The renaissance ofFallout 76has been going strong since Amazon’s streaming seriesFalloutwas a smash success in April. Likewise, virtual theatre has been a growing art in the past decade, and one of the latest examples of how the art form has matured has beenFallout 76’s Wasteland Theatre Company, which brings classic plays to life in post-nuclear Appalachia. Like Anne Washburn’sMr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, the works of the past take on a new context after the apocalypse for the company, which has before performed adaptations ofAlice in WonderlandandCoriolanus.
Acting artistic director of Wasteland Theatre, Bramadew (real name Jonathan Thomas) spoke with Game Rant about the company’s recent performance ofRichard III, and how Wasteland Theatre has given him a crowning achievement of his 15 years working in real-world theatrical productions.The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Exit, Pursued by Yao Guai
Q: Can you start by introducing yourself?
Thomas:Yes. My name is Jonathan Thomas, better known as Brahmadew in theFalloutcommunity; I have been part of the Wasteland Theatre Company since the beginning of 2022, and I’m now the acting artistic director. I have a degree in theatre from the University of Tennessee. I worked in New York theatre–mostly technical director stuff–for about seven years, and now I’m a digital nomad living in Utah.
Q: What made you chooseRichard III—orRichard the Ghoul, as you call it—as your most recent play?
Thomas:I think theFalloutshow played a lot of inspiration in that with the ghoul character, and there were a lot of similarities between that character and Richard; them both being kind of ostracized for their appearance and their overall demeanor in a lot of ways. I’ve doneRichard IIIin the real world, and it’s a really fun play to me, real tongue-in-cheek. A lot of people think it’s very serious, but it’s a lot of dark comedy. It’s almost likethe invention of dark comedy, I think.
We just thought that it would be another great Shakespeare show to introduce to the community and to people who had never seen Shakespeare. A lot of the time we get people in the chat, or who stumble upon the plays on the server, and they say, “Oh, I’ve never even watched a real play in my life.” It just seemed like a good opportunity to open up to people who had never experienced that.
Q: What are some of the changes you made adapting the script?
Thomas:Richard’s disfigurement. We changed that to a ghoul because that’s a very common ailment that you’ll run across in the wasteland. There are feral and non-feral ghoul, and the non-feral ones have found their way to integrate themselves back into the society that is growing and rebuilding. Having Richard, who historically had scoliosis and would have been thought of as less of a person in the time, and changing that to a ghoul was just so easy, and it just fit inside the universe.
We’ve made some line changes to make it more in tune withFallout; you know, the opening line of the play is “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York,” and we changed it to “Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of a [expletive].” We were also able to integrate the locale—we had taken some inspiration fromFallout 1and2, and then also the show.Shady Sands is where most of the actionin the show takes place, and that was also a key location inFallout 1and2, and then also adding in some cowboy flair.
One of the more fun things I think that we did is that every time a character dies, we try to come up with aFallout-style way to kill them. If you are familiar withTheWinter’s Tale, there’s that historic stage direction of “Exit, pursued by a bear.” When we had Clarence killed off, he’s having this philosophical debate with these two assassins on why their actions are not warranted, and then in the end, one of the assassins just is like, “I can’t. I’m done with this,” and he ends up killing him. In the play, he’s just stabbed in the back or something.
We thought it would be fun to take an asset from the game and incorporate it into the death. There’s a bed that you may learn to make, and it’s a giant Venus flytrap. When you enter the bed to sleep, it just eats you whole. We put that in there to have Clarence eaten by a Venus flytrap, and we thought that was kind of a quirky reference. Also, I thought it was a little bit of an homage to, “Exit, pursued by a bear.”
One moreFalloutthing that I can think of: Buckingham has spent his whole time within the play ingratiating himself to Richard, trying to show Richard that he’s on his side, and then Richard’s paranoia ultimately drives him to believe that Buckingham is actually going against him, working against him, and is not as faithful as he is claiming to be. There’s a scene where Buckingham is being led to his death, and he has this monologue of “I should have listened to everyone that was warning me,” you know, all the traditional things that you would say once you’re about to be murdered by somebody you trusted.
We changed his death to do an homage toFallout: New Vegas. In the beginning ofNew Vegas, you’re being told the story of what’s happening in the wasteland, and it opens up with your characterbeing shot in the head by the late, great Matthew Perry. Benny/Matthew Perry’s line is “The truth is, kid, the game was rigged from the start,” and he shoots you. We put that in there. He’s like, the executioner after the monologue of Buckingham, going like, “I can’t believe that all these things happened. And oh, the prophecies were true. How am I such a fool?” The executioner goes, “Truth is, Buckingham, the game was rigged from the start.”
