Blurring the Real and the Imagined

Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line is a good example of time and pace reinforcing the Reality Effect.  He wrote this play via Twitter over the span of two months, starting with an announcement of a subway disaster.  Over the next two months, “the play followed the reporter and five other imaginary characters whose lives intertwine in the aftermath of the accident (48).” So, these imaginary characters are posting on Twitter as any real-life person does, and they are dealing with the accident in real time. This isn’t a night in the theatre where you see a character have a journey and transform from beginning to end over the span of two hours. These Twitter characters are dealing with life as life actually passes not just for the characters themselves but also for the audience experiencing the play. As Muse says, “works like The 15^th Line call attention to current events and ape the format of ordinary interactions on Twitter reveal Twitter’s potential to blur the line between everyday life and performance (44).” Since The 15^th Line spanned over the time of two months, Gable also acknowledged events that came up over that time. Holidays and political happenings were not ignored, but included in the action, which further strengthened the Reality Effect.  Someone coming into the play a month late might actually wonder if this were real-life or imaginary. “Twitter plays help to expose the newly fragile distinction in a digital age between theatrical spectatorship and the experience of real-life events (44).” Since the Twitter audience/participants are all involved in some kind of theatrical spectatorship while browsing Twitter, how are the imaginary circumstances of these imaginary characters any different from the goings on of any real-life person’s Twitter page? Yes, a real Twitter page reflects a life that is actually being lived, but in the digital world of Twitter, that looks no different from the pages of these imagined characters. Whether real or imagined, everyone is bound by the same rules and limits on Twitter, and real and imagined alike changed and evolved over the same span of the two months it took Gable to write The 15^th Line.

            The common thread between all the types of theatre we read about this week seems to be the merging of performance and reality. The Reality Effect is taken even further than it is with naturalistic kitchen sink dramas. On Twitter, imagined characters live life alongside real people. In durational theatre, it is about unscripted, unpredictable, and unplanned interactions. Essentially, you are watching people just being and existing.  The element of truth becomes incredibly important, and the conventional theatrical format becomes less important. Where will we go from here? Theatrical events will most likely slip into every digital app we spend an excessive amount of time on such as Instagram, Snapchat, and whatever the next new social media fad turns out to be. I am actually more interested in the evolution of the durational pieces, because I am much more interested in watching theatre than I am in reading it. We live in an age that wants to be able to do everything from home, including be an audience of theatre. Pretty soon, we’ll have no reason to step outside our doors. This is not to say that theatre shouldn’t be explored in the digital world, by all means, it should be explored on every frontier. I suppose I am just a bit old-fashioned in that I still want to see the interaction that exists between people when you go see live theatre. So, I would be interested to see the six hour durational pieces taken to the next level where not only the line between performance and real-life is blurred, but it would also be interesting to see what would happen if the line between audience and performer was blurred. This idea harkens back to what we talked about last week with space and focus and having certain spaces where there is no forth wall and every part of the space becomes fair game as the playing area, and focus can be set on the general audience or on one person or a small group of people. I’m sure this has all been done before, but it seems like after the real and imagined start merging together; the next step would be to blur and bend the confines of audience and performer.