Set in a cinematic cyberpunk world built with the Unity game engine and then performed in VRChat, Uncanny Alley: A New Day begins with audiences in prison after protesting at a rally against the impending New Day update to their world. When hacker Gh0st enlists her megabyte friend, Puck, to trigger an explosive jailbreak, audiences are thrust into a journey through a whimsical, dangerous, and unexpectedly human virtual world. Two actors portray fifteen characters in real time, inviting audiences to speak directly with performers and interact with the world around them, as embodied characters inside the story.

One of the things I found interesting about this is there's a lot of technology involved, but the focus seems to be on still keeping the performance very grounded and human. So how do you let the technology not get in the way of doing the art, the acting?

Whitton Frank: I think that for me, it's been really helpful to find the familiar parts of this. And especially in Ferryman Collective, we have really tried to build these experiences from a theatrical base.

So we have a five-week rehearsal process, we block our shows, we memorize our lines. So there are touchstones as an actor that I find very familiar and comforting. But it definitely takes a bit of time adjusting to all the technology and getting used to it.

It's odd, but it doesn't feel that unfamiliar. And what has really been magical for me has been realizing that once people know that you're a real human acting with them and not AI or a pre-recorded interaction, it feels almost the same as interacting with people in real life.

It seems as if the technology might put a wall between you and the audience. And I wonder how you make that connection. If you're in a theater, you can see the people in front of you, you're able to sort of make that same connection you would if you were at a party.

This is a very different experience. It's like a very fancy Zoom call, basically.

Brendan Bradley: Right. In three dimensions. I think what is so helpful is I think the Zoom call is a great touchstone because especially during the pandemic when we started making this work, everyone was relegated to these little boxes of basically their heads and shoulders. And this is a fully embodied experience.

And so we can become any character in the world and play with scale and dimension and perspective and distance and space and gate. And what's ironic in the way that you're saying of a wall between us, we do have an actor menu that does literally look like a wall, but in some ways that actually allows us to focus entirely on you, the audience, because we don't have to run around looking for things. We can just quickly change our avatar or change and spawn to a new location and then really just stay engaged and connected to the audience.

So there's this button over here that I can press that will then start that animation and that music. I can do my own stage management literally based off of the pacing and the way that you're encountering the content and the story.

So that way, if we need to slow down a section to really make sure that we've caught everybody up and reconnected, or if we need to race through because people are running around and they want a different type of experience, it just gives us a lot of show control to really make it about your individuated experience.

Whitton Frank: But I think it would surprise most people to know that people do form really intense connections, even if we can't see each other's faces, because our brains don't really know the difference once they know it's a human. Once my mind knows it's a human I'm talking to, even though he looks like a robot with mouse ears, my brain still interacts with him in the same way, and I feel connected. And I feel the same way we've had audience members sing opera, recite poetry to us.

I did a show once where the three audience members who didn't know each other decided that they all wanted to high-five all the time. They just loved it, and they formed this bond during the show. So it's all pretty amazing.

Now, have either one of you done sort of, quote, traditional acting after you've started this? Because I'm wondering if that changes the way that you see just traditional acting.

Brendan Bradley: Yeah, I mean, I think we've continued our normal day jobs of working in film, television, and video games. And in some ways it's kind of the perfect hybrid of all of them. Actually, I wish I had this much control versus over the camera in the middle of filming a TV show, right?

Whitton Frank: It's true. That's very true. I find I'm much more aware of just how much control actors give up normally and how much we have in here because we control the sound, the pacing, all of it.

There it was on our television screens: Week 1 of the college football season, a 12-7 Western Michigan lead over Michigan, nine seconds remaining on the clock, and Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood dropping back, hurling a Hail Mary out of the back of the end zone, the clock clearly hitting zero before the ball touched anyone’s hands…and yet here were the officials insisting that we hadn’t actually seen what we just saw. So Michigan got one more play, and Underwood threw another Hail Mary, and this one was complete, and Michigan “won” 13-12, and the Michigan fans stormed the field as if celebrating the apotheosis of the modern American dystopia, and the rest of us at home were left utterly confused as to how zero plus zero plus zero had somehow come to add up to one.

Somehow, the replay officials conducting the review had actual video of a clock with one second on it when a Western Michigan player touched the ball, which was the exact opposite of the evidence we had just seen with our own eyes and ears. The justification was that this was the official clock, and that somehow the clock we had all seen on the NBC broadcast was not the official clock, and was in fact a hair of a fraction of a second off-kilter, no big thing, you know. The Big Ten appeared to not-so-subtly blame NBC for this, perhaps understanding that a broadcast partner who had paid many millions for the rights to televise its games would be willing to absorb the blame for this colossal fuck-up.

The Big Ten also released video of the officials deliberating during the review, which was supposed to foster transparency and perhaps dispel questions about a conspiracy, but instead, the utter lack of context only led to more confusion—were they making a judgment on the play from an angle where you couldn’t even see the ball?—and definitely raised new questions about how the hell the zeroes we had seen on our television screen were somehow false. And then you couldn’t help but wonder what else was false: What if down and distance was not entirely accurate? What if the Big Ten declared that the score itself was somehow wrong, and that we had all missed a phantom field goal that had been kicked while all our backs were turned?

A show which had a greater direct impact was That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas. You’d be forgiven for not really knowing or remembering That Girl. It was a sitcom about a young woman who moves to New York City to chase her dream of becoming an actor.

That Girl was never a smash hit show. But, it was successful enough to run for five seasons (136 episodes). And while it wasn’t a success, it rated considerably better than Star Trek ever did during its original run.

While there were never any That Girl spin-offs or movies that followed the original run of the show (outside of a one-off Rankin-Bass animated special), it was one of the very first TV shows to feature a woman who was unmarried and pursuing a professional career. The show was a beacon on the schedule for 60s-era feminism and set the template for decades of similar sitcoms to follow for years to come.

You don’t get The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 without That Girl. You also don’t get the endless stream of TV shows about young women making it on their own, mixing professional ambition and their personal lives. This is the show that opened the door to them all.

Yesterday in Always Be Watching there was mention of New Girl. This is a show that made very clear allusions to That Girl in its initial marketing. And the main lyric in its theme song? "Who’s that girl…. it’s Jess." 40 years later, That Girl was still making its influence felt.