The Way The West Was Sold

On view Nov. 6–15

By Jolly Productions | Phoenix, Arizona 

The Way The West Was Sold is a live, 10-night frontier broadcast ... and a beautiful con. Step into a world of vintage advertising, built to sell you a dream, including a wall of posters promising fortune, a newspaper shouting opportunity, a radio spinning tall tales, and a 1950s living room, where the television glows with the myth of the American West. Every headline says the same thing—“Try your luck and go west”—and every broadcast points you in the same direction. Follow the promise, and you’ll arrive at a hand-built steamer trunk that unfolds into a 16-foot gaming table, where a round of blackjack awaits. But alas, this was not the game you thought it would be. Instead, you’ll need to barter your way to a hand. You could wager stories, favors, and small treasures instead of money. Cameras carry every wager back to that family-room television across the water, closing the loop between the pitch and the mark. What you find may not be the fortune you were promised. It might be something better: a stranger, a story, a seat at the table.

About Jolly Productions

Jolly Productions LLC is an Arizona-based creative studio, founded in 2017 by executive director Jacob Glinski to produce large-scale interactive installations, live events, and immersive performances. The studio’s artistic director, Dottie Soldati, joined in 2024 after two decades as a working theatre artist, with credits spanning the American Repertory Theater, Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Alone: An Existential Haunt, the Oscars Red Carpet, Burning Man, Lightning in a Bottle, and June Jam. Together they built work that turns audiences into participants, fusing hand-built fabrication, live broadcast, game design, and performance into worlds where strangers become collaborators and spectators become the show. Beyond its installations, Jolly Productions is leading a community-focused effort to preserve and reimagine Old Tucson Studios, the historic film backlot and theme park in Tucson, Arizona. The Way The West Was Sold extends that same spirit—a love of western myth, live spectacle, and shared play—into a frontier broadcast built for a crowd.

Instagram: 

@FrickFrackBlackjack

@FrickFrackBlackjack.West

@Soldati.Rocks

@JojoFromTucson

@OldTucsonReimagined

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