140 Characters in Search of a Theater: Twitter Plays

John H. Muse 1 40 Charact ers in Sear c h of a Theat er Twitter Plays 99 percent of Twitter is insigniicant. But there’s that rare moment when it becomes profound . . . — Jeremy Gable Since the 2006 inception of the microblogging service Twitter, some in the theater have embraced the social media phenomenon as a free publicity engine, as a platform for networking on the ly, and as a soapbox for amateur short-form dramatic criticism, sometimes composed before the curtain falls. Twitter updates, known as “tweets,” are limited in length to 140 characters, the one-time maximum length of an SMS (Short Message Service) text message. Since messages can be written and published in a matter of seconds, Twitter ofers this century a decentralized and nearly instantaneous version of what faits-divers newspaper updates ofered readers beginning in the late nineteenth century: an up-to-date accumulation of miscellaneous current events from the banal to the cataclysmic. That Twitter is reshaping publicity and journalism is old news; that it may have lasting repercussions for the composition and performance of twenty-irst-century literature and theater is somewhat more surprising. Responding to the implicit challenge of the platform’s extreme formal constraint, writers have composed Twitter poems,1 Twitter microiction, 2 Twitter novels, Twitter ilm scripts, Twitter opera,3 and, thanks to a handful of media-savvy playwrights, a growing number of Twitter plays. However trendy or trivial Twitter theater in its current forms may seem, its advent deserves critical attention because it ofers a particularly rich instance of the ways social media are reshaping both playwriting and the experience of theatrical spectatorship. To examine the ways artists are enlisting Twitter for theatrical ends reveals not only that playwrights are colonizing Twitter but also the extent to which social media are making playwrights, performers, and spectators of us all. Twitter drama has emerged in two basic varieties: single-tweet plays and plays performed as a series of messages. The authors of single-tweet plays, the more radical of the two forms, push theater to its most lapidary extreme by attempting to compose a complete play in 140 typed characters. In the second, more common variety of Twitter theater, a series of posts by one or more characters constitutes a performance in real time but in virtual space. After ofering a survey of recent theatrical activity of both Theater 42:2 doi 10.1215/01610775-1507784 © 2012 by John H. Muse 43 Such Tweet Sorrow on Twitter, presented by Mudlark and the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2010. Photo: Charles Hunter  types, this article focuses attention on two case studies — a collection of single-tweet plays spearheaded by the New York Neo-Futurists, and Jeremy Gable’s original Twitter play The th Line — in order to highlight two very diferent ways Twitter is catalyzing theatrical innovation.4 Despite their diferences, single-tweet plays that seem to end as soon as they begin and Twitter performances that stretch over weeks or months both demonstrate the potential for social media to interrogate assumptions about theater. What is a play? Can one it on the screen of a cell phone? Does reading updates in private count as attending a play? Twitter theater bears some resemblance to closet drama, another form consumed privately that asks spectators to imagine unseen action, and yet these closet dramas are created and performed in real time for an audience. Twitter theater also shares similarities with radio drama — both forms broadcast verbal action simultaneously to distant spectators — but unlike radio plays, the action of Twitter plays is intermittent, proceeding in its and starts as updates ilter in among a user’s other activity on Twitter. Unlike both closet drama and radio drama, Twitter is a necessarily staccato format. Like Expressionist authors early in the last century who drafted plays inspired by telegraphy, the authors of single-tweet plays embrace abbreviating technologies to create self-suicient plays in highly compressed form. But more than previous experimental forms did, one-tweet plays, due to their sheer numbers, the diversity of their authors, and the ease with which they can be published, relect a publication landscape that is radically democratized. Meanwhile, works like The th Line that call attention to current events and ape the format of ordinary interactions on Twitter reveal Twitter’s potential to blur the line between everyday life and performance in new, historically speciic ways. Precisely because they eschew traditional stages in favor of Twitter’s wide and universal theater, Twitter plays help to expose the newly fragile distinction in a digital age between theatrical spectatorship and the experience of real-life events. Tw it t er S tag e s: A Surv e y The most extreme form of Twitter drama is the single-tweet play. A handful of amateur playwrights have explored this most microscopic of canvases, 5 but the center of activity for one-tweet plays has been the New York branch of the Neo-Futurists. The Neo-Futurists are best known for another adventure in short form, their ongoing performances of thirty original plays in sixty minutes. But beginning in March 2009, the troupe’s New York branch began asking fans to post single-tweet plays in response to weekly prompts (e.g., “Write a 1-tweet play that has dialogue and at least 3 actors,” or “Write a 1-tweet play that has a big kiss in it”).6 The response has been enthusiastic; by March 2012 the site had published more than 4,150 miniscule dramas by about 800 authors.7 Can 140 characters “hold the vasty ields of France”? Droves of eager playwrights seem to think so, and however irreverent the resulting plays can be, their authors’ playful struggles to shrink theater onto miniature canvases help reveal the lim44 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er its of drama, and the enthusiasm of their creators suggests Twitter’s potential to change the face of the avant-garde. The second, more widespread variety of Twitter theater takes its cue from Twitter’s inherent theatricality and stages ictional interactions among one or more characters through a series of real-time updates. In the rest of this section, I describe three related and sometimes overlapping variations on long-form Twitter theater: adaptations, impersonations, and original plays. Twitter adaptations convert traditional plays into Twitter’s format so that each line or stage direction its within the conines of a single update. Impersonations use a single Twitter account to give virtual life to a famous, imaginary, or historical character. Original Twitter plays allow audiences to follow an ongoing drama among multiple, original characters. Whatever the subgenre, one joins the audience of a Twitter performance by subscribing to or “following” the updates from each character. As a result, the dramaturgical logic of Twitter-based theater is tied to characters rather than