How do you make a play play-able?

Heins now had his story, but the question remained: how do you make a play, play-able? 

A game-changing opportunity was about to come along, though, and in 2020, Canadian Stage announced an artist-in-residence program that they were developing in partnership with a research project at the University of Toronto: the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts Performance, Emerging Technologies and Artificial Intelligence.

"They put a call out saying that they were looking for people who are really excited about tech," says Heins. "You're going to get your hands on MoCap (motion capture) stuff and motion-sensing AI, and I was like, yes please!"

Heins was accepted, and he found himself collaborating with researchers and fellow artists. He remembers arriving in a room full of computers that were "just whirring away" — and being thrown into experiments with text-generating AI models, tools they'd prompt to write Shakespearean sonnets.

The artist-in-residence program is essential to the lab's mission, says David Rokeby, director of the BMO Lab. "It's a very strange creature because it is an AI and emerging technologies research lab within a centre for drama, theatre and performance studies," he tells CBC Arts. "We really bring these different worlds together. We have computer science and engineering students developing technologies in the lab specifically for performance. And we have actors, directors, set designers and playwrights in the lab working with these technologies."

"[Performers] bring lots of questions to the table that don't necessarily occur to, say, a computer science student who's working on something. They bring a whole different perspective," Rokeby says. 

"We invite people from a wide range of things, including art history, architecture, and creative writing and music. And we see where there's resonance — where people say, 'Oh, I have an idea, I know where I could use this."

So it was with Heins. "Suddenly, I got my hands on all this gear that I'd never been able to use before, and I was like a kid in a candy shop," he says. About a year into his time at the lab, Heins approached Rokeby with an idea that would take his play-able play to a new level. He wanted to experiment with motion capture.

Of all the technologies Heins had seen through the lab, he was particularly interested in the "Shadow" motion capture suit. "It's kind of like Gollum in Lord of the Rings," he explains. "It lets you perform as another character in a digital world."

"I'm a very physical performer, and so it just became an extension of my creativity," says Heins. In the suit, he could embody a new character in an instant, while roaming through any environment imaginable. The experience unlocked something in his mind, he explains. With motion capture, he'd be able to bring the video-game world to the stage — and in the third act of No Save Points, he does just that, animating a 3D game character in real time: a little boy on a quest to rescue his mom. "It felt like, Oh my god, now I can be in a whole other world and perform in it."

BMO Lab's most recent research has focused on text-to-image AI technology like this tool that can instantly conjure panoramic visuals based on the words an actor utters on stage. But motion capture remains a key area of their research, and Rokeby was intrigued by the idea Heins wanted to develop. 

In the show, motion capture is more than a practical effect. It becomes a reminder of the connection — and disconnect — between our minds and bodies. "It was really poignant in relationship to the story about him and his mother," says Rokeby. "And I'm always very attracted to situations where the technology … serves not as a special effect, shall we say, but as something that furthers the central thrust of a story."

How does it work?

By collaborating with BMO Lab, Heins developed a way to appear on stage as a video-game character, but the effect required a mix of technologies — plus a bit of theatre magic. Much of the illusion relies on information Heins receives through the audience game controller, a device he built with creative technologist Stephen Surlin. It effectively functions like a remote control, he explains, one that's connected to six haptic buzzers that have been strapped to his body with sports tape. Press a button, and a corresponding buzzer will vibrate. It's up to Heins to interpret that information as movement, and during the show's complicated third act — a motion capture-assisted side-scrolling game — he's responsible for animating the game's digital avatar and playing the game itself. (Heins is technically the one who's in control of the action; he operates an actual game controller in his left hand.)

"There are moments where I'm like, 'Oh my god, they're pressing so many buttons! I don't know what they want to do!" he laughs. "But that's OK. That's part of the improv — the live-ness of it."

And as Heins has tested the show in previews, the game-play portions have felt like a spectator sport. "Like, people are cheering things on," he says. "We're figuring it out together. It's like a really weird connection between player and performer."

"We could have made a video game and put it on the Steam store. We could have done that. But we're making a live action video game, and that has its own huge set of rules, its own risks, its own things that can go wrong," says Heins. 

"It feels like we're really taking advantage of the reason why people go to the theatre. It's such a live experience."

No Save Points. Featuring Sébastien Heins. Written by Sébastien Heins. Directed by Sébastien Heins and Mitchell Cushman. An Outside the March Production. Presented by Starvox Entertainment in association with Modern Times Stage Company with support from Hilltop Studios and the BMO Lab. To June 25. Lighthouse ArtSpace. www.outsidethemarch.ca