DETOURS began with a strong theatrical promise and a practical problem:

How do you make one walking theatrical event out of six separately written site-specific pieces, a campus-wide route, two tour groups, and a seventh script that needs to hold the whole thing together?

The premise intrigued those who signed on to the project: Two student tour guides, working under the slightly dubious authority of a fictional historical society, try to lead audiences across the Willamette University campus. They are supposed to be giving a historical tour. Instead, they keep finding themselves in the wrong places, encountering the wrong people, and pulling the audience into a series of short theatrical interruptions to form one big, fun misadventure.

The producing idea came from Ciji Guerin and Elizabeth Rothan. The structure contained familiar elements by then for Northwest Theatre Workshop: multiple playwrights, multiple directors, multiple short pieces, one larger event encompassing it, and an audience moving through a nontraditional performance space. But DETOURS was not simply Fragments on a college campus, and it was not simply Scenes of the Season outdoors.

It was the company’s third major test of a question NWTW has been circling for more than a year. What kind of process actually helps playwrights, directors, actors, and audiences make something meaningful together when theatre leaves the theatre?

Ambitions grew wider with the offbeat concept. This project would not only include musicals and plays like the company’s previous two productions, but also include a dance piece, buskers, and a puppet show—all integrated into one, cohesive theatrical expereince.

By the time DETOURS reached audiences, the participants found they had more than a simple success story on their hands. They had worked through a process rich with challenges—and discoveries.

The other half struggled because they tried—in writing, or directing, or both—to force the site into a proscenium-style arrangement. The campus became a backdrop. The audience became a seated crowd without seats. The creators of the pieces taking that approach essentially asked the space to behave like a conventional theatre instead of asking what the space itself made possible.

“The site needs to have a reason to be used,” director Matt Pavik said. “Finding a balance is both tricky and fun.”

A central lesson of DETOURS was a recognition that each site was not simply unusual—it had to be necessary.

Process Shift

Fragments began with artists walking into Hopewell Hub, a colorful setting near Salem, before the pieces existed. Teams formed through conversation and instinct. Playwrights, directors, actors, composers, and other artists explored porches, ponds, gardens, an art studio, a yome, and a mushroom wall as their sites. They noticed objects ranging from a fuel tank to a shuffleboard, and all the odd textures of the place. For each team, the site came first. The scripts came later.

The Fragments process gave artists time to listen. It asked them to devise in collaboration with place, object, architecture, memory, and one another. The process was messy, slow, sometimes frustrating, and often uneven. It also gave several teams the room to discover material they could not have invented alone.

“Devising, for me, is about trust,” playwright Nancy Campbell said after Fragments.

That sense of trust was not a sentimental reflection, but a functional one. The strongest teams in that project trusted the site, the ensemble, and the feedback of fellow artists enough to keep investigating what the work wanted to become.

Scenes of the Season was different. It was fast, prompt-driven, and built around a clear producing idea of short holiday pieces set inside Rose City Book Pub, each based on a familiar holiday story with a twist. It was accessible, social, and audience-friendly. It sold out. It proved NWTW could create a popular event quickly in a working business.

But it also revealed the limits of compression. The assignment produced fun, tight, often skit-adjacent pieces. As theatre, some worked well. Others exposed the difficulty of building a full dramatic arc inside no more than seven minutes, especially when writers were trying to retell or subvert well-known stories in miniature.

The format reinforced the idea that any pizzazz needs to be grounded in story and character. “The spectacle doesn’t matter unless you make it matter,” playwright Zella Selvoy-Devan said after Scenes of the Season. 

With DETOURS, the company tried something between the two other production models. The playwrights were not left to devise freely from a site they chose, as in Fragments. They were assigned sites. They also had to participate in regular script meetings where the full team of playwrights worked together to create a cohesive script. This was a major structural difference.

The process gave the whole show more unity than either earlier model. The connective tour guide script could respond to the individual scripts. The individual scripts could be adjusted to serve the full route. The writers were not simply handing in separate pieces to be stitched together later. They had to think collectively about rhythm, handoffs, interruptions, escalation, tone, and the logic of the journey.

That collective connection was the breakthrough, but it was also an area of stress.

A playwright writing for DETOURS had to solve several riddles at once. The piece had to work as a short play. It had to serve the larger premise of a tour gone wrong. It had to justify its site. It had to be clear to an audience that had just walked across campus, and would soon walk again. It had to make room for the bodies of those audience members, as well as weather, noise, sight lines, timing, and attention span. The task was even more daunting for the organizers.

“It’s a puzzle I have to solve,” Guerin said.

The more “givens” there are at the outset, the harder the puzzle becomes. DETOURS had many givens: assigned sites, a route, two tour groups, time limits, outdoor conditions, multiple directors, multiple playwrights, a tour guide saga, a security guard thread, and the need to land at a shared ending.

The creator of a conventional short play can afford to care mostly about character, action, and language. The creator of a DETOURS vignette had to care about where the audience stood, what they could see, what they had just experienced, how tired they were, how far they had walked, and whether they felt safe enough to give attention to the story.

