The Interview Game: Reciprocal Interviews Build Family Ties, Bridging the Miles and Years

Dec 8, 2020 by Susan Rosenbluth

By Susan L. Rosenbluth

For Ami Dayan, there is nothing surprising in the melding of theatrical arts, elder-care, and the innovative discovery of ways to build family ties across the miles. This is why the actor-and-director-turned-elder-caregiver found himself intrigued by the ideas that led to his series of “Interview Games,” family entertainment that encourages adults and children of all ages to engage with one another no matter how far apart they live.

The Interview Game is not a routine video chat. In fact, Mr. Dayan calls it “the cure for the common family Zoom gathering.”

“It turns an ordinary video-chat or facetime session into quality family-gathering time,” he says. “It’s the antidote to pandemic-caused isolation.”

Engaging Conversations

This year, in addition to six one-on-one versions of the game (one specifically for grandparents and grandchildren and others for “valued friends,” family members, “Rites of Passage,” “Bar/Bat Mitzvahs,” and “The Jewish Mishpacha High Holy Days”), the series has come out with “The 2020 Hanukkah Interview Game,” created to bring families together when COVID is preventing them from being in the same room.

With its cleverly crafted and sequenced questions and prompts, the Hannukah edition of the Interview Game was constructed to engage multiple generations of family members in 60 minutes of illuminating conversations designed to inform, entertain, and surprise.

“Social distancing does not have to mean emotional distancing,” says Mr. Dayan, who sees value in both the one-on-one versions of The Interview Game as well as those that encourage group play.

“One-on-one communication is the foundation of interconnectivity. While our society’s technological advancements increase our capacities to share and communicate with the masses, they do little to nourish intimate conversations and connections. Our one-on-one games are the antidote to our texting culture,” he says.

Playing with a larger group, he says, may not offer the “unparalleled intimacy” of the one-on-one interviews, but, he says, it is the “antidote to COVID-induced isolation and loneliness, bringing families and loved ones together to learn more about each other and have fun connecting meaningfully.”

From Israel to Boulder

For Mr. Dayan and his wife, the quest to bring family together is personal. Both of them were born and raised in Israel, but his pursuit of acting and directing and hers of higher education and yoga, prompted them to leave for Europe, Canada, and ultimately the United States.

They chose to settle in Boulder, Colorado, as sort of compromise. A third cousin of the late General and politician Moshe Dayan, Ami Dayan was born and raised on a secular kibbutz in northern Israel, although he spent time in St Louis as a child when his father served as a shaliach there. After high school and military service, he was bitten by the acting bug and studied theater in Tel Aviv, New York, Paris, and London, only to find himself equally drawn to directing as well as translating and adapting works for the stage.

In 1999, his theatrical accomplishments won him a grant from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, which would have allowed him to live anywhere in the world. He opted for India. His wife, whom he had married three years earlier, wanted New York. Boulder was not exactly a midpoint geographically, but it allowed her to continue her study of yoga.

“We already had our daughter, who was two years old, and we thought we’d stay in Boulder another year or so,” he says.

Storytelling

Instead, they stayed. Their son was born in Boulder, and the family decided the mountains and people were sufficiently nourishing, certainly from an artistic standpoint, to satisfy them.

Mr. Dayan staged and toured with a number of plays, including several one-man performances, such as “Conviction,” an adaptation of Yonatan Ben-Nachum’s novel, “Confession” about an Israeli scholar who is detained and questioned by a Spanish official in Madrid for stealing a confidential Inquisition file on a priest who fell in love with a Jewish girl and discovered his own roots.

“But staying in Boulder meant we were permanently separated from our family members in Israel, and we wanted very much for our children to know them and for them to know our kids,” he says.

The search for ways to accomplish this proceeded throughout the years while Mr. Dayan’s theater career increasingly involved medical work, especially care-giving with the elderly.

“Storytelling has always been at the heart of my work in theater, and that lent itself to my interest in the profound impact that sharing life stories can have on people, especially the elderly,” he says.

