Here’s
a recipe for a terrible play: Characters are rarely in the same room as
one another; conversations are typed rather than spoken; one side of a
dispute can’t be heard by the audience.
Not
great drama but, in 2015 America, the stuff of real life, where the
rapid spread of mobile technology has redefined the way people talk, the
way they shop, the way they walk down the street.
As
a result, it is redefining how they interact onstage and, in the
process, challenging playwrights, directors and set designers who are
trying to figure out matters as technical as how to let theater
audiences know what is being said on screens they cannot see, and as
cosmic as what technological change means for human interconnectedness.
“My
most important and consequential arguments and fights and interactions
happen on my phone every day,” said the playwright Kevin Armento, whose
recent Off Broadway work, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,”
told the story of a sexual relationship between a high school math
teacher and her student entirely from the point of view of the boy’s
smartphone.
“How
would you even tell this story if it weren’t through their text
messages?” Mr. Armento asked. “It wouldn’t be believable in 2015.”
Even
as some playwrights embrace the integration of digital communication
into stage scenes as a new form of naturalism, other theater people
worry that their art form will be affected by communication that values
brevity over elegance and, increasingly, images over words.
“Technology
is creating a culture that devalues language — our need for a sentence
is less,” said Sam Gold, who won a Tony Award this spring for directing
the musical “Fun Home.” “That really affects theater, because theater is
an oral medium. It’s communicated through words.”
While he avoids social media in his life, Mr. Gold has incorporated digital communication onstage: This summer he directed “John,”
the new work from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, in
which one character’s receipt of texts (which were never shared with
the audience, but were signaled by the familiar iPhone tritone alert)
was a significant plot element.
Theaters, of course, spend a lot of time warning audience members to shut off their cellphones, sometimes to no avail.
But onstage, mobile communication has become so integral to
contemporary theater that a Tony-winning sound designer, Robert
Kaplowitz, collaborated with a programmer, Jay Konopka, to design an app
that makes iPhones ring or beep, or both, on cue. Next: figuring out
how to make phones light up on cue, so that they cast a lifelike glow on
actors.
Playwrights
have been exploring the perils of the Internet for years: “The Dying
Gaul,” which ran Off Broadway in 1998, featured the use of a chat room
for deception, as did “Closer,” which ran on Broadway in 1999.
And
even before the advent of digital communication, theater makers wanted
to incorporate the latest conversational technology into their work.
Think of “Bells Are Ringing,” a popular 1956 musical about a woman who
works at a telephone answering service, or “Bye Bye Birdie,” the
Tony-winning best musical of 1961, which features a much-loved show
tune, “The Telephone Hour,” in which land lines are vehicles for teenage gossip.
Many
of today’s playwrights are raising explicit questions about new forms
of communication. “The Nether,” a play by Jennifer Haley that has been
produced over the last two years in Los Angeles, London and New York,
depicts a world in which men are prosecuted for sex crimes committed by
their online avatars. “Privacy,” a play by James Graham that ran in
London last year, details the threats posed by government surveillance.
Some shows, acknowledging that theatergoers cannot let go of their own phones, are seeking to employ them in storytelling. At “Elements of Oz,”
presented by the Builders Association at Montclair State University in
New Jersey this fall, theatergoers downloaded an app that supplemented
the onstage production. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Miranda July
had audience members use pictures on their phones (then projected on a
screen) for her performance piece “New Society.” And this summer’s Broadway run by Penn & Teller used the cellphones of audience members for an opening trick.
But
the most striking new development is the normalization of onstage
digital communication: the number of shows in which mobile devices and
social media are not the subject of comment or criticism, but simply a
contemporary reality.
“The
phone is totally boring its way into the consciousness of playwrights,
because we live with them stapled to our faces, and major emotional and
life-altering information is being transmitted via these devices,” said
Bray Poor, a sound designer who worked on Ms. Baker’s “John.”
“Especially
when you’re dealing with younger playwrights — phones were part of
their college lives, they are part of their romantic lives,” Mr. Poor
said. “The phone is elemental, and so it will be in their plays.”
The
examples are everywhere. Quiara Alegría Hudes’s 2012 Pulitzer
Prize-winning “Water by the Spoonful” was set partly in an online chat
room for drug addicts, requiring characters to speak words they actually
would have typed. Now she is working on a new musical, “Miss You Like
Hell,” in which the commenters on a teenage girl’s online diary form the
show’s ensemble.
In “The Humans,”
a current Roundabout Theater Company production by Stephen Karam, a
Thanksgiving dinner is punctuated by furtive cellphone calls from a
young woman to her ex-girlfriend, trips to an area of the apartment
where reception is adequate to check sports scores, joking among
siblings about alarming articles electronically forwarded by their
mother and a reading of a poignant email from their grandmother.
“Steve,”
a comedic play by Mark Gerrard about two gay male couples and their
ailing lesbian friend, projects texts, sexts and emoticons on a stage
wall to allow the audience to see communications important to the plot
in a production now being presented Off Broadway by the New Group. And
“Dear Evan Hansen,” coming to Second Stage Theater Off Broadway in the
spring after a run at Arena Stage
in Washington, uses projections from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and
Gmail to evoke the cacophonous swirl of social media in a high school
grappling with a teenager’s suicide.
“We
didn’t set out to write a show about social media — in fact, it’s been
our sense that when we see technology in theater, a lot of times it
feels inauthentic to us,” said Benj Pasek, who wrote the “Hansen” show’s
book and lyrics with Justin Paul. “But we wanted to layer it in,
because it’s part of our everyday lives.”
The
challenge of dramatizing digital communication exists in film,
television and books as well, but is especially pronounced on the stage,
where printed language (in projections or supertitles) is often viewed
as less compelling than the spoken word.
Such
technology is “appearing in a lot of plays already, but we as an
industry still need to figure out how to make it truly theatrical,” said
Paige Evans, the artistic director of LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s
program for new playwrights, directors and designers.
Some
writers have tried to dodge the issue. Jonathan Marc Sherman moved a
play he is now writing, called “The Squeaky Wheel,” from 2008 to 2000 so
his characters could read real estate listings in a newspaper instead
of on an app. Laura Eason used a snowstorm in the first act of “Sex With Strangers,” which
was produced last year at Second Stage, to disrupt wireless reception
in a Michigan bed-and-breakfast so her characters would not be able to
Google one another.
And
even in “The Humans,” Mr. Karam set the action in a
ground-floor/basement duplex with poor reception so that the bulk of the
play could take place without digital interruptions.
“I
was definitely interested in how, in a world in which we are so married
to these forms of communication, do we behave when we’re shut off,” he
said.
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