locations. While the constraints of physical stages restrict most traditional plays to one or more spaces — so that we follow the comings and goings in front of Agamemnon’s house or within Hedda Gabler’s — Twitter theater allows one to follow voices and to imagine them in diferent locations, or in no particular location. To date, the most popular Twitter stagings have been adaptations. One of the early pioneers in this genre was the Broadway production of Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s musical Next to Normal. Beginning in May 2009, the production supplemented its Pulitzer- and Tony-award winning stage show with a Twitter version performed over thirty-ive days as a series of updates by the six main characters.8 Instead of watching a neurotic twenty-irst-century family cope with chronic depression on stage, the Twitter audience got a tantalizing, oblique perspective on the family’s crisis by follow- Next to Normal on Twitter, 2010. Photo: Situation Interactive 45  ing via computers and smartphones the characters’ ongoing commentary on their ictional lives. The show’s online audience — which grew to more than 145,000 over the month-long performance — experienced a capsulated version of the show complete with links allowing them to listen to excerpts of songs. Mid-morning on the second day, for example, the audience received the following ominous glimpse into a developing conlict:  — scared. Appointment with Dr. Fine. He speaks in riddles.  — taking wife to doctor. Everything’ll be ine. Just another day . . .  — agreed to hang out with this Henry kid. Don’t know why. Total pretentious stoner type. And wears . . . wait for it . . . lannel.  — Mom going to the doctor today . . . not a fan of the doctor. He’s creepy. Loves pills.  — has gotta think up a good date place for a Thursday night? Any suggestions? .  — it’s true. It’s not an exact science. But eventually you get it right.  — at Dr. Fine, my psychopharmacologist. It’s like an odd romance. He knows my deepest secrets. I know his, um, name.  “My Psychopharmacologist and I,” http://tr.im/kFzK9 As reprinted on the show’s website, the format resembles a traditional script, but like most activity on Twitter, these lines do not follow the rules of ordinary conversation. Since most updates are addressed to no one in particular, exchanges are usually less like conversations than a series of miniature soliloquies that arrive every so often instead of one after the other. Just as Twitter messages typically supplement everyday activity and comment on it, these virtual dramas run in parallel to the main action and ask viewers to reconstruct its contours indirectly. In addition to tracking characters’ observations, readers can follow links that augment the experience. For example, the inal message above, from “Hear,” converts a speech preix into an instruction, inviting the audience to click on a link to hear an excerpt of the song “My Psychopharmacologist and I.” Following a stream of updates and sound clips is no substitute for watching Next to Normal, but the Twitter performance provides just enough information to intrigue viewers, to draw them into the virtual lives of the characters, and, presumably, to convince some of them to purchase tickets to the stage show. A story about middle-class Americans in the twenty-irst century, the sort of people already on Twitter, lends itself easily to a Twitter adaptation. Next to Normal ’s Twitter performance imported many lines from the show’s book or lyrics with little or no editing. Other Twitter adaptations have undertaken more radical translation. In April and May 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark produced Such Tweet Sorrow, a loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet broadcast via the Twitter updates of nine characters over ive weeks.10 The project asks how the story might have unfolded if Romeo and Juliet were contemporary teens kissing not by the book but by the text 46 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er message. Actors playing each character improvised updates, guided by a story grid adapted by Tom Wright and inluenced by input from the play’s virtual audience and by contemporaneous events such as the British election. Each line was short enough to tweet, but the production as a whole expanded the play, stretching each act to a week and converting Shakespeare’s 3,052 lines into more than 4,000 messages in an efort to convince the audience that the characters were living full lives at the pace of real life. The adaptation replaced Shakespeare’s poetry with the casual and emoticon-laced lingo of text messages. In place of Juliet’s bittersweet aubade in the original, It is the lark that sings so out of tune, Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps. Some say the lark makes sweet division; This doth not so, for she divideth us.11 followers received this early morning gush, “Goooooooooood morningggggg :):):):):):) It happened . . . with THE most beautiful boy alive. . . . IT happened :):):):):).” 12 If Shakespeare by any other idiom might not smell as sweet, the very diiculty of reducing his poetry to instant messages unwittingly underscored one of the play’s central lessons: “. . . they stumble that run fast.”13 Much as Such Tweet Sorrow used Twitter to reincarnate both Romeo and Juliet in present-day London, a more recent project called Reorbit encourages writers to reanimate historical and literary igures by impersonating them on Twitter. Cocreator Ericson deJesus wondered to himself in an idle moment several years ago, what if Laurence of Arabia had a Twitter feed? Several years later, he and designer Dawn Danby launched Reorbit, a social media theater troupe whose fanciful Twitter posts ofer “posthumous social media vitality” to a wide range of authors and characters, including Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand, Hamlet, Jack Kerouac, Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, Samuel Beckett, the hal 9000 robot from : A Space Odyssey, and T. S. Eliot, among others.14 Once selected by the curators, interested writer/actor/directors devise a scenario or “play” in which to cast their personality, and post one or more messages a day in character for an audience of online followers. Where Twitter adaptations follow a preexisting script, these impersonations invent or improvise their own. The writers are given few restrictions but are asked to avoid Twitter’s slang in favor of language that best suits the character. A revived teenage Samuel Beckett opines, for example, “Writing this way, writing in bits, has an appeal, has a pleasing brevity, the momentary pause discovered between dry heave and stomach cramp,”15 and a faux T. S. Eliot, on a lunch break during his time as a bank teller, writes, “Lunchless again, This time with intent. Sushi on Saturday is a risk undesired, So too the prepackaged what-have-yous. Trust only in fruit.”16 Some writer/actors imagine their igure sending updates from his or her historical milieu; others resituate their luminary in a presentday