Most Net denizens know that privacy is hard to maintain on the Web. The issue takes on a creative bent though, when New York City's Peculiar Works Project plays with it.
The avant-garde theater company's latest project, Privileged & Confidential, examines the limitations of privacy in a technical world. Technology is both the subject and the prop, and cyberspace is the performance venue.
By utilizing PCs, video conferencing hardware and software, and ISDN lines, the play's anonymous playwright (who uses the pen name S.H. Dale) and producer Ralph Lewis intend for technology to serve as an underlying theme rather just as a means of presentation.
"Basically, we want people to confront their responsibility to protect themselves and others in terms of releasing information," said Lewis.
The script of Privileged & Confidential consists of text taken from real-life legal depositions and telephone transcripts. Some of the script was appropriated from what Dale photocopied while working a day job as a freelance legal assistant.
A majority of the text was downloaded from online postings of 911 telephone transcripts. The result is a nonlinear whodunit that involves a US$12.5 million financial deal gone sour and an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct at a multinational corporation.
"We want [the audience] to see how it's so easy for privileged information to become public. Think of how quickly information makes it onto the Web, potentially for millions to see," said Lewis.
Lewis declines to reveal more of the plot before opening night.
Lewis and Dale want to provoke their audience's paranoia about timely privacy issues spurred by the rapid acquisition and dissemination of information via the Web and other technologies. They do this partly by keeping the audience constantly aware of the equipment used, from cameras to computer workstations. It's all in plain view, as if they are set props.
"We put this piece together with technology in mind," said Lewis. "We're not trying to hide it." Privileged & Confidential will be presented Friday as a one-night-only event during the three-day Regional Alternative Theatre (RAT) conference in Los Angeles, which runs through 25 July. Five actors in New York City will videoconference with four actors in Los Angeles using an ISDN connection, on the concept that the performance is solely taking place in cyberspace, rather than at a particular physical venue.
The conversations between the actors are to be projected on large screens at both live sites. The actors are directed to respond to what they see on screen. Music, recorded on CD-ROMs, is played from PCs in both locations as a soundtrack.
The presentation of Privileged amp; Confidential is only open to attendees of the RAT conference. The performance is intended as a preview for future public presentations that, according to Lewis, will also utilize avatars, animation, and chat spaces incorporating dialogue from the play. The first public performance, which Lewis said will be open to online viewers as well, is tentatively planned in about six months.
"New technology is just getting introduced into the theater world's process of presentation versus their process of creation," said Cheryl Faver, the co-director of the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater, site of the New York portion of the performance. "But what distinguishes Peculiar Works is that they are actively producing work that considers new media as tools rather than as ways to achieve special effects."
Indeed, avid followers of "high tech" theater may recall 3-D computer graphics used as show-stopping visual devices in ongoing productions by San Francisco's George Coates Performance Works and in the latest Philip Glass opera, Monsters of Grace. And Douglas Davis, a New York City performance and Web artist, has incorporated streaming video into his production of his theater piece, This is Terrible Beauty, which has been touring internationally over the past year. In this work, a character in a remote location engages in a conversation, via the Internet, with Davis, seen onstage.
According to Lewis, the crew behind Private & Confidential carefully studied how other theater performers and producers use new technologies to decide what fresh approaches they could bring to the theater experience. Lewis cited the Web sites of Performance Channel and Franklin Furnace as inspiration. Both venues regularly stream live, cutting-edge theatrical pieces to online audiences.
John Reaves, a co-director of the Gertrude Stein Reperatory Theater, sees such uses of new media in a theater context as a growing trend.
"It's only natural that theater producers and performers are now requiring computer technology as components in their works," said Reaves. "It makes sense, because they have to take into account how their society communicates in order to be truly timely."