We’ll also change animal names to match names of the in-game animals, like cows are Brahmin now, or like mole rats, you know, silly things like that. We also did a little Michael Jackson and Alien Ant Farm reference in Act 1 Part 3. Annie, who is married to one of Richard’s brothers, is standing over her dead husband, and mourning his loss. Then we just had a little ‘Smooth Criminal’ reference in there—I came in, and I’m like, “Annie, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Annie?”
We try to include manyFalloutreferences and change things to make it fit inside the lore and universe of the world, but we’ll also pull from other pop culture things that try to bridge the gap for people that have not watched a Shakespeare play before or seen a live theatre performance at all. If you can add those pop culture references that they are familiar with, it just makes it all seem a little bit more familiar and makes them maybe more accepting of the medium in general.
Q: What’s the reception toRichard the Ghoulbeen like?
Thomas:I feel really good about the reception from it. We’ve been mentioned in the Johns Hopkins Shakespeare journal a couple of months ago, and right after we live-streamed it on Twitch. The editor put out a tweet—anybody who wants to write a review about this, get in contact with me, and we’ll set it up—and somebody volunteered to write a review about us, and they’ve reached out to me already. That, in itself, is huge for us because that’s one of the largest and most esteemed Shakespeare publications in the world. The idea that they’re even paying any attention to us makes us all just feel amazing.
We have a lot of support from the community in itself; other live streamers, people that make podcasts or make fan fiction or whatever. And they’re all super supportive. They tune into the live streams, they’ll even try to get on the server and watch it in person if they can. We have felt the love from the community and people that are aware of us and we’re highly grateful for it.
Q: The first time we spoke with Wasteland Theatre, you had just performedAlice in the Wasteland. How did preparing and performingRichard the Ghoulcompare to that?
Thomas:It was more difficult.Alice in the Wastelandwas super fun, and it’s a more straightforward story. There’s no nuance. There’s no subtleness to the words or what the intention of the actor or the character is. I feel like that one was more of a strain on our set designer because she created this amazing set that was trying to mimic a storybook, having these six different little stages that we panned to.
Richard’s a hard play not because it asks for theatrical effects. There’s no bear chasing you off stage or anything like that, but the text and the conversations with the characters are so nuanced, and there’s many times that Richard himself is saying one thing, but he completely means a different thing, and just being a conniving, backstabbing kind of character.
Then for the characters and the actors that are not playing Richard, we kind of looked at the play as like, “Everybody knows what he’s doing, but they are just trying to bide their time to figure out how to stop him, but nobody can just do it quick enough.” Just the end scene in itself is so weird because it’s this dude who comes to a grieving widow and then essentially tells her, “Yeah, I killed your husband, but don’t you want to really marry me?”
It’s such a weird emotional roller coaster within just a couple of pages. It’s really hard to pull off and convey in a way that an audience is going to understand that like, “Oh, this guy’s not a good guy. She is being forced.” There’s all these layers, and it’s like an onion. What he says is on the outside, but then what he really means, and what’s really going on within the scene is deep down towards the center.
Difficulties with doing the play? It’s a large play. There are a lot of different characters and a lot of the time we will cut characters or condense two characters together that maybe are always on stage together. Our company in itself is not super big. I think for this, we had a total of 12 people that were working on it, and there were at least three or four people that had to play at least four different characters, so lots of quick changes, which you would think, in a virtual setting, wouldn’t be too difficult, but there’s still timing and working with all the blocking.
There were a bunch of times when a character dies and we actually have the actor die in the game. It looks nicer than just running off stage because there’s not a way that you can really fake death, other than just having another player character kill you. There is so much double casting that somebody might die on stage, and then they have to come back on stage within 20 seconds or something, so you have to really get down that muscle memory of seeing that your characters died, respawning, getting back to the stage, and then getting into your new costume in time to still make it for your cue.
There area lot of quirks with doing plays in the medium that we dobecause we’re not only having to work towards our actions and stuff but we also have to make sure that the server itself is gonna work with us. I think there were three or four times that somebody blue-screened, or their game crashed in the middle of the play, so you’re having to help people get back quicker.
We’ll be on the same teams, so if you’re on a team with a person you can get back onto that server quickly if your game does crash. We’re doing logistics: these people can be on teams, and these people can’t be on a team because they are gonna have to end up fighting each other, and there’s just a lot of things we have to take into consideration for doing the play.