scenario, either accurate or absurd. So Arthur Miller moves to Venice Beach and becomes a surfer; Sylvia Plath survives her suicide attempt and is commissioned to 47  write a one-act play in Northbrook, Illinois; and Charles Bukowski, J. D. Salinger, and Franz Kafka ind themselves living together in San Francisco and competing to ind the best date. The Reorbit project resembles a growing number of Twitter impersonations — from the satirical doppelgangers of Rahm Emanuel and Steve Jobs, to faux updates from Laurence Sterne and other authors, to a radically feminist incarnation of The Hulk17 — but stands out both for the literary merit of its contributors and its insistence that the experiment is essentially theatrical. Its creators call the project “an experiment in social media theater” and dub the collected updates “plays.” Like actors, the contributors are “embodying that character, understanding what’s driving them” and performing alternate reality versions of their lives.18 The goal, Danby says, is “to infuse art into the mundane. There’s so much marketing and advertising on [Twitter], and we wanted to do something diferent, something inherently performative.”19 Although the project to date has been limited to Twitter, its creators would love to see Twitter used to create hybrid performances that stretch across multiple platforms as Next to Normal ’s experiment did: “You are a playwright and you have a play coming out. In the months leading up, you introduce the main character via a Reorbit. As the character develops, it generates interest in the play. The audience can discover the character before or after seeing the play.”20 Like other makers of Twitter theater, the creators of Reorbit set out to explore Twitter’s potential as “a platform for performance.” But as I will suggest in the third section of this article, theatrical or pseudotheatrical activity has arguably found a life on Twitter precisely because Twitter has always been a platform for performance. A smaller but in some ways more fascinating set of Twitter performances are original plays imagined as realistic conversations among a group of Twitter users. Amateur playwright Jeremy Gable initiated the genre in the summer of 2009. Gable set up Twitter accounts for four ictional characters living in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and from June to August posted more than three hundred updates comprising : A Twitter Performance, the irst recorded original play on Twitter.21  introduced Gable to the challenges of Twitter dramaturgy. Asking audiences to follow a developing story through updates meted out over two months involved a constant struggle to maintain their interest: “When the play is ninety minutes, you can build up to the exciting moments. When you’re asking an audience to spend sixty days with your story, you have to give them a reason to pay attention.”22 So when he set out to write his second piece for Twitter in early 2010, Gable took a lesson from other serialized long-form narratives (soap operas, comic strips) and constructed a story designed to catch attention and sustain it. The th Line: A Play of Brief Communication began on January 25, 2010, with a post from a newspaper reporter announcing a disaster in an unnamed city — “Breaking News — Subway accident at 15th St Station. 21 believed dead. 17 injured. Cause is not yet known”23 — and for the next two months followed the reporter and ive other imaginary characters whose lives intertwine in the aftermath of the accident. He later compiled the messages and published them online as a collated script. 48 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er Gable is not alone in devising original performances for Twitter. In 2010, a group of professional screenwriters organized Crushin’ It, a week-long original romantic comedy improvised by its characters (each played by a diferent writer) according to a loose scenario that evolved in response to audience input.24 A more recent production attempted to bridge the divide between live and digital theater using both Twitter and Skype. You Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives in Texas/You Wouldn’t Know Her, She Lives in London, coproduced by the London-based Look Left Look Right and the Austinbased Hidden Room, connected audiences in London and Austin via Skype under the pretense that a transatlantic couple, Liz and Ryan, are introducing their extended families to each other. Both the live audience and anyone following along on Twitter were encouraged to participate by posting comments or questions.25 While all of these forays into distributed real-time performance merit discussion, in what follows I focus on the Neo-Futurist one-tweet plays and Jeremy Gable’s th Line as representative examples of two varieties of Twitter theater that prompt fascinating questions. One-tweet plays ask, even more insistently than previous shorts, what it means to be a play and what it means to be a playwright. While single-tweet plays never allow readers to suspend disbelief, The th Line attempts to create a parallel dramatic universe that one follows just as one might follow other friends on Twitter. In the process, it illuminates the increasingly porous border between everyday life and performance in a mediated age. Nanodrama: Sing l e-Tw ee t Pl ay s The Neo-Futurists have a reputation for insisting that a brief collection of moments can constitute a play. In their signature show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, the troupe attempts to perform thirty plays in an hour under the insistent countdown of an onstage darkroom timer. Following their Italian namesakes and a smattering of other twentieth-century theatrical innovators, the Neo-Futurists repudiate many of the tenets of traditional playwriting, especially the reliance on gradual exposition and the pretense of illusion. 26 They share with the Futurists an irreverent, playful, and provocative attitude; a penchant for manifestos; a love of simultaneity; and an unapologetic embrace of the possibilities of brevity. Founder Greg Allen explains that the Neo-Futurists believe that “you can, in fact, write a two-minute play with just as much depth and humor and poignancy as something that takes ive acts, twenty characters, ifteen set changes, and two hours and ten minutes to complete. Perhaps — dare we say it? — we can achieve even more.”27 Too Much Light, which began as a late-night underground stunt in 1988, has become the longest-running show in Chicago and has spawned a second troupe of Neo-Futurists in New York. The success of Too Much Light suggests that audiences by and large agree that a collection of two-minute plays can make for satisfying theater. Twitter Plays, an initiative spearheaded by the New York branch of the troupe, represents a far more extreme test of the minimum limits of dramaturgical possibility, a leap from microdrama to nanodrama. 