THEATER Process Informs Performance

FAYETTEVILLE — Here’s what the audience needs to know: “Bombs, Babes and Bingo” is an original play by Merri Biechler, the story of how one man’s memories are unraveling due to an unspecified brain injury.

“It’s going to look, smell, taste, act just like theater,” says Erika Wilhite, co-artistic director of the Artist’s Laboratory Theatre, where the play will debut Thursday.

“There will be seating and lights and tickets and everything.”

But that’s where the similarity to traditional theater ends. “Bombs, Babes and Bingo” is a mind game of sorts, using actors and playgoers in an unusual experiment. For each performance, the order of the scenes will be determined by the drawing of bingo balls.

Among the big questions Wilhite and her colleagues are asking: Will the story stay the same? Does the order of the events in our lives affect who we are and the decisions we make?

“I don’t even know if the random order will be important to the audience,” Wilhite muses. “They just need to know this is our debut project, and we’ll be around for more.”

It’s what the audience hasn’t seen that makes the theater company truly different, Wilhite says. New to Northwest Arkansas from Orlando, Fla., Wilhite - who has a master’s degree in theater from the University of Central Florida - saw“a wonderful, rich theater community but also an opportunity” to work in experimental and experiential theater.

For the past six weeks, actors, artists, musicians, therapists and other community members have explored the “math and science” of memory, Wilhite explains. She calls it “physical dramaturgy,” taking the theory and practice of dramatic composition to a physical level.

“We learned everything we could, the ins and outs of memory, through physical exploration,” she says. Beyond the learning experience, the “performance lab was a superduper fun process.”

“Even though the performance lab took a month and a half, that may be a short time compared to other projects we might come up with,” Wilhite says. “We may be developing our own work, which might be a yearlongprocess.

“I wouldn’t say we value process over performance, but we really want plenty of time for process.”