Speaking with Ghostbird Theatre Company co-founder Barry Cavin, I’m reminded of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. The minimalist lithograph depicts a black-tipped, wooden puffer atop a looping line of script that reads, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” French for “This is Not a Pipe.” With his paradoxical work, the Belgian surrealist, known for his subversive messaging, prompts viewers to challenge their perception and question their reality. Likewise, Barry’s work with Ghostbird centers on enigma. The director, thespian and designer has written dozens of plays, but he insists, “I am not a playwright.”
Barry rattles off a litany of reasons the moniker doesn’t fit: His process is scattered, his plays aren’t published, playwriting is not his main focus. And, then, there’s the nature of Ghostbird itself. “None of these plays would be interesting to anybody outside of the area where I’m writing,” the Florida Gulf Coast University theater professor says in his characteristically gentle, even cadence.
Courtesy Ghostbird Theatre Company
Ghostbird Theatre Company actors on stage
Ghostbird is a small, nomadic theater company with three board members—producing director Jim Brock, Barry and his fellow Swiss army knife, Katelyn Gravel—and a rotating catalog of performers and stage artists. The team focuses on original, site-specific plays—stories rooted in a sense of place, anchored to their audience through physical location and a shared cultural vernacular. There is no brick-and-mortar Ghostbird Theatre. Instead, the group performs in artist studios and areas of historical significance and fascination, like Estero’s former cult community Koreshan State Park and Fort Myers’ 1919 Langford-Kingston Home. “I love creating conversation, dialogue, arguments with the audience, so they can get more than just entertainment out of it,” Barry says. “They can get some real thought and wrestle with some ideas.” This probative approach and from-scratch creativity have garnered a cult following for the troupe’s post-show talkbacks, the 15-minute sessions the cast hosts after every performance to engage with patrons.
Ghostbird’s concept, while esoteric, is far from new in the world of theater—The Bard’s most famed works are best understood in the context of the times. Barry’s honed his site-specific ethos since studying under Shakespearean scholar Robert Weimann at the University of California. “He often would talk about the idea of using local humor, local knowledge and the power of being in a place,” Barry says. “There would be local references, local color, local humor.” Through these tangible connections, Ghostbird productions address difficult, at times uncomfortable, questions. The events onstage rarely answer the queries posed, but they start a dialogue through familiar references.
Twelve years into its Southwest Florida tenure, Ghostbird Theatre maintains its grassroots energy. The company began when then-FGCU student Brittney Brady expressed an interest in pursuing an MFA in directing to Barry. He suggested she cut a competitive edge by starting her own theater company and offered to help her. They launched Ghostbird with a couple of friends and fellow faculty member Jim Brock. When Brittney took off to California Institute of the Arts a few years later, Barry slipped into the artistic director’s chair. No one, it seemed, was willing to let Ghostbird fly over the horizon. “We all had a shared vision of doing this unusual type of theater,” Barry says.
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Courtesy Ghostbird Theatre Company
Ghostbird Theatre Company actors on stage
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Courtesy Ghostbird Theatre Company
Ghostbird Theatre Company follows co-founder Barry Cavin’s site-specific ethos, producing locally inspired and written plays performed in locations throughout Southwest Florida. The nomadic troupe performs in locales like Koreshan State Park and Fort Myers’ 1919 Langford-Kingston Home.
The COVID-19 pandemic was hard on the troupe, which hosts a handful of short-run productions each year, alongside the annual 24 Hour Festival, where thespians, artists, dancers, musicians and poets work through the night at Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center to create works inspired by prompts written by Barry. Like most grant-funded performing arts groups who survived the pandemic, Ghostbird’s return to business as usual wasn’t guaranteed. But, with productions like Artificial Genesis in May, we see a company that’s back in full force and facing the issues of the moment head-on, starting with the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the arts.
Like many contemporary creatives with tech-loving counterparts, Barry and his son, FGCU sophomore Emory, have been consumed by conversations about AI over the last year. As Emory dove headfirst into each new iteration of ChatGPT, the two debated the technology’s physical and existential merits and risks. “When we think about creating something, we think of ownership. We can lay claim to the thing that we’ve done, and if there are benefits to be reaped, then we get to reap them—we get to have some control over it,” Barry says. “With AI, there’s this fear: Who owns this? Who reaps the benefits? Who controls it? How is it controlled? Is it controllable?” These questions, he says, introduce an uncomfortable level of ambiguity for some. But ambiguity is his bread and butter. Working with his son, Barry set out on a controversial quest to create a play using AI. The story centers around two women completing a working model of AI in a dimly lit and seemingly desolate office building. As the story progresses, the question becomes clear: What would happen if AI took over the world?
With a script written almost entirely by GPT-3 Turbo and an opening score by Udio: AI Music Generator, Barry and the Ghostbird team face their fears of creative mortality live with their audience. The post-show talkbacks between the audience and cast pushed the hour mark after multiple performances of Artificial Genesis.
Now, Barry is readying himself for Ghostbird’s next season, talking with his fellow playwrights and ‘writers of plays’ (a term to assuage the title-averse), scribbling character descriptions and asking himself the big questions. He’s working on scripts about local frogs and a response to Artificial Genesis that explores a theoretical new artform through the knotted family and personal struggles of two AI prompt writers—tentatively titled The Prompters. Rehearsals begin soon, but the stories remain a mystery, even to the man with the pen. “I never leave something that I’ve written alone,” Barry says. “I will change it even after the final performance is done because I’m listening to the audience, still watching the actors, because I’m never really satisfied. That’s why I don’t think I’m a writer. It’s never right. It’s never good.”
Photography by Christina Bankson
Barry wrestles with tough questions onstage. In the recent Artificial Genesis, Ghostbird explored the physical and existential threats of artificial intelligence (AI) through a script written almost entirely by the emerging technology.