49  The th Line on Twitter, by Jeremy Gable, 2010. Photo: Jeremy Gable In March 2009, the New York Neo-Futurists began asking their online followers to post plays the length of a single Twitter post. In the group’s improvisational spirit, and to make the challenge even greater, each week they posted constraints to guide composition. The irst week, followers were asked to “Write a full play (1-tweet) using at least 2 roles and a signiicant prop.” Later prompts strayed playfully farther aield, asking variously for plays that have “something to do with a ish,” that feature “an anachronistic robot,” that have two acts and an intermission, and that include more than one of the following sound efects: “beep, splash, whoosh, crunch.”28 To date the experiment has generated more than 4,150 plays, each of which was broadcast to the Neo-Futurists’ Twitter followers, a group that as of March 2012 includes 3,950 people and constitutes both the audience and the pool of potential playwrights for the project.29 At least 650 of those followers have tried their hands at authoring 140-character plays. Collectively, they have produced what is certainly the world’s largest collection of two-line plays, and to my knowledge the largest published collection of plays of any kind. One of the driving hypotheses of my ongoing research on theatrical brevity has been that examining very short plays helps to expose basic assumptions about dramatic form.30 As artists and writers reduce theater to its essential elements, they suggest different answers to the question of what about theater might be irreducible. To oversimplify, if Maurice Maeterlinck’s static dramas and some of Samuel Beckett’s shorts imply that theater is essentially waiting, Filippo Marinetti’s synthetic theater suggests its particular specialty is shock and surprise. The two-minute plays in the Neo-Futurists’ live shows are susceptible to the hypothesis as well. While their programmatic diversity frustrates generalizations, on the whole their microdramas emphasize theater’s potential to generate genuine, if leeting, human connections. Extreme brevity enforced by a ticking clock reminds the audience that, as their founder Greg Allen puts it, “Theater takes place in real time and space. The audience is right in front of you right now.” 31 But what of single-tweet plays? What might we learn about dramatic form from attempts to write plays in 140 characters (or about two lines of text printed on a stan50 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er dard page) when the audience is no longer present? By and large, these nanodramas exaggerate the tendencies that characterize other short drama. But their extreme minimalism tests to the breaking point the strategies brevity tends to encourage — surprising reversals, familiar plots, types and stock characters, non sequiturs, cheap gags, and so on. While few of the single-tweet plays call out for production as written, a number have formed the basis for two-minute plays in Too Much Light, and the New York NeoFuturists staged ifty-three of them at a free performance in June 2009 as part of the Fourth Arts Block’s Pride Goes East Street Festival. But measuring these plays against the yardstick of production is to miss the point. They are playful responses to a series of dares that nevertheless relect deep-seated ideas about what a play must do. For one, many single-tweet plays suggest, along with Aristotle, that the sine qua non of drama is reversal: : It was I who killed the king! (Lights sharply go to black. A gunshot is heard.) end of play.”32 : How much water? b: Two days, tops. a: So, four. b: Four? What do you . . . (Beat.) Ah. (Pause.) Well, fuck you too.33 In this respect, they resemble another ancient short form featuring reversals: jokes. Like vaudeville blackouts, one-tweet plays often use an abrupt ending as a punch line: “She wanted to prove her love for her man’s passions. She stepped into his striped clown pants; there was room for 2.”34 The authors of Neo-Futurist Twitter plays understand, like the Italian Futurists before them, that abbreviation is inherently funny. If any abridgment tends to render plots more artiicial and parodic, reducing stories to bones this bare often pushes them over the border from parodic to ridiculous. “The Fall” by Martin Schecter, for instance, compresses the fall of man to its thinnest outline, but it ofers little knowledge (good, evil, or otherwise) in the process: “she: Apple? he: Why, sure. god (voiceover): Get out of my yard, you scraggamuins!”35 Similarly, a shrunken version of Waiting for Godot by Paul Hayes suggests, with tongue in cheek, that Beckett’s play might just as well have had three lines: “vladimir: Godot? estragon: Hold me. pozzo: What the hell are you two talking about? godot: . . . (Curtain.).”36 Such reductions work best when they reveal the macabre joke at the heart of tragedy’s cruel ironies: “a: I have no food. b: There is a famine. a: I will kill a rich man and take his food. (kills man) b: That was your father.”37 Nanodramas are under even more pressure than most shorts to replace characterization with plot. They are typically populated by anonymous igures (often named A or B), by stock igures, or by celebrities whose history provides their character. If most one-tweet plays respond to this pressure by focusing on a signiicant or surprising series of actions, others follow Maeterlinck in attempting to capture the intensity and drama inherent in apparently static moments: 51  The moon is silent; empty. There stands Chris smiling ear to ear. Earth tries to pull him back but love keeps him there. A Tuesday.38 ::big kiss that lasts for 30 seconds, trumpets go of 10 seconds in, rose petals fall after 20 seconds::39 If all short drama tacitly argues that a small amount of material can be worthy of regard, single-tweet plays like these represent the most extreme version of this contention. They use Twitter, a platform dedicated to the idea that the trivial might merit consideration, to test the more radical proposition that almost any sliver of life can constitute an aesthetic whole. To broadcast a message on Twitter is to cast oneself in a miniature drama; single-tweet plays merely formalize this implicit theatricality. Despite their wild variety, single-tweet plays are united in their theatrical selfconsciousness. Here again, nanodramas resemble other shorts. Ruminating on endings, Henry J. Schmidt observes that as the moment of closure approaches, the [literary] work tends to become selfconscious, seemingly aware of the judgmental presence of the reader, who, having been captured, must be successfully released. . . . The resulting exertion renders art more artiicial, theater more theatrical, as the literary work builds to a inal lourish before it disappears from view.40 But what if the whole play consists of the few moments before an ending? When a play is nothing more than a moment of closure, it carries throughout the same sort of self-consciousness and artiiciality that characterize traditional endings and puts more relexive pressure on its own conventions. Ending from the moment they begin, onetweet plays call attention to the arbitrary convention of dramatic closure. Quite apart from the content