How do you level up a friendship?
'Wanna Play,' a new production by Austinite Christine Hoang, tackles the hilariously awkward world of making friends as an adult.
If only friendships came with a cheat code. A guidebook. An instruction manual.
A recipe card with ingredients and baking times and info about how long it will last and whether it can withstand being frozen.
“Wanna Play,” a new production from Austin playwright, performer, screenwriter, director and producer Christine Hoang, explores the budding friendship between two gamers who have never met in real life until, one day, they are sucked into a game.
Leveling up their friendship is the key to getting out of the game.
Hoang is a “recovering lawyer” who founded Color Arc Productions in 2015 as a way to create new spaces for new stories to be told.
I met her two years ago when she was producing a storytelling event about comfort food, and I’ve loved watching the steady stream of events and projects she puts out into the world. (Her short film “Pizza My Heart” has screened several times around town, and she’s producing a third storytelling night this fall called Stories About Unique Jobs, as well as a short film called “Dirty Dishes” written and starring Yola Jean Lu.)
When I talked to her on Monday after seeing the play over the weekend, Hoang said she started writing this piece last summer after she’d had a little time to think about how her world changed during the pandemic. “I remember the first party I went to after I got vaccinated, and the awkwardness was so weird,” she recalls.
Being at home all those months caused our soft social skills to evaporate into the ether of the Zoom calls that were supposed to take the place of IRL relationships.
It felt like we were all starting from zero.
That’s the scenario Hoang created for this play in the form of a video game, where the two main characters meet. Well, they already know each other because they play video games together, but in this virtual world — called “The Here” — they finally meet, and in order to escape the video game world, they have to “level up” their friendship by participating in challenges, like a game of pattycake or a walk through a labyrinth.
I was eager to see this play because I think a lot about adult friendships. I have a wonderful core group of friends, most of whom I met in Spain or when I first became a food writer. These are the people with whom I’ve already gone through all of the stages of a relationship — from the butterflies of first meeting them through the power struggle, stability, commitment and co-creation phases — that aren’t all that unlike what happens when you are looking for romance.
But I’ve found friendships to be even more complicated than dating because 1) there are so many more of them 2) they accumulate over time and 3) they are so wildly different. Some friendships are like cacti that can weather a decade without rain. Others are tender ferns that need a fine mist three times a week to unfurl.
There are so many different kinds of connections, from the bosom buddy at work who doesn’t know your kids’ names to the easygoing neighbor who posts all the time on Facebook but you’ll never talk to again. College friends, mom friends, professional acquaintances who toe the line of being an actual friend.
Friendships have layers, just like the layers of a house, and if you want to level them up, you need three things: grace, safety and closeness.
“Relationships can be transactional and based on what people can get out of one another rather than what they can give,” she said. “You have to be choosy; you have to date.”
Here are the lessons I took away from the play and my conversation with Christine:
You have to have skin in the game. In the play, the characters play pattycake, so they have to touch hands in a way that made them uncomfortable at first. Friendships should be easy, but they also require an investment of time and attention.
Get into the flow state. Find the chemistry. Get into a groove of conversation, a game of pickleball, a walk around the lake. “That’s when you’re out of your head and into your body. Moving with effortless momentum,” Hoang describes it. She jokes: “That’s what I assume is a runner’s high, but I don’t run.”
Share experiences and then digest them together. Hoang calls this a “power up” in the game, where the characters can rest and regain their strength by talking about what they just went through. This is how they build trust and show that they are there for each other. Tear and repair, as my therapist says.
Go to the deeper place. We all build up walls to protect ourselves from the scary things in life, including rejection. But to take a friendship to another level, you’ll have to go to a deeper place within yourself and let what you discover there shape how you show up in the friendship. “We have to create new pathways in our brains about how to process things,” Hoang says. “And sometimes we do that by talking things out with our friends.”
Embrace the flaws. In yourself and in your friends. People are not going to be perfect. They are going to say the wrong thing or forget to call you back or use that vulnerable thing you said to them in a way that hurts your feelings. We have to do the inner work to be able to forgive ourselves for the things we don’t like.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread around the love. Friendships have a unique form of intimacy, and that intimacy grows if there isn’t too much pressure on any one person. “If you feel like you are overgiving, maybe you are giving to the wrong person,” she said. “It’s just not sustainable to always be the golden retriever puppy. We all need to be a little black cat, too.”
Hoang, who has performed at the Hyde Park Theatre with Frontera Fest and Out of Ink festivals, quit her lawyer job in 2022, and she is still figuring out how to navigate adult friendships in this new chapter of her life.
She’s had to learn how to set boundaries and look for red flags when relationships are transactional, but she also has to learn how to let people in when they’ve earned the trust to be there.
It turns out that there are no cheat codes. Only choices.
As Cappy, the omnipresent host in the play says, “Your choices create your journey; your choices create your story.”
Hello, readers!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little reflection on Christine’s new play. It’s a lovely, 90-minute production that is appropriate for (and, because of the video game theme, even appealing to) teenagers.
Because people of every age wrestle with these questions about what it means to be a friend and to be a good friend.
Oddly enough, I think those answers change over time. It’s easy to say that you need to be a nice person to be a good friend, but it’s more complicated than that.
I do know that I’m grateful to have this space to highlight a fellow Austin creative who sparks deliciously interesting conversations like these.
Before I go, one last thing: I asked Hoang what she meant by naming this place where the main characters meet “The Here.”
In our conversation, she describes it as a place where you have to stop and be accountable for your choices. Is it a form of purgatory? Or is it a place where the present moment slows down and we can experience a different kind of love?
She intentionally leaves that for the viewer to decide.
I get the sense that we are in our own version of “The Here” right now, trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy during very abnormal times. We do that by doing the things we love and spending time with the people we love and doing the inner work to support the outer work, whatever that looks like.
It’s a radical act.
Until next week,
Addie
Oooh, I wish I could see that play. It sounds great! My husband Dave has a group of online friends with whom he plays D&D. A few months ago, we met one of them in person for the first time. It was a tiny bit awkward at first, but after the first hour or so, we all relaxed into it, and it turned into a wonderful experience. We spent an evening and the entire next day together — and now we're solidly friends-in -real-life, rather than 'just' friends online (i use the quotes because online friendships are really, too... just different.) As you know Addie, friendships can be maintained (and grown!) in the ether of digital communication — just gotta make sure to break out the watering can on a regular basis ;-)