Drawing Support from the FalloutIP
Q: Other than the centering of a ghoul as a focal character, how has the Amazon streaming show influenced your work?
Thomas:The Ghoul was definitely a huge inspiration. One thing that I did forget, we did actually take another reference from the show in the opening. You know, in the first episode the protagonist, she’s still in the vault. She’s having that conversation with the guy, and he’s like “Wasn’t it great when we had romantic relations or whatnot?” Then she says, “Having sex with your cousin is not a sustainable path to keeping the vault alive.” We took that to put in the play because Richard is literally marrying his cousin in the play.
I think that the show itself, other than those instances, didn’t really influence the play so much. I am excited about how they took the series and they said, “We’re not rewriting the lore, we’re adding to the lore.” So I guess you could say that also the inclusion of Shady Sands because there was a question of what actually happened to that place after the events ofFallout 1and2and the show. I like how the show has only added to the lore—they really hadn’t changed anything, so then that’s only going to open up possibilities for avenues that we could take to mesh Shakespeare andFalloutlore in general.
Q: There’s been a renewed interest in76in part because of the show and in part because of some of the updates that have happened. Has that had any impact on what you do?
Thomas:I know I’ve had friends that had picked up the game, as in people that I’ve met within the game. I mean, obviously it brings more eyes to us because once you get in, it seems if you playFallout 76and then you enjoy it, you start looking for other media about it, whether that be a podcast, like the Chad Fallout podcast, or any of the live streams. Joining a community is a large aspect of the game. I feel like it is finding your niche inside of the game and your little community that you can conquer and rebuild the wasteland in.
I feel like our live streams only are going up, and I can only attribute that partly to more players coming in because, for a long time, it was very stagnant in growth. It was like it was all just these people that loveFallout 76and, of course, we’re all intertwined in each other’s communities, and we’re aware of each other. But as more people come in, more people start looking for those other outlets, and I’m more than grateful that Bethesda didn’t abandon the game and kept it going. I’ve been here since beta, and I loved it even when it was broken, so now I’m just over the moon.
Q: Have any of the recent additions to the game—I’m thinking particularly camp items from seasons or the Atomic Shop—been useful in your performances?
Thomas:I used to joke that we don’t know it for sure, but sometimes it feels like they’re putting things in the games for us.There was a whole scoreboardthat was about movies and production and filming and acting and whatnot, and a lot of those have been used. There was also them adding the weather station. That’s huge because now we have complete control of the setting in a way. We can place it, make it dark, we can make it during the day. We can do a radstorm if we want to. We can expand upon the settings that we’re building.
I know that one big thing to us is not a particular asset, but Bethesda has helped our set designer, Thor, by giving her some extra atoms to get this thing that she needs for her idea, her vision.
Q: So you’ve had direct support from Bethesda?
Thomas:Yeah, we’ve been in touch. We’ve talked about things that we could possibly improve our productions and they are super helpful with Thor. I think they’ve even increased her build budget. She can build more than anybody else on a PlayStation. They’ve shown us a lot of support, and we’re super grateful for it.
Q: You mentioned that you’ve talked to Bethesda about some things that would be useful. What are some of the things that you’ve requested?
Thomas:We have not directly requested anything as of yet. It’s more just kind of an idea that we keep in the back of our heads. We haven’t come up with anything yet, so there’s no asset that I can be like, “Oh yeah, you can thank the Wasteland Theatre Company for that.”
Are there any that you have in mind?
A big working curtain would be awesome. If I was to ask for some assets, I probably would lean more towards costuming things, because that’s a big task for us. We’re trying toincorporate the factions, whether that be Enclave, Brotherhood, or Free States now. We’re always trying to come up with good ways to portray those characters that are aligned with those.
I think it would be kind of fun if we could have a robot protectron suit or something, because I know that we have an idea for one play where we would have a lot of the characters be robots, and the best you can do is the robot armor. Yeah, if I were to really ask for anything, I’d be like, “Can you just give us a huge curtain?” I think that would be neat.
The Most Famous Theatre in the Wasteland
Q: You mentioned earlier this academic Shakespeare journal from Johns Hopkins that you’ve been featured in. Can you talk a little about that?
Thomas:Yeah, so there was an article in the Johns Hopkins Shakespeare journal. It mostly talked about how we were just advancing the art of theatre—we’re one of the only online theatre companies that’s ever done Shakespeare in a virtual environment. The article itself just focused on how we were just adding to the long-storied history of putting on these plays.
