Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Toolkit
Midnight at the Algorithm & Blues
Practical pathways into satire, digital identity, public history, source-checking, performance, monuments, and the strange theatre of being watched.
Start Here
This Toolkit accompanies Gary Wright’s Midnight at the Algorithm & Blues. Use it with the Study Guide, after viewing the production, or as a stand-alone set of theatre, humanities, and media-literacy exercises.
Essential question: What changes when a story is shaped not only by the person telling it, but by the audience, the platform, the monument, and the stories people already expect to hear?
Facilitation with Care
The play includes intimate-partner abuse, coercion, strong language, alcohol use, sexual references, religious control, and historical material involving slavery, racism, and war. Activities should never require participants to disclose personal experience with abuse, religion, political conflict, family history, or online harassment.
- Offer observation, writing, speaking, drawing, and performance as equal participation pathways.
- Do not ask participants to recreate physical violence between Linzie and Boone.
- Separate critique of a character’s behavior from speculation about a participant’s relationships or beliefs.
- When researching history, label source type and point of view rather than treating disagreement as a contest of personalities.
Choose a Pathway
Theatre Classroom
- Perform the gap between public persona and private behavior.
- Test comic timing beside serious consequence.
- Turn a monument into a playable environment.
History / Public Humanities
- Compare monument language with primary sources.
- Study how historical interpretation changes over time.
- Distinguish commemoration from historical inquiry.
Media Literacy
- Examine how audience metrics shape creative decisions.
- Compare live and edited storytelling.
- Track the incentives behind a digital persona.
Writing and Design
- Create unreliable narrators.
- Stage historical correction without turning it into lecture.
- Use light, sound, captions, and objects to embody conflicting histories.
Activities
1 · Live, Edited, Algorithmic
Create a two-minute fictional story. Tell it three ways: live with no interruption; edited for maximum clarity; and redesigned to maximize clicks, retention, or comments.
Compare what each version rewards. Which version feels most truthful? Which feels most persuasive? Are those the same thing?
2 · The Persona Gap
Invent a creator with an online persona that differs from private life. Write five phrases the creator uses on camera and five thoughts the creator would never say on camera.
Stage a moment in which the two identities begin to leak into each other. No participant needs to use their own social-media identity.
3 · Clio’s Fact Check
Choose one historical claim from the play. Locate at least two reliable sources, preferably one institutional or primary-source collection and one independent scholarly or archival source.
Label the result: confirmed, contradicted, partly supported, disputed, or interpretive. Then ask the harder question: Why might the playwright want the claim in the scene even if a character is wrong?
4 · Julia Is Not Clio
Take one historical event and write two 150-word accounts: one by a person who loved the central figure, and one by a museum interpreter trying to acknowledge several perspectives.
Neither account may lie. Compare how selection and emphasis create different truths from accurate material.
5 · Read the Monument
Study photographs and official interpretation of General Grant National Memorial. Treat the building as a text.
- What does scale communicate?
- What words, names, objects, or images receive emphasis?
- Whose perspectives are physically present?
- What historical questions would require leaving the monument and consulting other sources?
6 · No Editing
Improvisers receive a topic and sixty seconds to prepare. They must then speak live for one minute without restarting. Afterward, they may create a carefully edited written version.
Compare spontaneity, vulnerability, accuracy, control, and performance. What does editing protect? What can it hide?
7 · What Does the Audience Reward?
Give fictional creators ten possible choices for an episode: nuance, conflict, apology, outrage, ambiguity, confession, spectacle, correction, repetition, or silence.
Assign imaginary metrics to the choices. Then ask: If the highest-performing choice conflicts with the creator’s values, what pressures follow?
8 · Correction Chain
Create a scene in which A corrects B, C corrects A, and D introduces evidence that changes all three accounts.
The exercise ends without a final verdict. Discuss why historical knowledge can become stronger without becoming final.
9 · Monument / Counter-Monument
Choose a historical figure or event. Design two public-memory objects: a traditional monument and a counter-monument that asks visitors to question, move, listen, or investigate.
Use sketching, collage, tactile materials, sound, text, or a written design statement.
10 · Comedy Temperature
Stage a short invented disagreement three ways: broad comedy, realistic tension, and a version that begins funny but changes temperature when harm becomes visible.
Identify the precise beat where laughter should stop helping the characters hide.
11 · The Blue Ending
Design the final shift into deep blue using at least three theatrical systems: light, sound, caption style, movement, scenic texture, or projection.
Your design should hold humor and the memory of war at the same time. Explain what the blue means without reducing it to one symbol.
12 · Who Gets the Last Word?
Write five possible final lines for a fictional historical comedy, each given to a different kind of speaker: historian, spouse, critic, witness, or the historical figure.
Discuss how the identity of the final speaker changes the audience’s sense of authority.
Source Lab: Grant in Layers
Build a small source packet using four kinds of material:
- National Park Service interpretation of General Grant National Memorial.
- A page from the Library of Congress Ulysses S. Grant Papers.
- NPS material on Reconstruction or Grant’s presidency.
- NPS material on slavery at White Haven or Julia Dent Grant’s life.
For each source, identify creator, purpose, date, intended audience, and what it contributes. Then write one paragraph beginning: “A monument can tell us…” and another beginning: “A monument cannot tell us…”
Writing Prompts
- Write a livestream in which a historical figure begins correcting the host in real time.
- Write a museum label that admits what the museum does not know.
- Write two versions of an apology: the version optimized for an audience and the version no one records.
- Create a “comments section” that functions as a Greek chorus without reproducing real online harassment.
- Write a monologue beginning: “I called myself History because…”
- Write a scene in which a spouse corrects a beloved family story while trying not to diminish the love inside it.
- Write a creator’s private response to a piece of content becoming popular for the wrong reason.
Directing Experiments
When the camera turns on
Stage the exact same physical action immediately before and immediately after a fictional livestream begins. Let the audience see the switch.
Who can see the ghost?
Experiment with sightlines and focus so that some characters respond to a presence others cannot perceive. Avoid relying only on literal invisibility.
The rules of the room
Stage Julia’s prohibitions as comedy, menace, maternal scolding, and theatrical game. Which version makes the later reveal most interesting?
Grant arrives late
Explore what happens if the historical figure with the biggest public reputation enters only after other people have spent the play arguing about him.
Multiple Ways to Participate
- Provide character maps and a simple historical timeline in advance.
- Identify when the action is occurring on camera, off camera, or in supernatural space.
- Use captions not only for dialogue but to clarify livestream comments, sound cues, or shifts in media layer.
- Describe essential visual information, especially objects, costume transformations, projected media, and the spatial relationship of crypt and viewing gallery.
- Offer research activities in spoken, written, visual, tactile, or collaborative formats.
- Do not require participants to reenact intimate-partner violence, sexual situations, religious trauma, or online humiliation.
Closing Reflection
Invite participants to complete one sentence in any medium:
- A story changed when…
- A correction that mattered was…
- A performance I noticed was…
- A source I would trust for one thing, but not another, is…
- A question the play refuses to settle is…
Continue Exploring
This Toolkit uses the play as a starting point for inquiry. It does not ask participants to adopt one interpretation of Grant, Julia, digital culture, monuments, or the political ideas raised by the play. It asks them to make evidence, source, performance, and point of view visible.