Last Saturday, I helped produce a live sketch comedy show over Zoom with Quicksand Club. We had put on a stage show in February, before The Germs ruined stages and everything else. Suddenly, we knew a bunch of talented actors who were rehearsed and memorized, and audiences who had all their live performances canceled. Why not translate some sketches to an online format and do it live? It was (and still is) a great time to try doing a for-real show over the Internet.

And it worked! It took some trial and error but we ended up with most of what we wanted for our 30-minute performance. For anyone who wants to try their hand at live multi-person theater over the Internet, here’s what we learned:

Pipe Zoom To YouTube Live

If you do your show for free, you should probably do it as a Zoom meeting, and stream that meeting to YouTube Live where your audience will see it.

The two main problems we anticipated were:

  • Lag is bad for theater. It is particularly bad for comedy.

  • Audience members shouldn’t be able to talk. We needed a system that allowed for two groups of users: performers and audience. The audience shouldn’t be able to turn on their cameras or microphones.

It turned out that my memory of videoconference software was out of date: Zoom is high-quality and low-latency, so lag wasn’t going to kill the vibe. Once we realized that, we considered doing the show as a Zoom webinar to solve the actor/audience problem, but it costs money. Piping our Zoom meeting to YouTube Live was free and worked great. There is a 20-second delay from the Zoom meeting to YouTube, but that delay doesn’t show up for the actors, and that’s the important part.

Lag will probably be worse if any of your actors are physically distant. My guess is that cross-country theater will be much more challenging if you’re doing a show where timing is important.

Get Streaming Permission In Advance

Before you stream on YouTube Live for the first time, you have to ask YouTube for permission. They say it takes 24 hours but it might take waaay longer or maybe they’ll just forget about you. Start the process well in advance and keep an eye on it. It took 24 hours for us, but we didn’t get an email or anything.

Use The Right Zoom Settings

Zoom is meant for meetings, so it’s aggressive about cutting out background noise and cross-talk. It makes sound effects and rapid-fire dialog sound like chopped garbage. Make it better by having every performer tweak these settings in the app that runs on their computer:

  1. Have everyone upgrade to the latest version of Zoom. The important settings don’t exist in older versions.

  2. In the preferences, go to Audio and click Advanced. Find the dropdowns that say Suppress Persistent Background Noise and Suppress Intermittent Background Noise. Set them both to Disable. That’s right, turn ’em off.

  3. In the Video preferences, check the box labeled Hide Non-Video Participants so that people disappear when their video is turned off.

  4. Probably also want to uncheck Enable HD and Touch Up My Appearance unless your computer and internet are very fast.

The Zoom app doesn’t have these options on phones and tablets. You should probably avoid those devices if possible, even though their mics and cameras are usually much better than the ones in laptops.

Sound Effects

Our first pass at sound effects was to play them on a phone, and let the computer mic pick up the phone sound and pass it to Zoom. This results in terrible audio quality. Instead, use BlackHole. BlackHole is an open-source utility that creates an input option and output option on your Mac. Anything that gets piped to Input gets sent to Output and vice versa.

So, our stage manager cued up sounds in QLab and told QLab to pipe sounds to BlackHole, instead of piping them to laptop speakers as it normally would. Then, she told Zoom to accept audio input from BlackHole, instead of from a microphone. Our sounds went from QLab directly to the Zoom meeting, and they arrived in pristine condition. More on BlackHole here. There is apparently a similar utility for Windows called JACK.

Have a Dedicated Tech Person

You’ll want a tech person to run sound effects, start/stop the stream, and fix any funky things that pop up. The tech person should be host or co-host of the meeting. As the host, they can turn actors’ cameras off in case an actor can’t do it on their own, but they can’t turn a camera on. Actors must always turn their own cameras on. Also, when a tech turns an actor’s camera off, they need to immediately click “Ask To Turn Video On” for that actor so that the actor can turn their video back on at their next entrance.

Don’t Play Copyrighted Music

YouTube monitors streams for copyrighted material and will cut off your stream in mid-performance if it detects the faintest infinitesimal quantum of no-no music. During our dress rehearsal, my neighbor was playing reggae. I could hear it faintly. Other actors couldn’t hear it at all. But YouTube’s cranky algorithms caught a psychic whiff of naughty music and abruptly ended our test stream. It was colossally stupid. But I’m over it now, really. It’s fine.

There’s…probably no way to prevent someone from driving past your place blasting Desmond Dekker. It’s a risk. But if you have copyrighted music (or video footage or anything) as part of your show, it’s almost certain you’ll get cut off. YouTube has an official library of free music and sound effects you can use without worry.

I had a hunch that Twitch might be a better platform than YouTube because of issues like this, but I signed up for an account and looked for some kind of “Create A Video” button akin to YouTube’s “GO LIVE” button. I searched for 15 minutes and came up empty. The experience made me feel old. So I have no idea if Twitch would be better for this or not.

Actors: Look At The Camera

When actors are talking to eachother, they should look at the camera instead of at the other actors on their screen. For some ineffable theater-magic reason, it looks better. It feels more real, even though no one actually looks at the camera in a Zoom meeting. Try it during rehearsal and see what you think.

Pad Text For Interruptions

While lag wasn’t a big problem, we needed to finesse situations where one character interrupts another. Assume that interruptions won’t happen precisely when you’d like them to, and make sure actors have stuff to say after the interruption is supposed to happen.

Go Forth Stay Home And Make Theater

If you make live, scripted theater on stages, I hope you’ll consider experimenting with it online as well. The SF Neo-Futurists, in particular, are pushing digital/theatrical boundaries with their ongoing World Wide Wrench show, but I’m sure there are others. Let me know! If you have questions about any of this, please ask. I’m not an expert but, well, I’ve got lots of time to talk.