When Exit 16 takes the Arts Asylum stage again on April 17, it’ll be a different play than it was just four days prior.
How different, we don’t know—but we know that after each show from April 10-14, the playwright, Jamie Lin Pratt, and her cast stayed in the tiny theater to ask the audience for feedback. Audience members told them what they liked and what could improve, and as you read this, the play is under active revision. Come April 17-20, we’ll see what the community helped create.
Here’s the play we saw on April 11: Exit 16 is set in an Alabama diner that’s stuck in a time loop. A travel writer walks in the door with a ding—and walks in the door with a ding, and walks in the door with a ding, each time like it was the first. A couple in a booth has escaped the loop but hasn’t escaped the diner and the suspicious, albeit friendly, locals that inhabit it. They clash over whether to help the writer or fend for themselves. We saw a show about seeing the humanity in others, about squaring your love for someone with your understanding of them, and about trying, and trying again, to get it right.
Lin Pratt is scientist/playwright behind Exit 16, but she’s already run it through three rounds of feedback, and she’ll run it through another from April 17 to 20 before submitting it for copyright and publishing. She’s done this through Hypothesis: a Theatre Lab, which she and her husband founded for just this kind of experiment. Writing plays, seeing how they resonate with the community, and giving the community a say on what they become.
As you sit in the audience for a Hypothesis: a Theatre Lab experiment, you sacrifice a bit of the pleasure of passive play watching, but you gain a different kind of pleasure—a creative pleasure, and a communal one. The pleasure of turning your creative gears and seeing how eager the playwright and cast are to hear your thoughts. Then the pleasure of having those thoughts valued and considered. You leave with a stake in the play.
If you go see the revised play (which you’ll get a discount code for), you might even get a tiny sampling of the artistic nerves, that trickling lightning, that the playwright and cast must be coursing with as they display their work to the world.
Exit 16 returns to The Arts Asylum this Thursday and runs through Sunday. Tickets are $33.85.
Anyone can submit a play of their own to Hypothesis: a Theatre Lab and volunteer as a reader, an auditor, or something else.