The hidden rigor of site-specific work stems from the fact that the site itself is never neutral.

Space as a Driving Force

The strongest DETOURS pieces showed that those who created them understood the assignment at the level of relationship—not just the relationship between characters, but the relationship between audience and space.

Jack Harvison, an actor in DETOURS, recognized this aspect early in the process: “When a story is presented in a place that is natural for the story being told, it can be easier for audiences to step into the world of the actors, as they are already standing in it.”

“When a story is presented in a place that is natural for the story being told, it can be easier for audiences to step into the world of the actors, as they are already standing in it.”

The successful pieces made the audience feel the scene could only happen right where it arose, and nowhere else.

In the pieces where the sense of space was strong, campus life did not decorate the action. It infiltrated the action. Properties of the sites and their immediate surroundings—such as a creek, a garden, a courtyard, a pathway, or a landmark—as well as activity in those places, such as an interruption of demonstrators by the physical act of moving through the space, became part of the drama. The strongest teams understood that the audience was not watching from a protected frame. The audience was implicated by proximity.

Selvoy-Devan identified the craft challenge from the playwright’s side. “I think setting is something I, as a playwright, naturally tend to neglect,” she said. But when the other aspects of the piece come from setting, “it becomes much harder to ignore.”

A theatre building allows writers to avoid certain questions. A black box or proscenium can absorb almost anything. The room “agrees” to become wherever the play says it is. But an actual campus as a setting does not make that agreement. A campus has its own history, scale, distractions, traffic patterns, architecture, and emotional associations. It does not disappear because the script starts.

Leveraging this perspective was part of the what made the process interesting. Actor Jamie Kushnick described the generative advantage of the work. “When the space already has a personality of its own, you have to be more precise with what kind of work that space needs to host.”

Precision became a dividing line. Some teams let the space tell them what kind of theatrical relationship it could hold. Others seemed to decide what scene they wanted, then place it in the assigned location. That second approach may work in a stationary indoor theatre, but it weakens in an outdoor walking theatrical event.

Cohesion as Craft, Not Glue

The largest achievement of DETOURS was not any single vignette. It was the way the show held together.

In Fragments, cohesion came from a shared site and a shared process. All the teams began inside Hopewell Hub, and even when the pieces varied wildly in tone, they felt “of” the same environment. In Scenes of the Season, cohesion came late in the process through music, placement, pub atmosphere, and the holiday frame. The individual pieces had a shared production premise, but the show-level structure had to wrap around them after-the-fact.

DETOURS took a different route. It built cohesion into the writing process.

The playwrights were assigned sites, but they were also required to attend regular script meetings. That meant the work of integration did not fall only to production after the scripts were finished. The writers had to participate in the making of the whole. They had to hear how their pieces sat beside one another, think about how tone carried across the route, and shape how the tour guide saga could move the audience from one theatrical reality to the next.

The attention to cohesion gave DETOURS its strongest formal advantage over both earlier shows.

Rothan, directing the tour guide misadventures, became part of the mechanism that connected the six vignettes. Her role was structural. She had to help guide the actors who guided the audience, while also keeping the show’s comic disorder from becoming actual disorder.

To rise to this challenge, she depended on everyone working together closely. “I deeply value the collaborative process between actors and playwrights,” Rothan said.

That collaboration had to operate at two levels. Each vignette needed its own internal collaboration among playwright, director, actors, and designers. But DETOURS also required macro-collaboration: the relationship among all the vignettes, the tour guide story, the production team, and the route itself.

The work-in-progress run revealed difficulties. Most teams had rehearsed separately. The campus route forced them into relation. Tour guides and security guards had to move audience groups from site to site. Production management tracked timing, departures, arrivals, delays, heat, and readiness. The process became less like a rehearsal and more like coordinating moving parts across a living map.

The coordination is where DETOURS presented a tougher challenge than Scenes of the Season structurally. In Scenes, the pub unified the event because everything happened in one social container. In DETOURS, the container kept changing. The tour guide saga had to create the container anew at every stop.

Without the script meetings, DETOURS could easily have become six unrelated outdoor scenes interrupted by walking. Instead, the event developed a show-level architecture.

The tour guides were not only hosts, but also the audience’s point of identification. In their story, encounters with a security guard were designed to complicate matters on the tour. The security guard aspect was not just a recurring gag; it helped to extend the show’s comic logic. The route was not just logistics; it connected intrinsically to the narrative.

That kind of integration is hard to achieve, but DETOURS achieved more of it than either Fragments or Scenes of the Season. It also proved that integration alone does not guarantee equal artistic quality across all of its individual pieces. A cohesive evening can still contain uneven parts.

The distinction was not about talent. The people involved were capable artists. The distinction was whether they understood the form.

The artists who created the strongest work treated the assigned site as a dramaturgical fact. They asked what kind of scene the space wanted, what kind of audience relationship the space created, and what kind of action would become more interesting because it happened there.

