Charles Deemer
Charles Deemer is an award-winning playwright, a screenwriter,
an editor and writer. He is the webmaster of The
Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page and author of the book Secrets
of the Webmaster: A Guide to Web Page Design. He also wrote the play "The
Bride of Edgefield," which previewed on the Internet...
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cdeemer@teleport.com
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Theatre Network Magazine
The Deal: A Hyperdrama Demo
by Charles Deemer
"Hyperdrama" is a recent form of theater generated by scripts written in
hypertext. These plays generate into simultaneous story-lines that are
developed with scenes running simultaneously throughout a performance space.
An audience member, who cannot be in more than one place at one time, makes
a series of choices that determines the flow of action - the "play", if
you will - being revealed to her. Different audience members experience
different "plays". In order to see all of the action, an audience
member must return to the performance many times. Hyperdrama is not for
everyone. Many people are upset by the profound changes in dramatic storytelling
that hyperdrama presents. For example:
-
In traditional theater, the audience sits in the dark and is "shown" a
story; in hyperdrama, the audience is mobile and puts together a particular
"version" of the story on the run, determined by the flow of action one
chooses to follow.
-
In traditional theater, there are main characters and minor characters;
in hyperdrama, all actors are in the performance space at all times, making
such distinctions meaningless.
-
In traditional theater, the audience practices voyeurism from a distance,
as if peeking through a window; in hyperdrama, the audience practices voyeurism
within the action itself, often watching the action by standing next to
the performers, sometimes even spoken to by an actor.
-
In traditional theater, the story is wrapped up at the end; in hyperdrama,
each "viewing" of "the play" serves as additional input into the grander
vision of the play that results when one finally has seen all of the action,
which usually takes many viewings.
-
In traditional theater, everyone sees the same play; in hyperdrama, each
audience member creates the play (defined as the flow of action one follows,
which is determined by individual choices along the way).
This kind of dynamic "create-your-own-play" on the run is not for everyone.
However, it is a model for how the real world works and as such
is more "real" than traditional theater. At my recent hyperdrama The
Bride of Edgefield, a former student of mine told me afterwards that
the play gave him a headache. "It was too real," he complained, "with too
much happening at the same time." This is not an unusual complaint. The
best way to get a feel for hyperdrama is to see a performance of one. However,
hyperdrama productions are few and far between. I have had six hyperdrama
scripts produced now, and if anyone else is this busy in the new form,
I haven't heard about them. Next to attending a hyperdrama, one can read
a hyperdrama script in hypertext, which gives the reader the same
kinds of choices made by the audience member in a live production. In live
hyperdrama, the choice always involves whether or not one follows an actor
who is leaving a scene - or whether one stays with the scene. These choices,
in the hypertext reading experience, are presented the same way, with particular
choices then linking to appropriate pages as the script continues. To demonstrate
this new form of theater, I have written a very short hyperdrama called
The
Deal. By no means is this great theater, but it is an example of the
form at work, created in a way that demonstrates how partial information
- a single viewing, for example - may not tell the complete story or even
the
correct story of the action. Read through this example more than once,
following different links, and you will begin to understand the rich complexity
that is at the heart of hyperdrama, a form that creates a theatrical event
as close to "real life" as it gets.
Begin "The
Deal" now
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