of the Neo-Futurist–inspired Twitter plays, the sheer number and the diversity of their authors might be their most signiicant feature. Through Twitter, the Neo-Futurists have created a de facto community of hundreds of amateur playwrights and allowed them to collaborate in an ongoing experiment writing and sharing impossible plays. Whatever limitations Twitter has as a medium of composition, and I do not wish to downplay them, one potential virtue of removing the organizational barriers to publishing is that it can encourage people lacking the access, inancial means, or courage needed to pursue avant-garde playwriting to spend time inventing microdramas featuring ish and anachronistic robots. While these plays at times resemble historical antecedents like newspaper faits-divers or Futurist syntheses, their historical predecessors are available to us only because they were produced by newspaper staf or by professional aesthetes with access to means of publication. The Neo-Futurist Twitter play project, by contrast, spearheaded the production and collection of thousands of impossible nanodramas by almost eight hundred unknown avantgardists working in their spare time. I cannot help but feel this is a good thing. Clearly, Twitter and other Internet-based publication platforms are not available to everyone. 52 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er Despite pronouncements about a lat world, only an estimated 12 percent of Africans have Internet access,41 and activities like Twitter playwriting are further restricted in practice to the subset with the leisure and inclination to wander online. Despite these qualiications, social media are laying the groundwork for a new theatrical avant-garde that is less centralized, less elite, and less invested than their predecessors. A Wide and Univ ersal Theat er : T H E  T H L I N E One of the contributors sending single-tweet plays to the Neo-Futurists was a young playwright and actor named Jeremy Gable. Gable started posting one-tweet plays in June 2009, the same week he began his irst original Twitter performance, , and he submitted at least one play a week to the Neo-Futurists for roughly a year and a half, producing a total of eighty-four single-tweet plays. One of Gable’s submissions winks at the frustrations such a miniature canvas entails for playwrights: (Lights) . : Why must I express myself in 140 characters? I demand length, elasticity. You cannot stile m . . . (Bows)42 53 You Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives in Texas/ You Wouldn’t Know Her, She Lives in London, created by Look Left Look Right (London) and Hidden Room Theatre (Austin), 2011. Photo: John Anderson  Gable’s long-form experiments in Twitter theater ofered a possible solution: keep Twitter’s real-time distribution and pithiness, but add length and a measure of elasticity by extending the iction for months at a time. Unlike single-tweet plays, original plays written as Twitter conversations could masquerade as typical activity on the platform. Gable’s The th Line, an early experiment in this incipient genre, provides an excellent test case because it aimed to look and feel as much like normal Twitter behavior as possible while also providing a compelling dramatic experience. As a result, The th Line, far more than one-tweet plays, raises fundamental questions about the increasingly mediated performance of everyday life. Like most Twitter performances, The th Line asked audience members to follow the action by subscribing to the Twitter updates of ictional characters. But unlike performances like Such Tweet Sorrow or Crushin’ It, in which updates were improvised by a number of actor/writers, The th Line was a one-man show. Gable wrote nearly all of the more than nine hundred updates in advance. During the run, he posted all of the characters’ messages at the appropriate days and times, using the script to guide the real-time performance much as one would in a solo staged reading. While the production was designed to be best experienced by following each of the character’s accounts on Twitter, Gable also compiled the script on a single page to make it easier for nonusers to join the audience, and published the complete script to his web page after the two-month performance.43 That the collated version looks very much like a play obscures its radical diference from most plays. Although one can now read the online script in a single sitting, the original audience of around 250 followers watched the play accumulate over eight weeks. Gable is not opposed to the idea of letting others stage his Twitter pieces, but he told me he has little interest in staging them himself because to do so would strip the genre of its most distinctive feature: its pace.44 The th Line is designed to work best as slow-drip microserial dramaturgy that unfolds over long The th Line, 2010. Photo: Jeremy Gable 54 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er stretches of time. So while the performance was free of charge — as in fact all Twitter theater to date has been — it required a signiicant investment of time and attention, paid in nearly one thousand tiny installments. The th Line began in medias res on January 25, 2010, with the breaking news of an unexplained subway crash in an unnamed metropolis. For the next two months, the story followed four characters whose lives intersect as a result of the ictional accident: a survivor named Melissa; her college classmate Seth, who witnesses the crash and runs away; Dustin, a thirty-ive-year-old therapist who loses his wife in the accident; and Patrick, an overbearing journalist for the city newspaper. The characters use Twitter as one means among others to learn more about the incident, to mourn, and to ind human connection. As the updates accumulate over days and weeks, the audience pieces together a story (familiar to many after September 11, 2001) about the way catastrophe reshules priorities, brings strangers into contact, and has repercussions beyond its site of impact. Despite the play’s diferences from traditional drama, the subtitle of The th Line, “A Play of Brief Communication,” announces the project as part of a dramatic tradition. When I asked Gable what he thought makes this accumulation of narrative updates a play, he pointed to two characteristics the piece shares with stage plays: it was written in “dramatic script format,” and it was performed “in front of an audience in real time.”45 By this deinition, The th Line, like most Twitter adaptations, shares elements both with closet drama and with staged performance but remains a generic riddle somewhere between script and performance. The liminal space of Twitter makes The th Line a closet drama performed publicly, and a broadcast performance that is silent and consumed privately. Perhaps the most salient aspect of the generic riddle of The th Line is that the characteristics that for Gable make the piece a play — its resemblance to a script and its real-time performance — also apply to most activity on Twitter. The th Line reminds us why the