Theatre meets Technology: The Technology Plays

From The New York Times:

In hindsight, Richard Dresser says, the commission was a painful test for a playwright, and he took it only because he thought nothing would ever come of it. But then the project landed a grant, and he was faced with what he had promised to do: write a seven-minute play about the interplay between man and technology, without live actors, to be told through machines to one person at a time.

"It took away everything I use as a playwright, basically," he said.

But the more Mr. Dresser, the author of "Rounding Third" and "The Education of Max Bickford," among other plays, meditated on those restrictions, the more he felt inspiration rising in his chest. After all, machines had insinuated themselves into the lives of people in a thousand forms, he said, so why shouldn't theater strike back and insinuate itself into machines?

The fruit of Mr. Dresser's labor, a playlet called "Greetings From the Home Office," is on display at the State University of New York here this month, along with works by the novelist William Kennedy and four other writers. (While Mr. Dresser and Mr. Kennedy were commissioned, the others won a university-sponsored competition for scripts.)

The project is called the Technology Plays, a theater experiment that is trying to take the old man-versus-machine theme to new extremes. The writers, led by Mr. Dresser and Mr. Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ironweed," have fashioned an unsettling exhibition challenging conventional notions of what theater can be and how it can be delivered.

Mary Valentis, an English professor who produced the plays, said the intent was to meld classic storytelling with new technologies to invent a new kind of theater and to raise questions about how technology has reshaped humanity. The display is a joint effort by the university and the Capital Repertory Theater here, underwritten by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and Apple Computer, among others. It will run through Wednesday at the New Atrium Library at the university and will reopen at the Capital Repertory in the spring. Admission is free.

Mr. Dresser's stab at the experiment is a strange hybrid, a mix of an art installation, a morality play and a computer game. Each solo audience member enters a booth where a run-of-the-mill office is set up; it quickly becomes apparent that he or she has just taken a new job. The new boss, a smarmy, disembodied voice, congratulates the hireling over an intercom. Then a colleague, slightly frantic and unhappy, calls on the telephone to inform the participant that the boss is corrupt. A secretary with a sexy voice interrupts several times by intercom, delivering mixed messages about the other characters.

Before long the audience member is caught in a spiraling moral dilemma, wondering whether to believe one character or another about a possible scandal. The tension builds until the theatergoer must make a pivotal decision about whom to trust, based solely on the voices and what appears on the computer screen. "I'm just trying to spread a little bit of discomfort, because I don't think there is enough of that in the world," Mr. Dresser said, chuckling.

The other five plays also take place in small booths that are sets. In Daniel Ho's "1 + 1 = 0," the booth is set up as a cybercafe, and the audience members act as voyeurs, peeping in on an online romance between two people while simultaneously listening to the voices of the lovers' spouses commiserating at the next table. The two conversations ?- one virtual, one real ?- overlap as Mr. Ho skillfully explores the meaning of a cyberaffair. Is computer sex simply a fantasy or a real betrayal?

"Chip" by Malcolm Messersmith is really an Automatic Teller Machine that begins to go haywire on its user. The machine reacts wildly when the identity chip supposedly implanted in the audience member's finger does not match its data. The identity, the machine says, flashing crazily, may have been stolen. Meanwhile, a woman on the telephone next to the machine tells the participant not to believe what the machine is saying. The tension builds as security forces close in, with the machine and the disembodied voice on the telephone giving conflicting advice. The disorienting results are at once frightening and somehow hilarious.

"I originally wanted it to be disturbing, and somehow it ended up being funny at the same time," Mr. Messersmith said, a bit puzzled at the audience reaction.

The other plays include "Beyond the Firewall," by Daniel J. Whalen, a wry commentary on fears of terrorism after 9/11, and "parse.a.PERSON" by Stacy Orsini, which revolves around an absurd computerized job interview.

But the most provocative is by Mr. Kennedy, who took his inspiration from some young computer experts who nearly beat the parimutuel betting system at Saratoga Race Course in Saratoga, N.Y., by hacking into its computer system and changing their bets after the races had been run. They won $3.2 million but were eventually caught.

Most of Mr. Kennedy's play, "In the System," is a dialogue between a traditional horse player with a hopelessly complex betting system and a computer geek who has figured out how to fix the bets after the race has been won. Both are involved in a love triangle with a woman on a pornographic Web site. There is also a subplot about a man attacked in his car by a deer he has hit; he is trying desperately to tell a 911 operator where he is.

The entire play, really a digital film, is played on an enormous computer screen that breaks up into different parts, giving the viewer several scenes at once. The climax involves six scenes, with the characters all stepping on one another's lines, giving the impression of a high-tech montage that somehow works not only as a climax but also as the denouement. Once again, the effect is disorienting and disturbing.

"It's been a very weird experience, which is what I was hoping for," Mr. Kennedy said. "It's really a sad story. All horse players die broke."

Yet the main conflict is really between Ace, who believes in the power of the cyberworld, and Deuce, who resists it. (Deuce screams, "You can't trust computers." Ace snaps back, "They are the only thing you can trust.") It is this Beckett-like dialogue that is constantly interrupted by the other media: the pornographic site where both men's lover writhes seductively, cellphones, television (showing horse races) and Deuce's office telephone, which inexplicably transmits a 911 call about a dog attacking a deer that is attacking a motorist.

"We are inventing the genre as we go, a genre in progress, so to speak," said Mr. Kennedy, who said he had always been leery of technology. (It took him six years to turn on the first computer he owned.)

But even the technology donated by Apple Computers was not enough to express his artistic vision. He had originally wanted nine streaming-video screens to be going at once in the climax of his piece, but the computer could not handle it.

Then there was the more practical roadblock presented by a deer's limited acting ability. "The problem was, we couldn't get a deer to lie down in the back seat of an automobile," Mr. Kennedy said, a bit remorsefully. "Some things you can do. Some things you cannot."