Reciprocal Interviews

He became fascinated with the work of Harvard-trained geriatrician Dr. William H. Thomas and his Greenhouse Project, a model that seeks to create small homes that recognize the individuality of elderly residents while honoring their autonomy, privacy, and dignity.

“In nursing homes operated according to the Greenhouse Project model, before a caregiver is assigned to a care-recipient, the two have an orientation session during which they tell each other their life stories,” he says.

Because some of his plays, such as “Conviction,” involved interviews as an important part of the structure, Mr. Dayan understood the power of such two-way dialogues, and he certainly knew that interviews were part of the process when caregivers were hired, but, he says, Dr. Thomas’s insistence on mutuality was something of a revelation.

“No doubt, this more intimate approach provides an opportunity to build familiarity, confidence, and trust between the caregiver and care-recipient. The caregiver needs to know the recipient’s story, and the recipient needs to know where the caregiver is coming from,” he says.

Intimacy, Friendship, and Trust

Several years later, Mr. Dayan learned that this sense of intimacy could be built between people of all ages. He was fascinated with the work of social-psychologist Dr. Arthur Aron who developed “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love,” a guided mutual-interview protocol that, in Mr. Dayan’s words, “helped boost intimacy between thousands of strangers, resulting in friendship, romance, and even marriage.”

“It was the flipside of Speed Dating, a one-on-one interview between two people that could lead to important relationships,” he says.

While Dr. Aron’s work focused on sparking romantic responses between strangers, it convinced Mr. Dayan that prescribed reciprocal interviews was the solution to bring people together, especially grandchildren and grandparents or the elderly with their adult children.

“On a deeper level, I saw the potential for these reciprocal interviews as the key to the healthy transmission of culture, the culture that must be passed from one generation to another if it is to survive,” he says.

Workbooks

Armed with the knowledge of the “true potency of guided reciprocal interviews and their power to bridge the intergenerational gap,” he began to formulate written material aimed at helping people share their life stories in a relaxed, enjoyable way.

He and his wife and many other Boulder-based families raising their children thousands of miles from older relatives began experimenting with reciprocal interview games.

“We received input from family, friends, psychologists, teachers, and kids of all ages, and the work, which we called The Interview Game, was greeted with unabashed enthusiasm,” he says.

His workbooks were selling well in local bookstores just when the COVID pandemic arrived, closing most stores in Boulder as well as across the country and putting an end to the idea of launching The Interview Game at public events in schools, houses of worship, and community centers.

Online Opportunity

But for Mr. Dayan, COVID provided an opportunity, and various versions of The Interview Game began appearing online. Now anyone with WIFI, a web-enabled device, and 60 minutes to spare is able to connect deeply and safely with family and friends.

Buying a game allows the purchaser to keep it forever, playing it with different people as many times as the owner likes.

Because these sessions are recorded, families can document these interviews and keep them as video mementoes for posterity.

Corporate Sponsors

From the beginning, Mr. Dayan’s mission was to create “a better, more compassionate, empathetic world,” which, he says, can be established by encouraging and allowing people “to truly see one another.”

“The pandemic did not change this mission one bit, but with growing isolation and loneliness, particularly among the elderly and fragile populations, this mission is more urgent than ever,” he says.

To that end, he recently founded the division of Interview Game corporate sponsors. In addition to advertising opportunities, sponsors can place these games in the hands of elder-care residents, allowing them to stay engaged with loved ones during the pandemic and beyond.

Further information about The Interview Game and how to purchase one or more versions can be found at https://www.theinterviewgame.com/.

Nothing seems to give Mr. Dayan more pleasure than hearing comments from people who appreciate what he’s doing, such as the mother who told him the game “got my 83-year-old mom and my teenage daughter laughing and having a conversation” and the Hillel rabbi who said, “The value of passing down our stories to our children from generation to generation is central to Judaism and so this effort to make that more accessible is deeply resonant.”

“The mom told me that, in all her family Zooms, her kids sat mostly silent, not really knowing what to say to their grandparents and vice versa. The Interview Game gave each of them a structure to build interesting conversation. What a precious gift for all of them,” says Mr. Dayan.