marriage of theater and Twitter should come as no surprise. In its everyday use, Twitter, like theater, is a social medium deeply committed to representation in “real time,” predicated on vicarious observation of other lives, and often dominated by those unafraid of self-promotion, narcissism, or oversharing. Whether used for explicit playmaking or not, Twitter already constitutes an enormous, continual distributed theater of the everyday in which a cast numbering more than 200 million strut and fret upon virtual stages for the beneit of audiences who follow their every move or thought. The site originally greeted every visitor with a blank box posing the question, “What are you doing?,” prompting users, much like an improvisational game by the same name, to describe their actions. Twitter transmutes the lines of a diary into the perpetual lowgrade performance of autocommentary before an audience of casual and occasional observers. Twitter also shares formal similarities with drama. For one, its format closely resembles the layout of a play script, albeit with the addition of a few unique conventions. A user name or “handle” precedes each message much as speech preixes in a 55  script attribute lines of dialogue to a given character, and many Twitter updates include paratext that works similarly to stage directions. When a user publicly addresses or responds to another, for instance, she marks the message with an “@” sign followed by the person’s user name: : @angiannini89 Would you be available for a follow-up interview? : @pattycitypress Sure. Do you still have my phone number? : @angiannini89 Actually, I was hoping that this time we might meet in person. Would tonight work?46 An exchange like this one would be visible to anyone following Patrick and Angela, but readers understand to whom each message is directed just as they would if reading the stage direction “(to Angela).” This convention replicates the most common form of address in staged theater: two or more people carry on a private conversation in public, but act as if they are unobserved. As on stage, on Twitter the pretense of privacy can easily be suspended, as in this relexive exchange from The th Line: : @angiannini89 Sorry if last night was weird. I don’t normally do that. I was on a bit of a natural high last night. : @turnbullseth It’s okay. I just need some time. Anyway, we shouldn’t talk about it here. : @angiannini89 Oh. Right. Sorry.47 Other conventions also call attention to Twitter’s staginess. For instance, Twitter users have developed their own version of the theatrical aside through the creative use of hashtags. Hashtags originally emerged as a low-tech solution to Twitter’s lack of categorization. In order to allow others to ind messages about a particular event or subject, Twitter users began labeling their updates with words preceded by the symbol #. If a user wrote, “I’m loving this opening number! #TonyAwards,” anyone interested in the Tony Awards could ind relevant messages by searching for the hashtag. Creative users soon began using hashtags in other ways, too, frequently to indicate a sort of sotto voce aside commenting on a situation (e.g., “My mother is still hugging my boyfriend #killmenow”) or undercutting a statement (“Best production of Othello ever! #InTheirDreams”).48 No longer useful for categorization, these creative tags, like the theatrical asides that inspire them, mark the messages as public speech from which we imagine some people are excluded. From this perspective, the hash mark may be superluous; many if not most Twitter messages operate like asides about life’s dramas whispered to a like-minded digital peanut gallery. The growing resemblance of hashtags to dramatic paratext has even led some users to employ hashtags as explicit stage directions. A user named Emily Corlen posted the following messages in May 2010, not as part of a Twitter play but simply as an improvised addition to her everyday interactions on Twitter: 56 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er EmilyCorlen @JMavPWA You . . . you know Johnny, you are so FUCKING dense sometimes! #StartsToLeave #TurnsAround You’re NOT the only one with demons! #Exits EmilyCorlen @JMavPWA . . . #StandsUp #FoldsArms #BackToYou #Silent #MayBeCrying49 Emily does not just send these messages to Johnny; she imagines them unfolding on a virtual stage. While the use of recognizable stage directions is rare on Twitter, messages like these make explicit the tacit theatricality of a forum driven by self-display and traicking in public drama of every sort. In addition to looking like scripts, Twitter’s little everyday dramas take place in shared time. Creators of Twitter drama, like many theater makers, insist on the central importance of its pace. A Facebook group dedicated to Twitter theater prefers the platform because on Twitter, “characters don’t just have lines on a page, but full lives which are updated in real time.”50 By “real time,” they mean not that every action represented takes precisely as much time as the representation, but rather that the updates are crafted so as to create the illusion that the characters are living at the same pace as ordinary people and in the same time as the viewers. Compared to stage drama, however, the pace of Twitter theater is halting. Conversation lows in chronological order, but exchanges are sporadic and intermittent, and since each user follows a different cast of characters, not all of the participants can hear each other. As a result, following an accumulation of solo and duet scenes on Twitter can feel more like channel suring than sitting down to read or watch a play. Like the ilmic “Wandering Rocks” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the perspective wanders in and out of the lives of nineteen Dubliners, describing bits of action and overhearing snatches of the inner monologues, Twitter allows discontinuous panoptic voyeurism. The important diference from Joyce’s Dublin, of course, is that in this case each of the participants encourages the surveillance and ilters or exaggerates her thoughts accordingly. The result is not stream of consciousness but a stream of self-consciousness. In November 2009, after Twitter’s purview had expanded to include not only descriptions of buying milk but also journalistic updates about revolutions, the site changed its prompt from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” The new solicitation retained its emphasis on action but shifted the focus away from the irst person. What had been envisioned as a space to share life’s little private dramas began to realize a secondary potential to create a global record of the drama of everyday life, a fragmentary theater of the world. The world has taken notice: on April 14, 2010, the Library of Congress announced that it would acquire every post made on Twitter since its debut in March 2006. As a result, billions of messages that would otherwise twitter and fade in the echo chamber of the Internet will now make up one of the largest (if least articulate) archives of contemporary