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http://laurengraham512.blogspot.com/2014/10/blog-post-8.html?showComment=1414729222734#c7619434633239652637

Time!

I was absolutely intrigued by the comparison of the everyday use of Twitter to theatre.  It was very interesting to imagine how much of a performance it is to use Twitter.  The single tweet plays seemed less like theatre to me and applied less to this idea of real time.  However the really long plays and the Twitter plays that took place over weeks definitely brought some sense of reality that a “normal” play wouldn’t quite be able to capture.  I found that especially the Twitter plays where different characters were tweeting different thing almost as if they were using Twitter were an excellent illusion of reality.  It would be very easy for these characters to turn into some of the “friends” that a person follows on Twitter.  It works well because Twitter is already set up as a form of performers and audience (even though those lines are a bit blurred and the audience and performers are constantly trading places).

I’m not sure how well it could work to take this idea of the Twitter plays to the next step, but I imagine a live performance of Twitter.  What I mean is using Twitter as a script.  I feel like it would actually end up turning into one of the durational plays though.  In order to create the reality of Twitter, characters’ conversations must take place over a drawn out period of time.  There also must be many different characters that sometimes interact with one another and sometimes do not.  I think that the inclusion of several random celebrities who don’t really interact with anyone else very much would be fun.  Then it would be performed over several hours to mimic somebody reading through a Twitter feed.  People would be welcome to come and go as they please, similar to the longer plays.  Perhaps there could be some audience interaction as well such as posting tweets that would appear in the play.

Environmental Theatre

Alright, so I love musicals and any time I get to put on my director hat and choose a production that I'd love to see come to life, it will most assuredly be a musical.  For this one, I chose the musical Godspell.  I would want it to take place in a busy outdoor environment such as the quad or a popular park.  The characters would be dressed as ordinary people (including the part of Jesus) and would interact with audience members as if they were audience members themselves.  All of the music would be sung acapella.  Obviously, this production would take place in a found space.  There would be no set brought in and props would be minimal.  Focus would be multi-focus most of the time.  And as for the text, it wouldn't be the entire show that we'd be doing.  Only the parts that would be relevant to Jesus interacting with his disciples (which would be the actors as well as the audience.)
The reason I chose this show and this sort of environment is because I would like to mimic what it was like when Jesus was actually on earth interacting with his followers.  When he would speak, a crowd would gradually form around Him and His disciples.  My hopes would be that a similar thing would happen with this production.  I think it would greatly enhance the show to have it set in a modern day version of history.
As for Kantor's quote, I would have to say that I disagree.  I believe that when we are expecting things to happen, they are always much more likely to happen.  If I attend class expecting it to be boring, it almost always is.  If I attend a movie expecting to hate it, I usually will.  If I go to church expecting to encounter God, I usually find myself more likely to than when I don't expect anything.  I believe the same is true with theatre.  Most of the time, when I attend a theatrical production that I expect to be good, I am impressed.  On the other hand, if I expect the opposite, I'm usually not surprised.  I believe that expectations have quite a lot to do with the results.

Theatre and Technology

I believe that technology has reached a dangerous point with theatre.  It has certainly reached a point where it is significantly affecting it.  This happens in a multitude of ways.  The first that comes to mind is the use of projections and videos as part of the set design.  There is a good bit of excitement over this new innovation in the design world of theatre, but for the most part I’m not on board with it.  Every time that I’ve seen projections or videos used, I found it to be mostly distracting from the show.  It took me out of the space that I was in, away from the performers, and into a world of media.  One of my favorite shows that I’ve gotten to see is Newsies.  In this show, they used projections a number of times.  One of the times, it was used for Jack Kelly to write the word “STRIKE” across a large chalkboard.  He pantomimed writing as the words appeared on the screen.  My question is, why couldn’t they use a real chalkboard with real chalk?  I believe it would have been much more effective than it was.  I found myself pulled between two worlds: one that was wrapped up in the story and another that was very aware of a screen pretending to be a chalkboard.  This is only one example out of many, but I really feel that it detracts from the quality of the performance.  I realize that theatre is trying to keep up with what is happening in the world, and—while this is important—I think that it is losing some of its integrity.  I don’t know what the answer is to this issue, but, with the growth of the film industry, social media, and other types of technology, theatre seems less accessible to people.  Of course, it isn’t any less accessible than it was before, but there are options that are much easier to gain access to.  If theatre molds itself into these more accessible forms of art, then what is the point of going to see a theatrical performance?  Theatre must keep the things that make it unique.  Things happening right there in front of the audience is what makes theatre, well, theatre. 

When I think of when media has presented something to me that I didn’t experience first person, I (along with most of America, probably) think of 9/11.  I was quite young when it happened and I had never been to New York City, so I really didn’t have any personal connection to the event.  It was mostly because I didn’t completely understand what was happening.  Several years later, in high school, I visited NYC for the first time.  We visited ground zero and, even though I understood the seriousness of it, it still seemed so distant and removed from me.  However, several years after that, my sophomore year of college, I lived in NYC for a year.  While I was there I made friends with people who had lived there for their entire lives.  One day, my friend Cindy happened to mention something about 9/11.  As we were walking down the streets of Manhattan, she told me her story.  Suddenly, the event wasn’t this far away thing that had happened to a bunch of strangers.  I felt the weight of it as this real life human person spoke her story to me.  Now, this wasn’t a performance, but it was a shared moment between humans with no other distracting influences.  Just a girl telling her story.  And that was powerful.