Red Redacted Theatre

Role: Concept, Design, Research, Development

“Red [Redacted] Theatre” is an interactive puzzle-based experience in which players can discover and relate to queer archives, specifically from the Gender and Sexuality Collection at Georgia State University, through tangible interaction and puzzles. With this experience, our aim is to guide participants deeper into queer theories and understandings of history through play: from a more familiar “surface” understanding of history, into a discovery of queer histories, and eventually even further into a more abstracted challenging and breaking of familiar language and constructs. This project was created in collaboration with Rachel Donley and Terra-Mae Gasque.

Artifacts

working with the archive

”Red [Redacted] Theatre” was crafted in homage to the Red Dyke Theatre company, an Atlanta-based lesbian theater company from the 1970s, which performed and documented their community-focused productions from 1972-1978. Their archival materials—photographs, flyers, booklets, show notes, T-shirts, among other objects—form the basis for tangible puzzles in the interactive experience. Pictured below are examples of their flyers, show notes, photographs, and T-shirts.

Flyer from the Red Dyke Theater's Davita Frosting Drag Show, courtesy of the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives.

Photo slides from the Red Dyke Theater Company courtesy of the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives.

T-Shirt from the Red Dyke Theatre, courtesy of the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives.

Show program from the Red Dyke Theatre, courtesy of the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives.

Puzzle Design

creating interactive artifact replicas

We designed three puzzles for our experience, each made from a different artifact: a T-shirt, a flyer, and photo slides on a light table. Each puzzle has two possible answers: a more easily solved “surface answer,” which represents a surface understanding of history; and a more obscured “hidden answer,” which suggests an uncovering of queer subjects or a queer understanding of a known historical event. Players can solve the puzzles in any order, retrieving answers that correspond to clues in a central crossword. Upon solving the crossword, players will retrieve stickers that either encourage them to dig deeper if they have only solved the surface puzzles, or give them information about the puzzles, the Red Dyke Theatre company, archival scholarship, and queer theory if they have solved the hidden puzzles.

Playing with themes of censorship and hidden or "taboo" language in this puzzle: when folded closed, the flyer puzzle redacts this language as a form of censorship, metaphorically indicating censorship of queer and specifically sexual queer content. The closed flyer looks “complete” and matches traditional letter dimensions, as a way of indicating that surface history is typically considered “neat” and “explained.”  

When opened, the flyer reveals the messiness and unruliness of queer-coded, or previously considered taboo language, metaphorically indicating a revealing of queer history and queer subjects.  

With the photo slides puzzle, we played with chronology, demonstrating how our conventional means of ordering historical information, often chronologically, is not the only way and often not the most meaningful way to make sense of how events, artifacts, or individuals connect. If players order slides in chronological order, it will reveal a "surface" answer, and therefore a "surface" understanding of history. 

To find the “hidden” answer, players needed to read a few lines on an adjacent notebook detailing how different theater members related to each other, recognizing that the names mentioned are also the names on the slides. In this, they make the discovery themselves that they can connect artifacts and find new, meaningful ways to order content to make sense of history differently or "queerly."

In this puzzle, we emphasized the importance of ephemera as valid artifacts in history and archives. In the experience, all artifacts are stored in archival boxes, but one is empty, cueing something is missing. 

Players must find ephemera, in this case a T-shirt, to place in the empty box and trigger the "hidden" answer to the puzzle. They are clued to the shirt's relevance as it is present in other artifacts, such as in the photo slides above.  

The central crossword brings the experience together: players solve clues from the artifact puzzles and use the tiles to input their answers. The crossword solves in two ways: surface answers (indicating a surface understanding of history) and hidden answers (indicating a queer understanding).

We framed the experience with an informational booklet, inspired by the original Red Dyke Theatre show program, that gives historical context and instructions.

After players solved clues from the artifacts, entering their letters in the crossword, they would receive stickers to place in their booklets, adding context to their answers, whether surface or hidden.

As players moved from a surface understanding of history to a deeper, queer understanding, it was important to facilitate debriefing, discussion, and reflection throughout the experience.

Experience Debrief

takeaways and future considerations

By creating a physical, immersive installation space, the experience positions the player as the archivist, sifting through archival materials to first observe, document, and categorize by solving puzzles that convey a surface-level understanding of history and lead to a hidden or "queer" understanding.

The take-home booklet and framing of the experience also gives players a level of agency in shaping their own experience and therefore their own understanding of the archive. Further, the booklet and framing allow for the experience to be contextualized within the history of the Red Dyke Theatre company, and for the Red Dyke Theatre company to continue to have contemporary, ongoing, and collective significance. The “take-home” aspect of the booklet underscores this significance by providing a personal, material link to the theater company and eponymous game. In providing additional resources, information, and links to the Georgia State University Gender and Sexuality Collections, individuals can also further their learning and relationship to the materials.   

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