Missed Connections: A Craigslist Play is as much about community as it is about isolation. The age of the internet brought with it new opportunities for connection, as well as for loneliness. This play brings to life one of the early frontiers of this new world— Craigslist, which was created in 1995. The website is ubiquitous as an online marketplace and forum, but less so as a community with its own idiosyncrasies and culture. By highlighting the anonymous stories of Craigslist’s Missed Connections page, this production reflects on how humanity changes the internet, and how the internet changes humanity.
You're probably already familiar with the concept of a Missed Connection; someone makes a post describing someone else with whom they were unable to make contact, hoping that they will see it and reach out. In this play, the characters are not only reaching out across space, but across time as well. While some posters seek people from the recent past, like their TAs, or strangers they saw at the grocery store, others wistfully reach back years into the past with the hope of reviving a long-lost connection. The individual posts the script consists of –and the play as a whole– explore memory as a form of time travel. Although few Missed Connections posts are directly grounded in a specific year, they each subtly reflect the world at their time of publication. The “Best of Craigslist” archive forms a strange key to the past two decades in the United States from the voices of hundreds of individuals.
While Craigslist posts may be a dying art, the concept of Missed Connections are not. These dates are indicative of the significant decline in Craigslist’s use over the years. The sample size is small, but the trend is real. We mostly used posts from the early 2000’s, with fewer from the 2010’s. Craigslist has faded into antiquity and obsoletion as a social community with the rise of the social media platforms most people use today, like Instagram and Twitter. Now, the 28-year-old online forum and marketplace is less often the home of anonymous lonely souls seeking their lost loves, and more frequently the place to go for selling your 15-year-old vacuum cleaner or for shouting unhinged political conspiracy theories into the void. However, rather than vanishing with the Craigslist community, Missed Connections seem to have migrated to these new social media platforms, with Instagram accounts like @cmu.missed.connections, which has nearly 3,000 followers, carrying on the tradition. It is comforting to think that no matter how things change, human beings have a consistent interest in finding each other, despite the odds.
As you watch the play, imagine a convention of time travelers. Each character is from somewhere unique, each isolated and alone, reaching into the void for an unlikely connection. And you. You’re a time traveler too. When all of these people share a stage together, what do you find that they have in common?
Missed Connections: A Craigslist Play is an example of documentary theater. Documentary theater uses pre-existing material, carefully sourced and collated to tell stories composed of authentic voices. Works of documentary theater often use news articles, interviews, reports, and other first hand sources. One of the hallmarks of documentary theater is the tension and gap between the fact-based reality of the source material and the interpretative nature of their performance– in the hands of our directors and actors, the stories of these anonymous contributors are embodied, removing them from the isolated anonymity of cyberspace and shining a new, more human light on the truths therein.
While a typical Craigslist Missed Connections post is often deeply personal and contains a significant amount of detail, it often leaves out just as much as it says. For the purpose of this play, our directors and actors have engaged with the script through consistent character work and discussions in order to formulate a voice and character for every role, a deliberate process that balances creative liberty with the knowledge that behind every sentence is a real person.
The text of Missed Connections is constructed from posts found on Craigslist.org made by anonymous persons during the past two decades and throughout the country. Early in the process, we discussed how to go about handling these texts. The first question was what to choose—did we care if it was true? What were we looking for in a post? What kind of story are we trying to tell? Over several drafts, we developed a standard for our editing and selection process. The text is largely unedited from the original, as we wanted to preserve the idiosyncrasies and tone of each poster as closely as possible, and allow the actors to enjoy the conversationality and personality of the original writing. That being said, we were not afraid to cut and edit where we found necessary. We are more interested in creating art than in representing reality, and prioritized keeping the emotional energy of each piece we used intact, rather than its exact specifics. Scenes like “Spatula” and “Old Man”, for example, have been edited to remove language, situations, or character choices that did not serve our purposes. Despite this, we did our best to avoid sanitizing any of the posts, as our primary goal in creating this play was to highlight the voices of unheard, anonymous, everyday people, in all of their strangeness, loneliness, wisdom, and humanity.
A significant trend running through the play is a shared location: public transportation. A train, subway, or bus provides the perfect opportunity for a fleeting interaction: long enough to notice someone, but not long enough to approach them. Additionally, a commute is part of a daily routine for many people, and their Missed Connections posts contain the hope of a repeated meeting. What we see of someone on the train is a small representation of their larger life: their attire is indicative of their work, the way they interact with other passengers is indicative of their personality, and their stops are indicative of their destination. The more observant Missed Connections posters take note of other things - the items in their shopping bag, the size of their headphones, or snippets of phone conversations. Regardless of what detail of a stranger’s appearance or circumstances catches the eye of the poster, the location seems to make it all the more enticing. There are few other settings as well-defined within the text of Missed Connections, meaning that a significant challenge for the production in translating the iconic internet marketplace into a living, breathing community was figuring out exactly where that community exists and what their lives look like. The train is the most obvious and most prominent playground for the characters, but keep an eye out for the more private and hidden spaces these characters inhabit when they are not commuting.