Resident Feature

How Theater is Adapting

to a Virtual World

It’s been over eight months since I was cast in Loyola Marymount University’s production of She Kills Monsters, and this week we finally performed our show for an audience for the first time. Originally, we were set to perform in person in March, but just over a week before the curtains were supposed to rise, our show was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the determination of a wonderful cast, crew, and director, our play has found a new life on Zoom. 

My name is Jake Zingg, and I’m a Theatre Arts major at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I’m a Danville native who is pursuing my dream of becoming an actor. I got my start performing right here in Danville, singing in Sunshine Vocal with Lorrie Harris and performing with San Ramon Valley High School’s Theatre Department for four years.

She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen is a play that follows a young woman, Agnes, who starts playing Dungeons & Dragons in hopes of learning more about her sister, Tilly, following her untimely death in a car crash. I play Chuck, the nerdy teenager who introduces Agnes to the world of D&D. The show is heavily reliant on stage combat to tell its story, so naturally I was skeptical about performing it all online. But everyone involved in this project is so full of imagination and optimism, and every limitation has been viewed as nothing more than a creative challenge. We have cast members scattered across the globe, including one in Hong Kong, so while we’re performing at night, she’s performing in the morning. Our costumes and props were shipped to us, swords, monster heads, and severed human arms among them. We got to work adapting the show we created in a real life theatre to the virtual world of Zoom. It turns out that storytelling possibilities are limitless with technology and imagination. 

I’ll be honest, when Fall classes moved fully online, I considered taking a semester off of school. Acting classes over Zoom seemed like a waste of time. How can you connect to your fellow actors through a screen? How do you make eye contact with your costar through your camera lens? No one has mastered these skills just yet, but I’ve since come to the realization that these challenges are not a reason to write this semester off as wasted time; they are a test of my creativity as an artist. After all, art cannot be separated from the time in which it was created, and as artists we must embrace the challenges of the time we find ourselves in now. Although my journey with She Kills Monsters has nearly reached its end, I still have an exciting semester of Zoom acting classes to look forward to, including, (ironically enough) Acting for the Camera. Acting class works surprisingly well over Zoom, and I’ve been inspired by my professors’ continued dedication to providing a quality education in the virtual world. I’ve even been cast in my next play with LMU, Lysistrata, which is set to open over Zoom in November. As I move forward in pursuing my acting career in the ever changing landscape of Hollywood, I will face new challenges with the same optimism and creativity that made possible the virtual performance of She Kills Monsters.


By Jake Zingg, Danville Resident since 2000