Practitioner
Stepy Kamei
Writer-performer, interactive audio drama
Interviewed July 2026
Works We Should Meet In Air (2022) · Postscript (2022) · One Bad Day (2023) · Everything Starts Like a Knock at the Door (2023) · No More Half Measures
Experienced for this research We Should Meet In Air
This page is provisional until Stepy Kamei has reviewed it for error. That undertaking was given at the outset of every interview and it stands.
Dr. Carlson — the debrief written into the fiction
One Bad Day carries a character whose function is offboarding: easing the participant back to the present after a call spent in conversation with someone who died young and violently. A debrief mechanism that lives inside the frame rather than arriving afterwards as an email. This is the most directly transferable design object anyone gave me all summer.
Onboarding as the consent instrument
She names the onboarding email as unusually effective at getting people ready to play — and reports that a significant number of people are open and willing early, if given space and time. By the point at which she becomes Sylvia Plath, the audience has already settled where they are willing to go. Parker Sela named onboarding as the field’s single unsolved problem; Kamei has been quietly solving it.
Playing yourself is still playing
On moving between portraying herself and portraying a historical figure: it remains a performance — a storyteller role, not talking to a friend. She describes it as being true in imaginary circumstances, closer to running a game than to conversation.
“I have nothing to lose”
On using real vulnerability as material. She did not expect it to be accepted, let alone appreciated. Dozens of participants tracked her down afterwards to say they had felt compelled to reach out, or that the piece sent them to Plath’s poetry.
Guardian of a memory
Developing a piece about a woman killed by her stalker, she was told by the woman’s mother: you are the guardian of my daughter’s memory — and given explicit permission to speak about her. This is a working consent architecture for putting a real person into a phone piece, and it is the protocol I need for the show described below.
What the phone is for
“The phone is a very powerful tool.” It is specific: there are things that cannot happen outside it. And every encounter makes a new piece — everyone gets to decide what it meant.