When the game GETS REAL
Virginia Beach actor competes in the popular ‘Squid Game’ reality show
In January, Jessi DiPette stood in a decommissioned British aircraft hangar surrounded by competition — 455 other people — all waiting for cameras to roll. The Virginia Beach resident was primed, even eager, to go head-tohead with the towering psychotic robot they were about to face. After unsuccessful auditions for “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent,” she’d landed a spot on this reality show, “Squid Game: The Challenge,” and the games were about to begin. “It was so nuts,” she said.
DiPette, 28, competed on the popular Netflix game show earlier this year, and although she didn’t win its $4.56 million grand prize, she came home with behind-the-scenes insight into the reality of reality shows.
The program is based on the fictional Netflix show “Squid Game,” which became a mega hit with its 2021 release. In the original show, debt-laden South Korean characters receive invitations to compete in a sequence of children’s games — with a deadly twist. The contests include classics such as marbles and tug of war. Victory can bring money and a clean financial slate. Defeat equals a quick but grisly death.
In the reality show, eliminated contestants, like DiPette, are humanely sent home. Still, she said the physically challenging and mentally exhausting experience was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
“When I say the hype was real,” she said, “the hype was real.”
DiPette is the marketing director for Zeiders American Dream Theater in Virginia Beach, transitioning from daytime art promoter to evening performer.
In May, she played Countess Andrenyi in “Murder on the Orient Express” at the Little Theatre of Virginia Beach. Earlier this month, she starred as Sibella Hallward in the theater’s rendition of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” She is always on the lookout for ways to advance her career.
A years-long habit of following casting producers’ social media posts keeps her informed about national auditions. Last year she saw the casting call for “Squid Game: The Challenge.”
“Oh, that looks fun!” she thought and submitted a one-minute video application.
Casting producers liked it and then a Zoom interview went well too. The directors instructed applicants to get physicals. Squid games are strenuous. Then came a psychological test. She needed to be able to mentally handle “Squid Game” levels of pressure.
She was cast on Dec. 22. The next month, she flew to London, on Netflix’s dime.
After spending a few days in a hotel, she and the other 455 contestants woke up at 3 a.m. one day and were bused in a long convoy for what felt like a three-hour drive to the decommissioned aircraft hangar at the Wharf Studios where they would
York in 2010 and asking theaters’ artistic directors why they weren’t producing Native work. They would answer that they didn’t know any Native playwrights or that there weren’t enough Native audiences to power ticket sales.
“Good storytelling is good storytelling, whether the protagonist is white, Black, Asian, LGBTQ — it doesn’t matter,” said Nagle, who is on the board of IllumiNative, a nonprofit working to deal with the erasure of Native people.
“There’s a lot of projects out there that are changing the narrative and that are proving that our stories are powerful and that non-Natives are really moved by them because they’re good stories.”
Madeline Sayet, a playwright and professor at Arizona State University who also runs the
Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, sees the contemporary Native theater movement flowing from the civil rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s and an increase in awareness of Indigenous issues ever since Native people won the right to legally practice their culture, art and religion.
She connects the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973 to the Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 to Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America: Native
Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S History” winning the National Book Award for nonfiction this year.
Sayet, a member of the Mohegan Tribe who became the first Native playwright produced at the Public when her “Where We Belong” made it in 2020, said keeping Indigenous stories
being produced depends on changing funding structures and getting long-term commitments from theaters and programs like the Young Native Playwrights Contest.
“Part of what’s really helping right now is us all creating more opportunities for each other instead of in competition with each other,” she said.
FastHorse, who made history on Broadway this year with her satirical comedy “The Thanksgiving Play” — which follows white liberals trying to devise a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play — has since turned her attention to helping rewrite some classic stage musicals to be more culturally sensitive.
“Native people have been exotified in a way that keeps us othered and separate, sometimes in a negative way, as in, ‘We just kill all the Indians’ and sometimes in a ‘positive’ way where they’re this special, magical thing.”
She has recently reworked the book for an upcoming touring musical revival of the 1954 classic “Peter Pan,” which was adapted by Jerome Robbins and has a score by Moose Charlap-Carolyn Leigh and additional songs by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
FastHorse found the character of Peter Pan complex, the pirates funny, the music enchanting but the depictions of Indigenous people and women appalling. There were references to “redskins” throughout, a nonsense song called “Ugh-AWug” and Tiger Lily fending off randy braves “with a hatchet.”
“I was like, ‘What? We’re having little kids read this? This is just rape culture written out, exoticized with a Native person to boot,” she said. “This is what makes you a good woman? If you fight hard enough to keep the men away?”
FastHorse widened the concept of Native in the musical to encompass members of several under-pressure Indigenous cultures from all over the globe — Africa, Japan and Eastern Europe, among them — who have retreated to Neverland to preserve their culture until they can find a way back.
The playwright said one of her guiding principles in the reworking was to make sure a little Native girl in South Dakota could see herself and celebrate.
“Then we’ve done our job and she can join the magic instead of having to armor herself against the magic.”
Nagle is enjoying making her debut at the Public Theater — her play runs through Dec. 23 — but is realistic that no one play is going to teach everyone every single lesson they need to know about Native people after hundreds of years of misinformation.
“I think one thing I’m just hoping that people take away from this play is like, ‘Wow,
Native stories are really compelling. Native people are incredible. They’re incredibly resilient. They’re incredibly brilliant. Yes, there’s tragedy, but they have such incredible senses of humor,’” she said.
“I want them to love my characters the way I love them. I want them to feel the heartache. I want them to feel the laughter. I want them to feel the love,” she said. “And I want them to leave the theater just wanting to know more about our tribal nations and our Native people.”