In some ways, video games have an advantage over blockbuster films.
While the latest big budget Hollywood release provides emotional roller coasters that conclude once the credits crawl, a video game offers comparable production levels with the added bonus that the person with the controller has a hand in the ultimate outcome.
Playwright/screenwriter Jennifer Haley is using those dynamics of video game play to continue leaning towards the dark and daring in her work. Her writing credits include the Netflix crime thriller “Mindhunter.” Her play “The Nether” ran at San Francisco Playhouse in 2016. But there’s something special about “Froggy,” making its world premiere at Center Repertory Company in Walnut Creek.
Haley began writing the play in 2008, not with a word processor, but on InDesign software more conducive to creating graphic novels. That was one year after motion capture software became a massive norm within video games, which greatly influences the world where “Froggy” is set.
The story follows the Texan Froggy searching for her missing boyfriend, ultimately learning he is in a bootleg video game. That discovery leads to an obsessive quest to locate the game’s production company with Froggy intending to snag a copy and find him. Yet as the discoveries inside the game become clearer, the past becomes much more murky.
“She begins looking at her whole obsession from this psychological viewpoint,” said Haley, who describes the play as a graphic novel thriller. “The entire question becomes not just why am I looking for this guy, but why was I with him in the first place? He was struggling with mental illness, so what did I need from him and what do I still need from him?”
Artistic director Matt M. Morrow is ushering in her full season helming the company; the first season she oversaw when she obtained the position in August of 2023 had already been selected. Morrow, succeeding Markus Potter as artistic director, has been part of “Froggy” as the show’s director for 14 years and is thrilled to see the bold play get its world premiere housed at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center.
“One thing Jen and I have always known about ‘Froggy’ is that it’s defiantly its own thing,” Morrow said. “It’s not a show to necessarily decipher on the page, and it has its own sort of emotional intelligence to it that either you latch onto or you don’t.”
Both Morrow and Haley decided early on that the show needed a multimedia experience, but someone who would stick around long enough to see the project through over the course of many years was going to be tough. With good fortune smiling down on the duo, not only were they able to land a multimedia designer, but one who boasts multiple Obie, Lortel and Helen Hayes awards.
In many ways, the show’s director of creative technology, Jared Mezzocchi was the missing piece of the puzzle, and the person responsible for providing the visual colorization within the mind of Froggy.
“I think things really started to pick up when Jared joined our team, which is when we started to really have these forward moments and confidence in what we had,” Morrow said. “It’s a deeply expressionistic story all seen through Froggy’s eyes, and Jared’s media design is Froggy’s psyche projected around her on stage.”
Lots of time has passed and many digressions away from theater have encompassed Haley’s career. She is in a rehearsal room for the first time since 2013, big-screen and television projects having been her primary professional focus of late. Yet despite the weight of a world premiere that’s been slow-burning for 17 years now ready to enter the theatrical world, the word important is not one she would automatically apply to the grand unveiling of the project. Haley is much more comfortable applying the label “consequential” to the show for multiple reasons.
“I definitely think, from a designer point of view in the way we think about doing theater, it will be consequential,” Haley said. “I also hope that it is consequential for people who maybe have been in the same emotional state as Froggy in terms of questioning how we function in love relationships and the choices made there, and how that reaches back to things that did or did not happen in childhood. Even exploring within ourselves the things one may have needed but didn’t receive, or received but didn’t know how to process. So on an emotional level, I do hope that it’s consequential and can help people.”
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (‘22-‘23); @davidjchavez.bsky.social
‘FROGGY’
By Jennifer Haley, presented in its world premiere by Center Repertory Company
Through: March 2
Where: Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek
Tickets: $25-$78; centerrep.org