experience: a dormant documentary theater composed of an efectively ininite number of ininitesimal slices of life. 57  Vi rtual Real ism With his Twitter plays, Gable speciically aimed to recreate the pace, content, and feel of real digital events and relationships. He wanted both plays to read “like Twitter posts from real people,” in order to make the experience “as convincing as possible.”51 Gable read widely on Twitter as research for the piece and used his familiarity to write updates in The th Line that ape the platform’s style and form, complete with misspellings, ill-advised posts followed by retractions, and the impression of hasty composition. The th Line’s updates, arriving at appropriate times of day mixed in among updates from actual Twitter users, aimed to convince audience members that Angela, Dustin, Patrick, and Seth were living in tandem with them. Focusing on an urban disaster and including updates from a ictional journalist reinforced the impression that this could be real activity on Twitter, and setting the action in an unnamed city made it easier for those in or near cities to imagine that the accident was local or regional. To further cement the illusion that its alternate universe is our own, the characters in The th Line made reference to actual current events that transpired during the run, including the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day. So when, on the morning after President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, followers received an update from Patrick asking, “Did President Obama’s State of the Union address help diminish our nation’s fears?”52 it was easier for American audience members to imagine that Patrick’s nation really was our nation. In live theater on a stage or on the radio, both actors and audience must generally ignore the artiiciality of the theatrical convention that warrants a group of strangers to surveil other strangers. Twitter theater, however, can produce more thorough realism because the means by which one observes and interacts with characters is in fact identical to the ways one follows the lives of actual friends, acquaintances, or strangers on Twitter. In an interview before the debut of , Gable underscored his aim to mirror the voyeuristic theatricality of Twitter: “Just as the service [Twitter] ofers you a glimpse into the life of friends and celebrities, so [] will ofer you a glimpse into the lives of these four characters.”53 Where a naturalist stage play might ofer a two-hour slice of life, realist Twitter theater provides a series of miniature slices mixed in among slices of the lives of real people, over a period of weeks or months. Gable told me that he wanted audiences to experience The th Line from day to day over two months “so that the adventures of the characters become as important as the adventures of the audience’s friends and family.”54 In this way, an intermittent pace that might seem to attenuate a performance actually reinforces its reality efect. We might call this brand of digitally enabled verisimilitude “virtual realism.” This realism is virtual not in the sense that it is nearly or almost real, but rather in that it accurately reproduces real-life experiences, characters, and relationships which are themselves increasingly virtual. Like closet drama, radio drama, and virtual reality simulations, The th Line relies on the mind to ill in the contours of the event. But unlike other simulations, it recreates experiences that in their everyday manifes- 58 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er tations invoke our imaginative powers in much the same way: the dramas of online acquaintances that we follow from afar, the spectacles of tragedies experienced remotely rather than in person. As social networking becomes more pervasive, we often follow the lives of loved ones and celebrities not by being with them but by tuning in to mediated updates from them or about them. Gable told me that this potential attracted him to the genre: “[Following someone online] you can see that an acquaintance started a relationship, take a look at their pictures, read their updates, and then ind out that they’re single again. Without having talked to them, you get a narrative of their life. So with a Twitter play, you have a chance of drawing people further into your story, as it is happening in the midst of their real lives.”55 A platform renowned for abbreviation and casual surveillance helps facilitate a low-intensity marathon of observation that is potentially indistinguishable from the rhythms of an increasingly digital real life. The virtual nature of Twitter’s identities and relationships augments its potential to confuse reality and iction and makes it an ideal venue for dramatic hoaxes. To be sure, Gable’s news updates about a ictional disaster, unlike Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938, were unlikely to cause audiences to panic. Followers of The th Line had to decide to subscribe to the characters’ updates and would have retained a sense that the scenario is imaginary. Nevertheless, the way the action of Twitter plays merges with the stream of other messages, events, and news updates lends the performance event remarkably porous borders. What I am calling virtual realism is not limited to Twitter theater: a similar dynamic animates, for example, online performances by computerized chat bots impersonating humans,56 plays like the Headlong Theater Company’s Cell (2007) in which a phone conversation with the spectator becomes the basis for an imagined world,57 plays performed on the game plat59 Such Tweet Sorrow, 2010. Photo: Charles Hunter  form Second Life, and certain epistolary novels, like those in Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine trilogy, which build narratives through removable letters and postcards written by the characters. But whatever the medium, virtual realism invites the spectator into an interaction that is familiar from everyday life, yet not face to face or embodied. It holds the mirror up to aspects of nature that are already relections. In this light, the most fascinating lesson of Twitter theater and similar experiments might not be that they are reshaping contemporary theater in novel ways. More important, these experiments reveal that, as social media introduce new varieties of everyday life, theater makers are adapting as they always have to relect the contours of altered realities. As Bert States reminds us, theater is a remarkably predatory institution that “consumes nature” and repackages it for aesthetic consumption.58 Like more conventional forms of theater, Twitter plays colonize a section of reality — in this case the world of remote real-time updates — and build within it an imaginary alternate reality that parades before us as if it were the real thing. And as we have seen, plays are ideal frames with which to repackage activity on Twitter because the digital facets of our lives increasingly resemble theater.59 During the run of The th Line, Jeremy Gable justiied using Twitter as his stage by saying that “99 percent of Twitter is insigniicant. But there’s that rare moment when it becomes profound.”60 Properly iltered and framed, Twitter’s trivia has the potential to reveal hidden depths. This is essentially the dream behind Twitter — that any sliver of experience might reward attention — but, remarkably, it is also one of the central defenses of theater, and indeed all art: most of life is insigniicant, but if we restrict attention to particular moments, they might have something profound to teach us. 60 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er Not e s 1. See Twitter.com/TwitterPoetry; Twitter.com/PoetryTweets; TwiHaiku at www .makeliterature.com/twihaiku/Twitter-poetry, and Twitter.com/twihaiku; or search for #poetweet on Twitter. 