The artists who struggled treated the site as a location label. Their scenes contained characters, humor, ideas, conflict, and language, but the space did not transform the event. Instead of using the audience’s presence, distance, angle, and movement, the work often seemed to wish for a theatre building that was not there.

The experience pointed to the difference between site-specific theatre and outdoor theatre.

Director Jeffrey Puukka pointed out that outdoor, site-specific work has an “inspiring nature,” but a theatre building is designed for performers and audiences. That difference makes theatre in a building more accessible and straightforward, and site-specific work challenging.

Site-specific work is not automatically better. It is harder to control, harder to hear, harder to see, harder to stage, and harder to make accessible.

But the answer cannot be to drag the proscenium into the open air. If the site makes the work harder, the work has to become more specific, not more conventional.

“Site-inspired work demands a different physical and emotional presence” than conventional theatrical spaces, actor Leah Cohn said. The site-inspired form asks everyone to change: writer, director, actor, designer, stage manager, and audience.

The teams that changed with the form made the stronger work.

Audience Dynamics

One of the most surprising discoveries of DETOURS came not from the scripts, but from the audience.

At Fragments, audience members wanted to be in small groups. They often shifted into different groups than the ones they began with, prefering relatively smaller assemblages. Seven people seemed to be the ideal number.

The setting helped explain why. Fragments was performed in small spaces within a small artist hub. The environment was intimate. The scale invited closeness. Small groups felt special, manageable, and safe.

DETOURS produced the opposite behavior. Audiences wanted to be in the largest groups possible. Fifteen seemed to be the ideal number.

The difference reveals how deeply audience behavior is shaped by space.

At Hopewell Hub, the audience was moving through a contained world. Even when the route shifted from place to place, the environment felt contained. The audience could break into smaller groups because the overall space created enough intimacy and safety.

Willamette University was different. DETOURS unfolded across a sprawling campus. The audience was walking farther, across more exposed and varied terrain, with longer transitions, and a stronger sense of public space. In that context, the small-group intimacy that worked for Fragments did not feel ideal; it felt vulnerable.

The audience chose safety in numbers.

The distinction does not mean audience members were afraid in any dramatic sense. But, organically, they understood the environment. A large group makes a campus tour feel official. A small group on a sprawling campus can feel uncertain, exposed, or lost. The audience wanted the social confirmation of being part of a larger crowd.

The audience behavior provided one of the most useful discoveries from DETOURS. Company members realized they cannot assume that immersive audiences always want intimacy. Sometimes they want proximity. Sometimes they want privacy. Sometimes they want the best view. Sometimes they want the smallest group because the environment tells them they are venturing to intimate spaces. Sometimes they want the largest group because the environment tells them larger is safer.

A site-specific process has to account for the differences before the audience arrives. The audience relationship should not be an afterthought, but part of the writing.

Roy Arauz, a photographer for DETOURS who also is a director, spoke of the appeal of immersive theatrical approaches. “People don’t want to sit in a dark room and be passive spectators.”

The experience of DETOURS complicates that observation, however. Audiences may not want passivity, but they do want orientation. They want to know how to behave, where to stand, what kind of risk they are being asked to take, and whether the event will protect them even while it surprises them.

DETOURS asked audiences to walk, watch, adjust, listen, follow, and participate socially. They accepted that invitation most confidently when they were in a group large enough to feel like a temporary community.

Conclusions on the Path

DETOURS demonstrated that NWTW can build a more integrated multi-play structure when playwrights are brought into the cohesion process early and consistently. Assigning sites, requiring regular script meetings, and building a show-level story around the individual pieces created a stronger whole-show architecture than the company had achieved in its previous two experiments.

It also proved that not every artist who can write or direct a strong short play can automatically make strong site-specific work. Guidance is essential.

From its Fragments production, the company found success by encouraging teams to allow the sites influence the story before the script solidified. From Scenes of the Season, NWTW drew inspiration from the social pleasure and accessibility of an event people could immediately understand. From DETOURS it learned the importance of script meetings, show-level integration, and an insistence that the larger frame be developed alongside the individual pieces instead of after them.

But the company would also be wise to be more strict. For future site-specific processes, it should ask every writer and director the hard question early: Why must this piece happen here?

A campus makes people move differently than a pub. A pub makes people listen differently than an art studio. A small artist hub makes people cluster differently than a university campus. A courtyard, creek, lobby, bridge, plaza, or Japanese garden does not merely hold the play. It teaches the audience what kind of event they are in.

The best site-specific theatre notices that teaching and uses it.

DETOURS was not as artistically even as Fragments, but it was more structurally integrated. It was less immediately contained than Scenes of the Season, and deeper in its site demands.

A weaker process would have produced a charming walking show and stopped there. But DETOURS showed that NWTW’s artists can make high-quality site-specific work when the process forces them to write for the space, the audience, and whole-show cohesion at the same time. It also showed that artists need clearer expectations, stronger site-specific criteria, and more rigorous early intervention when a piece begins drifting back toward conventional staging habits.