Oberlin’s newest OMTA/OSTA production is unlike anything the school has seen before. Wilder Dice, debuting April 24 and 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Wilder Main with matinee shows at 1:30 p.m. on April 25 and 26, features two casts with two different plotlines, one called “The Wedding” and the other “The Duel.”
The show combines the world’s most popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, with live theater. D&D involves improvisational storytelling and statistical determination of narrative outcomes based on the results of rolled dice. A typical, private game of D&D features a group of friends sitting around a table, role-playing imaginary characters and rolling dice, but Wilder Dice brings D&D to the stage.
The director, College third-year Conrad Branch, did not pitch the show without inspiration. Like many students at Oberlin, Branch is a self-proclaimed fan of D&D and D&D actual play. They cited the famous web series Critical Role and its current gamemaster, Brennan Lee Mulligan, as their biggest influences. Critical Role broadcasts massively successful live-streamed and recorded sessions of D&D and self-produces live arena events around the world, setting a precedent for Wilder Dice.
Apart from the web series Ends Well Tales, an Oberlin-based company that produces tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) live plays, Branch maintains that nothing that aims to combine D&D with live theater in such a way has ever been officially produced in Oberlin before.
“It’s something so different from all of these other shows that I’ve been involved with,” College first-year Mai Bolster, the show’s lighting designer, said.
The constitution of the show is what makes it so unique. The stage manager, College first-year Grace Waldman, estimated that roughly 20 percent of the show is scripted, and the rest is improvised.
“Conrad and I and all the designers have an outline of what the show is gonna look like . . . but the actors don’t know any of this,” Waldman said. “So when we get to the show and perform it, it’ll be the first time that they’re experiencing it.”
Branch expressed excitement at the flexibility of this mode of storytelling on stage.
“These characters are almost [alive] in a way that is not the same for … characters in a script,” Branch said. “It’s kind of a mad science experiment.”
Actors will be seated behind a table onstage to immerse themselves in the gameplay aspect of the show, but they will also be performing some scenes away from the table, to immerse the audience in the story of the game. This hybridization is what makes Wilder Dice so distinct from other D&D shows that remain at the table.
“Wilder Dice is D&D, but it’s also kind of its own little world,” College first-year and cast member Naomi Farkas said.
In line with the hybrid nature of the show, Wilder Dice cast members bridge the divide between actor and player. Many of them are not concerned with the discrepancy between roles.
“It’s a blend [of roles],” College third-year and cast member Kiera Leitch said. “It’s a gradient. … It’s a scale that fluctuates depending on the situation.”
Additionally, Branch will perform alongside the cast and run the game as the Dungeon Master, so they must be prepared for every possible shift in the storyline depending on the characters’ actions. This means that the actors are unaware of most of what is going to happen.
“As players, there’s a lot we know, but there’s also a lot we don’t know,” Farkas said. “And I’m really excited to see how it turns out.”
In this way, the audience will be experiencing the show in its entirety for the first time alongside the cast. Audience immersion is a special priority for the cast and crew. In fact, Waldman hinted that there will be moments in which audience members help to roll the dice, including a soccer-ball-sized, 20-sided die, to determine the course of the story.
“We want them to also feel like players or maybe NPCs in our world that are going through this experience with us,” College first-year and cast member Xander Mroczek said. “We want to make sure that [audience members] are experiencing the best mix of D&D and improv as they can.”
Branch’s passion project has a runtime of two hours. Their vision for the production and its novelty aims to redefine the possibilities of student-led theater productions at Oberlin.
“It’s stressful but also freeing to know that this is almost a new medium of theater, and so that means there is no definition for it,” Branch said. “I hope it’ll open people’s minds to all sorts of new possibilities for theatrical storytelling … [and] prove that something like this or something beyond the normal bounds of theater is possible.”
