Correspondence From Limbo

Let me start by acknowledging how weird this is. I normally use my diary posts to write about things other than games, to experiment with my writing style and try new things. But then I finished Kentucky Route Zero, and I just could not get the game out of my head. It took me almost a year to finish it, but I finally wrapped up Act V and the final interlude of the game at the beginning of this month, and I really wanted to write something about it. I have a history with acting, as I detail below, and the play-like structure of the game, as well as it’s themes of community, debt, labour and the toll they both take on us, really connected with me in a surprising way. Not since I first played Night in the Woods have I felt such a connection to a game.

But what is my quick-fire review of the end of KR0? Well, I enjoyed both of the final chapters (experiences? performances??). The slightly surreal play-like experience of Act V saw the characters I had known for so long deciding on whether they should stay in the ruins of a flooded town and rebuild or move on to pastures new, whilst also attending a funeral for a pair of horses that the remaining townspeople knew and loved. Meanwhile, the interlude had Carrington -a character who, for me at least, hadn’t appeared since the first act where he asked Conway where he should stage his play- head into a bar and complain that no one had come out to see said play. Apparently, a gas-station car park is not the prime spot to host a theatrical performance. Who would have guessed?

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In a lecture, theatre director Peter Brook said, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man can walk across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged”. I don’t agree with Brook on a lot of things – I find his series of lectures to be overly self-congratulatory – but this theory that theatre can be anywhere, that it doesn’t require a proscenium arch or an elevated stage, to be one that I agree with. You can perform theatre anywhere; the only necessary component is an audience.

I’ve never performed in a gas station car park, but I have acted in several town halls. When I was younger, I was a member of a couple of local community theatre groups; one of them belonged to the town that I lived in, the other to the village that was just down the road. I did all sorts of jobs for both groups; stage-hand work, front of house ticket checking and ice cream selling, I even helped with setting up some of the lights occasionally. But my first love was acting. I appeared in a multitude of roles, including a bumbling superhero dressed in skin-tight lycra and an Elvis wig (it makes sense in context) and a rich, arrogant prince, all of which I found immense joy in playing. One year I was even the Pantomime villain!

But playing through KR0, experiencing the stories of Conway, Shannon, Junebug, Ezra and, yes, Carrington, seeing how the game explored the themes of community and performance and art, brought to mind one specific production I was involved with. I was part of a production of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales when I was 17, playing a few characters across several stories: Palamon in The Knight’s Tale, Justinus in The Merchant’s Tale, and John in The Miller’s Tale. It was a fun experience, I look back on it fondly, but what I remember most about this production is how we staged it. It was quite unlike anything I had done before or have done since.

The decision was made fairly early in production that we wanted to stage the play like it was in a medieval town hall. Instead of rows of seats, we would have tables that the audience would sit at, some of which were at an angle to the stage. The lights would be dimmed, not so much that the audience couldn’t see us or each other, but enough to create an atmosphere, a simulation of candles and lanterns. But the most obvious alteration is that we wouldn’t have a backstage area. No green room, no changing rooms. The costumes were instead stored to one side of the stage, near the table where we, the actors, would sit between our scenes, as members of the audience.

As an experience, it felt utterly unique. But why am I writing about it? How does it fit into my time on the Zero? Well, in the last Act of Kentucky Route Zero, I saw a group of characters, some of whom had never met before, come together to become a community. The final Act of the game ends with almost everyone who you have met so far burying a pair of horses nicknamed The Neighbours, amidst the ruins of a town that has been destroyed in a flood. As the horses are laid to rest, after all the poetry was recited and eulogies given, one of the town’s people, Emily, starts to sing. It’s a simple song, and her voice is soon joined by that of the other residents of this now destroyed place. The camera lifts up to reveal shadowy figures, the ghosts of forgotten and fallen friends surrounding the grave, the mourners, the buildings. The song only lasts a few minutes, but that brief time is incredibly powerful. The scene creates a sense of community between people who don’t really know each other, and people who are only there as memories. It brought me back to performing in the Canterbury Tales, sitting during the interval, alongside audience and cast-member alike, eating a meal of soup and bread that we decided to provide instead of ice cream. That was one of the last places where I had felt such a strong, overpowering sense of closeness and camaraderie. I had never met most of the people sitting around me before, but at that moment I would have counted any of them as being amongst my closest friends. But, just like The Neighbours funeral, the moment ended suddenly, and without warning.

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The majority of people you meet in KR0 are either academics or workers or artists, with some falling into multiple categories. Carrington is in the former camp; a playwright and dramaturg whose life goal is to stage a dramatic, real-time reenactment of the Robert Frost poem Death of The Hired Man. Unfortunately, his dreams are dashed. In my playthrough, Carrington ends up putting on his production in the car park of a gas station – the very gas station that Conway comes across at the beginning of Act I. In fact, it is Conway who suggests that Carrington stage the play there, promising that he’ll come and watch it as soon as he is finished with his delivery.

But Conway never makes it to the play. In fact, no one does; both the audience and the actors fail to show up. While Conway and Shannon are exploring the Zero, struggling to come to terms with what they encounter in the process, Carrington waits in the cold for company that will simply not come. His life work is ruined, his art potentially destroyed.

When I was at university I was part of an improv group. I wasn’t an especially strong improviser, a combination of social anxiety and being surrounded by people with strong personalities meant that not all of the scenes that I attempted to start were good, but I still found the experience fun regardless.

It was in my second year that we started doing some regular live shows. They weren’t huge affairs; we mostly performed in the backroom of one of the on-campus bars or in the reception area of the on-campus cinema/theatre. Both spaces could fit a lot of people, and we weren’t charging any money, but we rarely attracted huge audiences. This wasn’t ever really an issue, but it was still strange. The smallest audience we ever performed to was two people, a couple, who came to see our show. We even had a few performances where no one showed up at all. Even when we had people come by to watch, there was always a fear that, no, they wouldn’t laugh at the scenes we were putting together. That we would be standing at the front of a room, making fools of ourselves, for no reason. The only thing worse than having no audience is having an audience you can’t connect with.

But for Carrington all is not lost, he does get his wish of acting out Frost’s poem even if he doesn’t realise it. In the final interlude, named after the poem that was and the play that wasn’t, Carrington talks with the bartender Harry about his night. But Harry is only half-listening to his friend; he has his own issues. A former employee is back at the bar, asking for work. Carrington believes that Harry should take on the man; he isn’t so sure. During the conversation, Harry is encouraged to just go talk to the man, see what’s going on. And he does. In this instance, it looks like KR0 is going to have one last tragedy, the perhaps avoidable death of a man, echoing the cruel ending of Frost’s poem. But it doesn’t. The man hasn’t died, he’s simply fallen asleep. Harry decides that he’ll let the man rest. It’s the kind thing to do.

In this interlude, Carrington gets his wish, even if he doesn’t realise it. He gets to live out Frost’s play, even if the ending is different and the setting isn’t the same. It makes me think of all the dreams we fulfil that we either don’t acknowledge or recognise because they aren’t the ones that we have in our heads. Sure, we might have missed our chance to go to space, but maybe we had the chance to start a family instead. I might never be a famous actor, but I did get several things I wrote published in my university’s paper. And Carrington might not have had his life’s work seen by others, but he still managed to survive a night that a few others didn’t. And sometimes survival’s enough, even if we don’t achieve our dreams.