Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.
The Basics
’97: I’m 18, a freshman at Wesleyan in Connecticut. My best friend gets me to read A Supposedly Fun Thing. I go to see DFW speak at the Harvard Film Archive. I fall in love.
’99: Coming back from Australia, I’ve finished Infinite Jest on a six week road trip, and landing in San Francisco, a friend, the same friend in fact, and I go see DFW again at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books (now sadly gone). I tell DFW I want to make a play out of IJ, and he laughs and says “Let me know how it turns out.”
’00 (summer) – I do it. I sit in 100 degree heat sweating to death in an apartment on 11th and C in New York, and trim, coax, and cajole the script from it’s 900 or 1000 pages down to 70, focusing entirely on Enfield and Hal, because to take on any more would have been ludicrous.
Sept ’00 – March 6th of ’01: I turn 21 and we produce Infinite Jest, now called Standing Witness. Bonnie Nadell, DFW literary agent, grants me permission to do it as long as it’s a one time event and we don’t charge for it. My advisor cajoles me into making the script more coherent and understandable. I cast my best friend and closest acting associate as Hal. My genius props designer not only makes tennis balls drop from the ceiling during Eschaton, but makes it snow in the theater later in the play, and a lot of other magic.
Another friend turns Mario into a Bunraku puppet. Two further actresses and friends meld Madam Pyschosis into a character that’s part radio host, part DFW’s narration, part Mario’s voice, and part an excuse for me to try some of the Supercollider patches I was working on at the time to mess with her vocal cadences. The whole cast shows up at 6AM to liberate the bleachers from a block of snow, bleachers that eventually become the audience seats. We crank the sound system in the theater up at 2AM and play jungle into the wee hours when we can’t concentrate on building the set any more. The staff hated us. The audience loved us, both those who’ve read the book and those that haven’t. We finish the play. We have a ridiculous cast party, one of the stage runners singes her eyebrows off on a flaming 151 shot, and we burn the set plans outside in the snow.
I never direct another piece of straight theater again.

Eschaton
Eschaton was the crown jewel of the show – I mean, it’s probably the crown jewel of the book anyway, but as a scene it’s got everything a director could want in it. It’s funny, it’s got drama, it’s got the dual attention between the big kids and little kids, it’s got a huge build up, it turns into a fight … and it ends with one of the most dramatic moments in literature, the infinitely long frozen arc of the computer as it flies out of Lord’s hands through the air and onto the court.
Because it was a black box configuration, we had the opportunity to use one of the balconies as a space for the big kids to sit and watch, and to me that way it was like Pemulis was conducting the madness from on high. Not only was he above the kids but above the audience as well. He could manically shout down at the little kids during the action from above while Hal fretted, Axford (who in my version was sort of Peemster’s sidekick) smoked and Troeltsch narrated. Meanwhile the little kids started pleasantly enough but slowly devolve into this elegant match that turns into a fight, then into a wrestling match, then a melee, then a disaster. It all happened over the course of about 12 minutes.
So many details about it were just amazingly fun to engineer. Dressing everyone up in as much winter gear as we could find, and making sure all the clothes were a little too short (to give the illusion that the actors, all 18-21, were actually 12-14). The actor who played Otis P. Lord gave an awesome performance in the perfect beanie, playing the most gigantic nerd on earth and carting around an old monitor which we destroyed every night (no easy thing to engineer, throwing a heavy monitor about 20 feet over the heads of a bunch of fighting actors…). The impending sense of disaster as tennis balls started to fly off in all directions, and the double horror and glee that all the designers and I felt as we both watched the audience get (sort of intentionally) pelted with balls and held our breath hoping nothing would knock a light or a piece of sound equipment out of alignment.
Not only did I direct the whole thing, I sound designed it as well (theater was always kind of just an excuse for me to have access to loud toys and a place to use them in), and my favorite moment of the whole play was the sonically enhanced crash of the monitor onto the floor that coincided with the blackout at the end of the 1st act and the loudest noise I could make (I ripped it from the explosion at the beginning of 2 Bad Mice’s Bombscare). We spit it out through two giant subwoofers under the audience. Literally earthshaking. It was magnificent. Every night we got some of the loudest and most raucous applause I’ve ever heard at a theater.

