What Happens When You Let Creative Artists Run the Library After Dark?
What happens when you let creative artists run the library after dark? In Los Angeles, quite a bit of collaborative storytelling occurs.
For the first time ever, the Los Angeles Public Library opened their doors to ticketed guests after hours for a boisterous night filling the halls, atriums, and stacks with art and artists. Around one corner you could find live figure drawing, another area had the legendary Bob Baker Marionette Theater puppeteers; and in the main rotunda, the Urban Voices Project filled the dome with song. But if you ventured into the Arts and Recreation section, you would find yourself amidst a throng of denim-clad utility workers in hard hats and high-viz vests shuttling guests through the stacks while shouting joyfully, “I HAVE AN IDEA!”
Welcome. You are officially in the middle of a regular worknight for the Narrative Treatment Plant, a fictitious municipal department responsible for helping the library take unprocessed ideas and turn them into stories.
The Library Foundation of Los Angeles reached out to us to create a unique interactive experience for their first time hosting the Night at the Library event at the Los Angeles Public Library. Besides our deep love for the library and all the resources it provides across the city, we loved the opportunity to be very loud in the library.
You can’t tell us that there’s never been a point in your life where you haven’t wanted to be loud in a library. Let us introduce you to the Narrative Treatment Plant! A playful, participatory, performance piece where an after hours crew assists library patrons in processing uncovered ideas into stories. Our inspiration for the experience was creating as many opportunities to gleefully get loud in the stacks, while making something ‘fun to play and fun to watch.’
After a brief onboarding, a Narrative Treatment Plant worker guided you through the bookshelves to uncover an idea kernel, which you brought down into our main processing floor. Once that idea arrived, we reimagined familiar games into absurd treatment processes that returned narrative chunks like axioms, characters, and plot twists.
For example, what looks like Jenga, is actually “Extraction and sedimentation” treated with the safety and seriousness of retrieving nuclear fuel rods, to reveal a potential character for our ongoing narrative.
Among our 22 performers and crewpeople were three writers we roped into the chaos. Their job was to take all of the processed ideas from patrons and slot them into a “perpetual narrative document” being written live for the entire four-hour duration of the event. All the while, guests continued to flood them with input delivered to the writers.
Enter Sam Alper, Drew Paryzer and Megan Tabaque.
We chose them because of their interest in non-traditional shapes of writing—interactivity, site-specific, and experimental; plus, they are all writers that are familiar with immersive theater and were happy to jump at the challenge of writing live at a big party of book lovers. We even brought in a nice mechanical keyboard to add that visceral clickety-clackety sound during the duration of their writing shift.
“I really responded to Andy and Jeff’s original concepting language of a sewage treatment plant meets the creative process, because that is what writing can sometimes feel like,” said Megan, playwright and professor of playwriting, screenwriting, acting at UC Riverside. “It’s like sorting through a lot of really substantial mental sludge for something that doesn’t stink. The Narrative Treatment Plant takes all the stink out of the metaphor though—by personifying the treatment of ideas in a playful, improvised, and interactive series of ‘treatments’ for guests’ ideas.“
When we originally designed the experience, we asked our writers how long they felt like they could write live, since we were going to be running the full four hours of the event. We settled on 45-minute shifts.
“Each writing session was very different, as the pace and nature of the inputs changed,” said Sam, writer for Sugar on Apple TV+, “I had an extreme experience of time-blindness. I thought it had only been 10 minutes when someone tapped me at the end of my 45-minute session.”
In-person, experiential entertainment of any kind, especially with guest participation, creates exciting responsive and unexpected results. In our work through Mister & Mischief, we set out to create an experience that folks would enjoy watching (our “treatment processes”), but we did not expect how much patrons would get a kick out of watching Megan, Drew, and Sam clack away at the keyboard for hours.
“There was a conceit we worked in at the last minute, where [each writer] would write five final words at the end of each shift, and everyone present was directed to watch the [projected narrative] as we wrote out this final bit of text,” said Drew, playwright/experience designer for Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart and affiliated writer at Playwrights’ Center. “I was surprised at how nerve-wracking this was! It made me reflect on the multitude of intentions and pressures and hopes that all writers (regardless of whether they’re actively being watched) have to tackle every time they try to write a good sentence.”
Each changeover of the writers’ shift was also met with a “moment of mirth” from the whole crowd: guests, performers, and on-lookers.
The Narrative Treatment Plant doesn’t exist without their workplace—the library. Getting to actively, joyously, and loudly celebrate this revered institution was such a privilege.
People adore the library so it’s no wonder this event sold out. The library-loving public couldn’t wait for the chance to go party in a place that feels hallowed, yet comfortable; experience it filled with performances and music and silliness.
“I can trace my path as a human through the time I’ve [spent] in libraries in Ft. Collins, Denver, Bronxville, Brooklyn, Austin, and now Los Angeles,” said Drew.
“Libraries are everything,” said Megan, “That meme that’s going around that reminds us that libraries are the last bastion of democracy really guts me with how true that feels right now. I read my first chapter books at the library, I took lessons in improv and crafts at the library, I’ve made theater in libraries, I’ve witnessed theatre in libraries, I’ve seen people weep, and laugh, and run, and contemplate, and turn their lives around in libraries.”
This is the second experiential installation that we’ve created for the Los Angeles Public Library and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Andy was previously Creator-in-Residence for LAPL in 2024 and her installations, under the title The Bureau of Nooks and Crannies, are still available at branches around the LAPL network. As much fun as it is to don a hard-hat and treat the stacks like a factory floor, it’s absolutely intentional that we likened the library to an essential municipal utility, especially one that requires daily maintenance and care and knowledge.
We’d love to bring the Narrative Treatment Plant to other library institutions and to engage the library fans all over the planet. We were asked to bring something unique to Night at the Library, but what we designed wasn’t something to bring—it was merely a service designed to focus and uncover the ideas that are already present when you put people in a place that brings them joy and surrounds them with words… and let them be as loud as they’d like.
