George Bernard Shaw, Dungeons & Dragons, and me, Theater News

“This show will be like Dungeons and Dragons meets Geroge Bernard Shaw! The audience will be super involved, and the whole story will be decided by rolls of the dice like a D&D adventure! We could use two different actors to play the game every time, and I would be the game master. It’d be fun, exciting, and cheap!” 

That was my pitch in a meeting with Shaw Festival artistic director Tim Carroll. 

“So,” he said. “Will it need a board or something?” 

Let’s back up. 

I love George Bernard Shaw. This is my 11th season as an actor at his namesake festival. I think so much of what Shaw wrote could have been written yesterday. But from what I’ve seen in my time at the Shaw, from patron feedback in the grocery store to the frequent nappers I’ve seen in the audience, some people aren’t interested in hearing what Shaw has to say to them 74 years after his death.

So I started thinking: What could I do to get people to love Shaw like I do? 

Suddenly, it came to me: What about Dungeons and Dragons? 

I’ve been an avid D&D player since I was 13, when I went from being a kid that didn’t read to one that loved Tolkien. I went from being a shy tween to one who loved improvising stories. D&D is the reason I became an actor.

Flash forward to three years ago, when I found myself asking what I could do to get people to love Shaw. It soon occurred to me that I could make a roleplaying game about the playwright. D&D was created so that a bunch of guys in the 1970s could put themselves inside the worlds of Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs. (2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the game!) Maybe I could make a game that let people put themselves inside the world of Shaw. And, all things going well, maybe I could make it really fun, so that people could have a great first experience with Shaw and then want to come see his plays at the festival. 

With this idea, I started my master’s degree in comparative literature at Brock University. My master’s thesis became The Roll of Shaw, an educational tool that that used the format of a tabletop roleplaying game to let participants play one of Shaw’s most famous female characters — Eliza Doolittle or Major Barbara, for example — and go on an adventure around 1920s London trying to save socialism from greedy corporate interests. 

I spent a year playtesting this game with different groups, and to my delight, it worked. People loved improvising stories and deciding what they would do if they were in the shoes of Shaw’s characters.

In one playtest, fellow Shaw actor Cosette Derome played Eliza Doolittle. The characters eventually found themselves going back to Henry Higgins’ flat to look for a clue. They went into his library, and Cosette asked, “Is there brandy around?” I said yes. “Great!,” she said. “How about cigarettes and matches?” I replied, “Makes sense to me.” 

“You see Higgins’ extensive Brandy and cigarette collection on an antique table next to his enormous brown leather armchair,” I narrated. “Wonderful,” said Cosette. “I take the brandy, cover the books with it, and light it all on fire with the cigarette lighter, and scream, ‘YOU KEPT ME CAGED HERE LIKE AN ANIMAL!’” That’s what Cosette wished Eliza would have done in Pygmalion. 

The game worked. 

During one playtest at the University of Toronto, there were too many students for them all to play. So I turned 20 of them into an audience, and I let them vote on things that happened in the story and pitch me ideas. It was so much fun that I started to become certain that this could be a show.

Flash forward once more to 2023, when I tried to convince Tim Caroll that an interactive, Shaw-meets-D&D-meets-show could be a good choice for the Shaw’s 2024 season. 

He went for it. 

The process of transforming my project from an educational game to a show worth the price of a ticket was a long one. It began with a trip to England and Ireland in 2023 to explore the locations from Shaw’s plays that I used in the game. I had been awarded the International Shaw Society’s Dietrich Scholarship, a prize for a rising academic in Shaw studies to travel for research.

Then we began workshopping at the Shaw. My first invited audience run went terribly. I realized I had to do more to make the audience feel involved and invested in what was going on in the plot. It’s super easy for someone playing a character in a D&D game to feel engaged., but how do you do the same for the audience? 

Then Erika Evans, my colleague at Brock as well as a video game designer, theatre mom, and all-around amazing person, solved it. She said, “For the audience to feel more involved, you need to involve them narratively. I think you should cast the audience as Fate, and then they’re implicated in the outcome.” That unlocked the whole thing. 

After that, The Roll of Shaw started to take shape. I ran a playtest every week at the Shaw, inviting large groups and shaping the piece into a dynamic theatre experience. I learned what the show needed for an audience to consume it. I added an introductory speech to explain what a roleplaying game is and how it works. I explained that the show they were about to see was “half radio drama, half Yahtzee,” and that really clicked for people in the audience who might not have already been familiar with the mechanics of D&D. 

Then we moved to the theatre, another huge learning curve. I was blessed with a very cool space: The Shaw’s vintage 1920s Belgian Spiegeltent, set up as a theatre in the round. And I was doubly blessed with a lighting and sound crew that was up for improvising cues around whatever happened in the narrative. If I described a fireplace, for example, suddenly a pulsing red light appeared with a crackling log sound cue to match. I started being able to see when the audience was losing focus, so I knew when I needed to call for another audience Fate vote to decide what happened next. I was given two different actors every show, with varying degrees of experience with roleplaying games, and I started learning how to take care of them on stage, and to ensure they knew they could pitch any silly idea and I would fold it into the story and make them look good.

The show’s major dramaturgical structure still changed throughout previews. An academic colleague came to see the show and said, “I don’t know a lot about theatre, but I know a lot about games. I think the audience voting doesn’t give them enough agency to specifically alter the story. You still have too much control over how the story turns out.” 

So, we made envelopes containing audience “powers” they could use to change the story. For example, we have a power called “Chekhov’s Gun,” where an audience member can just yell out that a gun appears in the scene and I have to find a way to use it. There’s also “an animal appears,” in which an audience member chooses any animal to show up in the story and leaves it to me to explain how it got there. 

I’ve introduced hundreds of Shaw fans to the world of roleplaying games, and how they can be used to tell stories.

We’re getting close to finishing our run. I’ve had an amazing time. I never really believed that people would buy tickets to come see my master’s thesis — but they have. We’ve had great crowds all summer. I’ve introduced hundreds of Shaw fans to the world of roleplaying games, and how they can be used to tell stories. Something that’s really surprised me is the number of young people who have been coming to the show — not the typical Shaw festival patron. I always go and talk to them, and almost without exception they are D&D fans who wanted to see some live roleplaying game action. 

I’m extremely grateful that Tim Carroll took a chance on this show. I think we’ve discovered an appetite for this kind of interactive, improvised game based theatre here at the Shaw. Every show is different, so we have a lot of repeat patrons. 

And we’re going to do it again next year, this time around a Narnia theme as a companion piece to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which will play on the Festival Stage. How will it be different? Instead of Shaw heroines, maybe the players will be talking animals trying to survive the White Witch’s 1000 year winter before the Pevensie children arrive in Narnia. 

But who knows? You’ll have to come on down to Niagara-on-the-Lake and roll the dice.