Coda
I haven’t actually read the book since then … it was so very much of a particular time and place for me. Since my life has taken me away from theater, I didn’t think about it much again till Infinite Summer asked me for the use of the picture of the Eschaton game and Matthew offered me a chance to reflect (by the way, the balls falling from the ceiling were more for visual effect than because the book calls for them … dramatic liberties I suppose). In doing so, I found an old review of the play on Wallace-L … read it if you care too, although definitely be warned of spoiler alerts about a few details:
Happy reading, I hope IJ gives you as much joy, wonder, happiness and sadness as it did for me all the times I’ve read it.
I’d have given anything to see this.
I believe I startled my colleagues when I just burst out laughing at the sight of that photo! Oh my, I would so love to have seen this. I loved the Eschaton section and to see it in action – fantastic!
This is so, so cool.
Was it filmed? For archival purposes, I mean – I’m sure you can’t distribute it if it was filmed, but I need to know that there’s SOME record of this, or I’m going to be so sad.
I had been thinking about the possibilities of adapting the Hal/Orin phone conversations and Hal/Mario dialogues for the stage, but this sounds so, so, so much cooler.
Bravi to all of you!
This looks like so much fun! Thanks for sharing the photos. I just wish I could have seen it!
Thanks all for you lovely comments, it always tickles me to revisit Standing Witness. We were kids, we were young and invincible and I’m so glad we did it.
There basically is no archive beyond the pictures … or rather, there’s only two things that exists. 1) The script, but only in paper form, since a computer crash in 2003 caused me to loose everything I had a digital copy of before then. The paper copy is included in my thesis, of which there are only 4 copies of. Maybe one day I’ll OCR it. 2) One night the actor who played Otis P. Lord’s parents made a small recording with a hand held camera. But I never got a copy of the tape. So now, after 8 years, that tape could be anywhere, and I haven’t gotten in touch with him in years (although it’s still possible I suppose).
BUT, after all this time I’m actually OK with there not being a video copy. I love that about theater and other theatrical/musical events… you work your ass off, people come and experience it live, it’s done, it fades … it forces you to keep doing better and newer things.
I think you should definitely revisit it. If you put it on in New York, I would not only go, I’d want to participate!
this sounds fantastic. but ballhoppers instead of buckets?!
Beautiful story. I remember this being discussed on the Wallace-l back in the day, and I really loved reading your remembrances of putting the play together.
I wish I could’ve seen this!
I am so NOT surprised this happened at Wesleyan. (Yes, I went there too, although long before IJ was written.) Bravo!
I have one of the t-shirts. Seriously. I’ll get a picture and come back.
Here we go..
shirt front
shirt back
OMG, where did you get these? Were you at the show? I don’t even have my tee anymore!
“Reign of Balls” Hilarious.
I’m a Theatre Arts major about to start my senior year, and I have spent my entire time reading this book trying to figure out how to craft a theatrical production out of IJ. Now I think I’m going to give it a rest, because there’s no way it could be anywhere near as awesome as your show seems to have been. Thanks so much for sharing.
Eschaton is the crown jewel of the book? That’s absurd.
Eschaton is probably the worst part of the entire novel in my opinion.
The whole thing seemed forced, overly long and just plain not funny. I actually had to convince myself that DFW was using the whole episode as some sort of meta-commentary on the overindulgence of writers (or something) but I wasn’t successful. In the end I just had to chalk it up to a painful miscue and not let it ruin the book for me.
Jeez, what fun this was. I wish I had done this when I wasn’t a 22 year old idiot.
I thought I understood Hal then… but really not sure I ever will.
Matt threw his life into this project. It was a truly beautiful show.
Good luck to all with the book.
What a great post! This is the sort of thing I’d like to read more of, blog-wise. I’m a little behind still, but Eschaton is my favorite part so far – it had me laughing out loud. Nobody in that picture looks scary enough to be Kittenplan, though. I would definitely pay money to see this.