I don’t do this often, but my Globe and Mail colleague Simon Houpt — who is based in New York — had a great piece today about the blurring of the lines that is going on between the Web, theatre, video and so on. He writes: “Here’s some advice for aspiring playwrights: Forget theatre school. Just start a blog.” Then he goes on to talk about several plays that use the Web and what you might call a “crowdsourcing” model:
“My First Time is an 80-minute collection of stories about first-time sexual experiences, performed by an eager-to-please quartet of two men and two women…
My First Time isn’t so much written as it is constructed from stories written by real people. The stories can be read on MyFirstTime.com, a website started in 1998 that now boasts 40,000 entries (no pun intended).”
Simon also mentions other productions, such as the WYSIWYG Talent Show, which he says “yanked bloggers out from behind their computer screens, made them change out of their pyjamas, and put them onstage at a downtown venue to bring their voice into the real (aka non-virtual) world.”
Nice story — read the whole thing.