It also talked about how video games are not meant to be broken, in a sense. A player, a person who plays a video game, they’re always going to attempt to optimize or be the most proficient in the game, so they’re going to find ways to work within the game that aren’t exactly the intended purpose of the game. I feel likeputting a theatre company inside of a wasteland survival gameis pretty much the definition of that.
We have found a way to take a thing that we like and then take this other thing that we like, which is completely unrelated, and then just smash them together to create a whole new art form, in a way, and create a new form of theatre. Virtual theatre is moving forward the idea of how to perform Shakespeare.
Q: How did it feel to be recognized on that level?
Thomas:It didn’t make sense, honestly, at first, because I’ve been doing theatre for almost 15 years in some professional capacity, and this is definitely the most recognition I have ever received for any of my work. That, in itself, is humbling. It also makes us feel like we’re on the right path, like somebody sees this great thing that we’ve done that we all think is so great, and so just the recognition is incredible.
Then, after reading the article, we realized our historical significance. It’s something we’re aware of, but I don’t think that we understand the full scope of it sometimes. Seeing that article, and other articles about us, I mean, I think at this point we’ve been talked about in at least five different languages. There’s been an Icelandic article written about us. There was an Italian professor who did presentations about us in a Shakespeare convention summit over in Europe. To be recognized by Johns Hopkins. We just started this originally because it was fun.
Shakespeare has been present in all the otherFalloutgames to some capacity. It almost seemed like a “Why hadn’t anybody done this before? Well, let’s do it.” It means a lot to us to be recognized in such high regard by such an esteemed establishment.
Q: What play are you looking at adapting next?
Thomas:There are three that are kind of in the works. It might come down to who can get done with their script first. We’ve been talking aboutHamletfor about a year and a half now, so that will happen eventually. The other Shakespeare play that we are consideringis Twelfth Night.
Also, we have an idea for doing a play that’s not Shakespeare, and it’ll beFrogs, which is the Greek epic by Aristotle. I don’t know how familiar you are withFrogs, but it’s about a guy that goes down the River Styx, and he ends up in Hades, and he decides that he’s gonna try to right all the wrongs that the gods have done against humans and whatnot. Then, in the end of it, he just kind of realizes that, “Oh no, we’re the toys of the gods.” WithinFallout, that’s a recurring theme constantly.
You know, in the show where you have the boardroom of all the different CEOs–Vault-Tec and REPCONN and RobCo and whatnot–talking about the use of the nuclear bombs tohave a reason to test the vaults. The general population is always at the whims of these larger entities inFallout; the different corporations. That, we think, translates very well toFrogs, because it’s humanity realizing, “Oh, the gods are actually in control, and there’s really nothing we can do. We’re just at the whims of their mercy.” Those are the three that we’re thinking about right now.
Q: As more of a player than a theatre artistic director,Milepost Zerojust came out. Have you gotten to mess with it? What are your thoughts?
Thomas:I have not done a caravan yet. I’m excited about the new gun. I see the excitement on Reddit and Twitter/X, and new content to the game is always amazing, but real life has kept me from finishingthe last update,Skyline Valley. I’m still trying to get through the weather stations. I’m excited to get into them. I like the idea of the caravans and another aspect of things that we have to work together. Yeah, I haven’t had a chance to dive into it yet.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thomas:I would like to add that I’m really proud of the fact that in our live streams, we raise money, you know, like a lot of theFalloutcommunity. Fallout for Hope is a huge thing, and I’m a kid from West Tennessee, so I grew up around St. Jude. I knew kids from my hometown who went to St. Jude, so raising money for St. Jude, and anything that we can get through donations from our live streams is always just so great to me, and it makes me really happy to be a part of a community that recognizes St. Jude and is willing to help in any way that we can.
Q: If someone wanted to get involved with Wasteland Theatre, how should they reach out?
Thomas:The quickest form of communication to us is through X, @76Theatre. You could DM us if you want to be in a play. We’re always excited when new people come in. I think each show, we’ve had a new person. If anybody wants to be that new person for the next show, the spot’s open still! We also have an Instagram that is not as active—we are most active on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it now—but the Instagram is also @76Theatre. Anybody that has interest, you find us, reach out to us.
We do all the plays on PlayStation, sothat’s the only barrier to entry. We also try to do other things, so if you’re on Xbox or you’re on PC, and we’re doing one of those, you’re able to film something and send it to us, and we can include you in those as well. We’re always trying to find some way so that people who aren’t on PlayStation could contribute, and that will probably be like a night of one-acts or sonnet readings and just general things like that.
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