How The Sims 4 connects to Anton Chekhov and A24’s Past Lives
Even if you aren’t familiar with her work as a staff writer on Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time, director Celine Song — whose directorial feature debut, Past Lives, hits wide release this week — might spark with you for a different reason. Back in 2020, in partnership with the New York Theatre Workshop, Song made the news for staging a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull within a Sims game.
Appropriately dubbed The Seagull on The Sims 4, the virtual production ran for two evenings in October 2020, clocking in at about six hours. Including those who viewed the archival footage, which was hosted on Song’s Twitch page for some time, close to 10,000 people watched this innovative staging.
The show happened at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when live performances weren’t possible in person, so the theater world had to innovate. Song looked to the video game world for inspiration.
“My little sister is a video game designer, so I kind of know the video game world,” Song told Polygon. “I was watching a lot of Twitch, a lot of live video game playing — streamers — during COVID. [Streaming] is like a durational live performance.”
Song was particularly compelled by how long streams can be, and how streamers often ad-lib what they’re talking about and adapt to what’s going on in chat or their environment. Her production of The Seagull wasn’t just a staging streamed via Zoom, but a full process involving casting (character creation) and directing (audience participation in the chat), as Song guided her Sims to enact the events of The Seagull.
The life-simulation game was a natural choice for Song, even before she decided what play to produce there. She grew up playing Sims games (her favorite generation is
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