Jeremy Gable’s Twitter play, “140: A Twitter Performance,” is now in its second day, and so far nothing much has happened — hey, what can you expect when four characters talk to each other in bursts of no more than 140 characters?
But let’s give the playwright some slack. This is a 60-day narrative, after all. A certain amount of scene setting is in order.
The initial assessment of this seasoned critic:
Dane’s an arrested-development type. Most 16 year olds I know wouldn’t admit to watching “Transformers,” let alone liking it. Perhaps that’s because he’s a somewhat naive small-town kid (the action is set in Hayden Lake, Idaho, population 560).
Dane’s best friend Nik is a live wire. For years I’ve been wanting to do the same thing to Shia LaBeouf that he so merrily suggests. But what’s a hip-talking 18-year-old doing hanging out with a “Transformer”-loving nerd two years his junior?
Leslie, Dane’s 26-year-old stepmom, desperately wants to communicate with him, hence her presence in the Twitter universe of the play. “No one told me talking was obsolete,” she grouses. I sense tension here, and a blowup looming. Also, given the brief span of years separating her from the kids, I predict all sorts of boundaries will be recklessly crossed. Just a hunch.
Among the four characters, Nik’s girlfriend Courtney is most convincingly plugged in to the zeitgeist. Her initial tweet sounds like the clarion call of our benighted times:
“Anybody know a non-crap job that doesn’t pay minimum wage?”
Hm. I’ve looked at the page, but have not read the story yet… however I can comment on the concept…
the defenition of a “play” is bound to alter in the techno world.
Is it a “live” performance, however, Is it scripted or improv? If it is an improv, are we watching/reading an improv scene or an online rpg (in which case it’s not really anything new)?
If it is scripted I wonder how the play would be re-preformed would happen (why would it be reproduced if the result is forever recorded online exactly as it happened the first time) unless it is converted into a stage script to be re-performed. Would that make the original a “tiwtter story” (like thoes books we see now written in IM-text), rather than a play or theatre piece…
So, without seeing actors (merely reading their posts), and the script itself not being performable.. is it a play?
Good questions. You might have noticed that in the Q&A published earlier this week in the Arts Blog, Jeremy was careful to call it a “performance” and not a play. But I think that term, too, is inaccurate, unless your definition of performance is very broad. Personally, I’d like to see the results performed by actors in a reading. It would add a fascinating and unpredictable layer to the twitters, which with their shorthand and candor, are a sharp contrast to spoken-word conversation.