Mergers between media

A particularly nice example of this merging of new and old media concerns Between a Screen, a play I happened (by pure chance!) to see while recently in Perth, Australia. How I encountered this play, and the play itself, form an interesting, narrative example of such media mergers.

At the time (late November, 1995) I was hanging out in Perth for a week. I happened to see a poster advertising Between a Screen hanging on the wall of a coffeehouse I was eating in. The poster included a URL; I copied it down, though I didn't actually get a chance to look at the URL before seeing the play. The poster itself showed what appeared to be actors in a traditional play setting, using a laptop.

The actual play itself took place in a small, experimental-theater setting in the Western Australia Actors Centre, just off the main drag in the Perth tourist district. It featured a nine-CRT video wall, a traditional theatrical set, and two live actors (playing a married couple). The basic plot revolved around someone the wife had met online: she had an increasing intimate and personal conversation in a MUD-like medium with someone who appeared to be another woman. Combined with the wife's disintegrating relationship with her husband, the draw of this other woman was a powerful one. Eventually, the wife went to meet the other woman at a nearby airport---only to discover that the other woman wasn't really serious about having such a meeting, but was only joking! While she was gone, the virtual "woman" started talking to the wife's husband---only this time, the remote presence changed genders to male and started talking to the husband as a male, trying to encourage an intimate homosexual relationship with the husband.

The video wall served to narrate the virtual presences. The conversation on both sides scrolled by in large letters on the CRT's, with somewhat abstract backgrounds projected behind the lettering. At times when there was little conversation, the backgrounds became less abstract and reflected images related to the plot. In order to avoid overwhelming the audience and hence turning into "shock theater", the CRT's were essentially inactive when the actors were delivering lines; similarly, the actors were frozen or otherwise inobtrustive when the on-screen narrative was most important.

Overall, the production worked well. It experimented with online representations of gender and sexuality, worked in the tension between real and virtual presences and the strains that can be imposed when trying to reconcile the two, and understood the constraints and affordances of the online media it portrayed---including taking advantage of the virtual presence's ability to download his/her entire transcript of the conversations with the wife to the husband, to attempt to prove that the conversations had, in fact, taken place.

Such a production obviously merges at least three types of media: traditional plays, video, and MUDs. That three such media are at least partially miscible is good news, and demonstrate that criticism of one type of media might well be applied to more than one---would one criticize such a play only as a play, using only criticism taken from the tradition of criticizing plays? While its dominant form is that of a play, one must also be aware of the video and, much more important, online traditions to properly interpret what is being presented. So-called literary or film criticism in the future is going to have to be much more trans-model and multimedia to effectively encompass the range of performances being created---especially when online, interactive media can turn simple conversation into a "performance" of its own, complete with spectators who may themselves join in the fray (witness any MUD, for instance).

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