Real Talk

Our society is always interested in the ‘real’; we want the truth and want to see real things happening to other people. Reality TV, sports, You Tube and many other forms of entertainment are always consumed more when we know something really happened. Twitter plays, durationals and futurist pieces are all about embracing real time, performing right here, right now. The time and pace of these forms of theatre are more believable to an audience, as opposed to going to see a play that covers a substantial amount of time. Take for example; since we all saw this play, Frankenstein, this play covers duration of two years in these characters lives. But obviously we aren’t sitting in the Shaver Theatre for two consecutive years, (which sounds like torture), the actors, technicians and directors have to help the audience believe that the time has transpired, which is asking the audience to suspend the disbelief quite a bit, to make the story feel real and truthful. We do this by changing costumes and having monologues that fill in the moments that aren’t played out, hence the reality effect we have been talking about can not be fulfilled, at least not to the most believable degree.

This is what Twitter plays do for us; they take out that suspention of disbelief and make these plays as real in time as possible. As we read for example, Such Tweet Sorrow, the carrying out of Romeo and Juliet in real time, Juliet making comments like, “It happened, cutest boy ever”. This seems more enticing to us because the characters lives are more relatable to audience members, instead of actors and playwrights, bringing you into their parameters of time, we get to share time together. I can relate more to a dramatic tweet that is posted at 3:00AM that says, “I can’t sleep, my boyfriend has to get out of here in an hour, so my parents don’t freak out #starcrossedlover”.

Relating back to my example above, Frankenstein takes you through a vague timeframe of two years; it would be interesting to do a Tweet play that has the pace of really being performed over the course of two years. Pace is an interesting part of the Twitter plays that allows us to indulge in the time it takes for some of these characters to go through these huge moments in their lives. We see the example of the, Next to Normal Titter play, that is performed over a duration of thirty five days, this in it of itself makes the drama more realistic, as two hours doesn’t do justice to the amount of time this family has to deal with their issues.

An example of pace and time that I think was very effective, was the durational film, Boyhood. This film documents a boy aging from a child through his early twenties. Now this is not a special effect or Benjamin Button situation. The director cast a young boy and took 12 years to film the project, watching one person literally age in real time. Not only did we see the same actor age, but also the entire cast remained the same. This to me was a major commitment to time and pace, allowing a project to take the time it needed to be as real as possible. You could also argue that the Harry Potter movies did the same thing, we watched pace and time be used to watch real people really getting older.

Regardless if the work is on Twitter, a stage or film, time and pace are tools that can really change up the way we entertain and effect the public. We can use new ways to reach out to an audience that is always focused on right here, right now.