If a year ago someone had told me I would spend the summer as a "playwright-in-electronic-residence," developing a new one-act hyperdrama in collaboration with a director in Santiago, Chile, I would have tilted my head in that special way reserved for people who aren't in possession of all their faculties. And yet that has been my wonderful summer of 1996.

Yet I shouldn't be surprised. Hyperdrama and cyberspace were made for one another. Both, after all, speak "hypertext," the electronic nonlinear language that develops narrative as a network of options, whether they be choices on a help menu or decisions to be made by an audience member. I wrote hypertext scripts for a decade before the project in Santiago, which is my first hyperdrama script to be developed in cyberspace, and the new environment has made my job as a hypertext writer far less cumbersome, while at the same time providing all the immediate input and collaborative advantages that I remember from being a playwright-in-residence in non-virtual (which is to say, "really real") reality.

Moreover, my experience in developing a new hyperdrama script in cyberspace convinces me that traditional linear scripts, too, can benefit from this kind of process. I've come to believe that traditional theater is only a "special case" of hyperdrama, in the same sense that Newtonian physics can be considered a special case of quantum physics, and many of the things I have to say about hyperdrama development here have application in the much larger traditional theater world. 

What is Hyperdrama?

• In traditional theater, the audience sits in the dark and watches a play on a stage, the story moving forward with linear action; in hyperdrama, the audience is mobile and watches a play that networks into scenes running simultaneously. Each audience member must decide which scene to watch.
• A traditional play takes place on a stage; hyperdrama takes place in "a real environment," which is why the form has been called a living movie. The hyperdrama "stage" is like a movie set, a "real" space into which scripted action is created. Thus, I've written hyperdramas that have been performed in a mansion, a river sternwheeler, a bed and breakfast resort, a bank, a restaurant/bar, and - in Santiago - an art gallery. In hyperdrama, stories must be written for the "real" space, unless one has the budget to construct a space appropriate to the story. The set of Tamara (the best known hyperdrama), for example, was an Italian villa built inside an abandoned American Legion Hall in the Los Angeles production, to the tune of a million dollars or more. In contrast, I prefer to have the space selected before I write, and then write the story to the space.
• In traditional theater, the audience makes no decisions about focus; one watches what is on stage. In hyperdrama, the audience must make a decision every time the story branches. Commonly this occurs when an actor leaves the scene - does an audience member follow the actor into a new scene, or stay and watch the present scene? Thus, individual audience members end up watching a "different" play, based on their sequence of decisions.
• In traditional theater, there are main characters and a main plot; in hyperdrama, this distinction makes little sense since all actors are on stage (in the performance space) at all times and, if the writer has done his/her job right, all characters have meaningful stories to which they are attached.
• In traditional theater, one careful viewing is enough to "receive" the play; in hyperdrama, more than one - usually many - viewings are needed in order to "receive" the full story. I recommend that audience members at a hyperdrama follow a single actor throughout the performance in order to "receive" at least one cohesive thread of the story.

The Problems of Hyperdrama

Many audience members also feel inhibited by the proximity of the actors. In hyperdrama, the audience is almost in the lap of the action. A scene in a living room, for example, may find the audience sitting next to actors. In one of my hyperdramas, Turkeys, the setting is a family Thanksgiving and an actual turkey is baked and eaten during each performance.

Indeed, if the audience at a tradiitonal play may be compared to invisible peeping Toms who are lurking in the dark and watching through the windows of the fourth wall, in hyperdrama the audience becomes mobile voyeur ghosts, who follow the action wherever an individual audience member decides to wander. Hyperdrama, in fact, is more like "real life" than any other narrative form. The Thanksgiving dinner hyperdrama, minus the audience, would model many "generic" family occasions, which we've seen on stage and film before. The difference is that now all the action is set loose in full dimensionality, just as at an actual family gathering, and amidst all the simultaneous action we set down the audience like invited ghosts who can wander and look at will.

None of this makes for easy production. A space appropriate for this kind of theater is not easy to find. And actors must be able to combine traditional skills with finely tuned improvisational skills because in hyperdrama improv is always a factor. Indeed, on the opening night of one of my hyperdramas, a reviewer's favorite scene, of which my writing was highly praised, was improvised and never occurred again (the particular timing problem that led to it having been solved by the director in another way). The point is, both the space and the cast are harder to find in hyperdrama than in traditional theater.

Then why do hyperdrama? Because there is nothing - absolutely nothing - like it in the performance arts. 

Enter Santiago

I had become convinced that the best way to introduce hyperdrama to a new audience was with a one-act play, that was then repeated during the evening of theater. In that way, everyone would see the play two or three times for one ticket price, thereby walking away from the experience with a far better understanding of the form. All of my projects before Santiago had been full-length hyperdramas.

The advantage of the one-act format became clear to me during a residency at The Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon, where I directed some honor high school students through the process of writing and performing a one-act hyperdrama. Not only was the short form easier to produce, it also was more meaningful to the audience, which "received" more of the story from the three viewings that made up our evening of theater.

This, then, was to be our strategy in Santiago - a one-act hyperdrama. 

A Creative Process in Cyberspace

So our story would take place in an art gallery - but with a complication. Only a few of the art objects would be in the gallery during our performance time. With this qualification, we brain-stormed and came up with a story:

The house that had been leased as a gallery has been inherited by a young couple who plan to move into it. So the gallery must close. Hence, most of the art objects have already been removed.

One of the things I really like about hyperdrama is the ability of the form to run different kinds of stories side by side, simultaneously. More than adding "comic relief" to a serious play, the playwright in hyperdrama can have a farce, a drama, a light comedy, all running simultaneously (again, just like in "real life"). So I quickly started looking at different plot lines with different feels to them.

I don't want to take time to summarize the story here - except to say that the script that resulted is called The Last Song of Violeta Parra and I've put our early draft online in order to invite feedback on it. The full production, in Spanish, is scheduled to occur in March, 1997. I'm hoping to find performance spaces in which to do the play in English as well.

Down the line, an important part of the process will be to talk to actors in real time as well, providing a virtual version of the traditional rehearsal process. This has already happened - again using Powwow for Windows - with a traditional play of mine that is now in rehearsal in Cork, Ireland. I've met and answered questions from the actors, just as I might if I were attending rehearsals myself. 

Hyperdrama and Cyberspace

There are a number of theater projects in cyberspace today, most of them traditional (at least from my point of view: anything without simultaneous action, I call traditional), and no doubt more and more theater artists will learn how to take advantage of virtual realities in their work. For me, the summer of 1996 and developing a new hyperdrama in cyberspace have been an extraordinary experience, which is still very much in process.

I welcome comments from others interested in, or curious about, hyperdrama in general and my new Santiago project in particular. You can email me at cdeemer@teleport.com