2. See in particular Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, Twitterature (New York: Penguin, 2009). 3. The libretto of The Twitter Opera, staged by the Royal Opera House in London in 2009, consisted of public tweets set to popular opera standards. Rachel Shields, “Overtures, Arias . . . and Tweets: The World’s First Twitter Opera,” Independent, August 9, 2009, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/news/overtures -arias-and-tweets-the-worlds-irst-twitter-opera-1769693.html. 4. Now that Facebook’s Newsfeed and Google Plus services ofer alternative platforms for brief real-time updates, Twitter has become one of a number of similar outlets for distributed theater. Much of my analysis of Twitter applies as well to these services, but I focus on Twitter not only because it pioneered the form but also because its strict character limit provides a more challenging formal constraint than rival services. 5. Paul Feig, the cocreator of the television series Freaks and Geeks, solicited so-called Tplays from his followers, and Canadian playwright Neil Fleming (@NFlemingPlays) frequently writes one-tweet plays. 6. Prompts for March 30, 2009, and June 3, 2009. Jefrey Cranor, “Twitter Plays,” spreadsheet archive shared with the author, March 12, 2012. 7. Recent examples are archived on the Neo-Futurists’ Favorites Twitter page, twitter .com/nyneofuturists/favorites (accessed July 5, 2011). Totals derived from Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 8. Next to Normal: The Twitter Performance, Twitter.com/N2Nbroadway, archived at nexttonormal.com/twitterperformance.pdf (accessed June 10, 2011). 9. Next to Normal. 10. Royal Shakespeare Company, Such Tweet Sorrow, www.suchtweetsorrow.com (accessed May 25, 2011) and Mudlark, “Projects,” www.wearemudlark.com/projects/ sts (accessed March 21, 2012). For an archive of all of the tweets in chronological order, see Bleys Maynard, Such Tweet Sorrow Archive, www.bleysmaynard.net/ suchtweet (accessed May 15, 2011). See also Maev Kennedy, “Romeo and Juliet Get Twitter Treatment,” Guardian, April 12, 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/apr/12/ shakespeare-twitter-such-tweet-sorrow. 11. William Shakesepare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson, 2004), 3.5.27 – 30. 12. @julietcap16, Twitter post, April 24, 2009, Twitter.com/julietcap16, retrieved from Maynard, Such Tweet Sorrow Archive, www.bleysmaynard.net/suchtweet. 13. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.94. 14. Reorbit, reorb.it/project. 15. Steven Westdahl, Samuel Beckett, March 10, 2011, reorb.it/play.php?p=18. 16. Thomas L. Strickland, T. S. Eliot, May 17, 2011, reorb.it/play.php?p=23. 17. See @MayorEmanuel, Twitter.com/MayorEmanuel/; @FakeSteveJobs, Twitter.com/ fsj; and @feministhulk, Twitter.com/feministhulk. 61  18. Dawn Danby, interview by Jamillah Knowles, Outriders, BBC Radio 5, January 11, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/pods/all#playepisode48. 19. Rachel Syme, “Social Media Theater: Where Sylvia Plath Is Alive and Well,” Thirteen.org, March 22, 2011, www.thirteen.org/fourth-wall/social-media-theater -where-sylvia-plath-is-alive-and-well. 20. Ericson DeJesus, “Social Media Theater?” Electric Literature Blog, http:// electricliterature.com/blog/2010/10/21/social-media-theater (accessed July 13, 2011). 21. Jeremy Gable, , www.jeremygable.com/140.htm (accessed June 11, 2011).  tells the story of Dane Leopard, a sixteen-year-old with dreams bigger than his small town. A year after his father’s death, Dane sets out, much to the consternation of his stepmother, on a road trip to Los Angeles armed with a movie idea and accompanied by his friend’s girl, Charlotte. The trip is a bust but gives everyone enough perspective to mature and reconcile in the end. 22. Jeremy Gable, e-mail message to the author, June 24, 2011. 23. Jeremy Gable, The th Line: A Play of Brief Communication, January 25, 2010, www .jeremygable.com/15thline.htm. Because the compiled script is unpaginated, all references will be to original message dates. 24. Crushin’ It: A Social Media Love Story, Story2Oh, http://CrushingItStory.com (accessed June 14, 2011). 25. Jo Caird, “Truly Involving Theatre,” WhatsOnStage.com, March 8, 2011, www .whatsonstage.com/blog/theatre/london/E8831299622710/Jo+Caird+Blog:+Truly +Involving+Theatre.html. 26. See Greg Allen, “A Not-So-Quick History of the Neo-Futurists,” NeoFuturists.org, neofuturists.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=27&Item id=28; and “Neo-Futurism in a Nutshell,” NYNeoFuturists.org, www.nyneofuturists.org/site/index .php?/site/whats_the_whatism (accessed December 18, 2011). 27. Greg Allen, preface to  Neo-Futurist Plays from “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” (Chicago: Chicago Plays, 1988), 3. 28. Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” The prompts were available on the New York Neo-Futurists Twitter page on the following dates, respectively: March 11, 2009; August 5, 2009; November 18, 2009; April 21, 2010; October 28, 2009. 29. Twitter Counter, NY Neo-Futurists Twitter Statistics, twittercounter.com/ nyneofuturists (accessed July 19, 2011). 30. See John Muse, “Dimensions of the Moment: Modernist Shorts,” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 76 – 102; and “The Paradoxes of Suzan-Lori Parks’s  Days/ Plays,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 22, no. 1 (2010): 7 – 31. 31. Greg Allen, “Neo-Futurism in a Nutshell.” 32. Sean McCain, Twitter post, April 8, 2009, twitter.com/sdmccain, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 33. Cameron McNary, Twitter post, April 23, 2009, twitter.com/cameronmcnary, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 34. Cesar Torres, Twitter post, March 13, 2009, twitter.com/Urraca, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 35. Martin Schecter, Twitter post, March 30, 2009, twitter.com/martinschecter, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 62 1 40 c harac t ers in sear c h of a t heat er 36. Paul Hayes, Twitter post, March 30, 2009, twitter.com/kollektor, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 37. Kevin Mullaney, Twitter post, May 13, 2009, twitter.com/ircmullaney, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 38. Chris Diercksen, Twitter post, April 13, 2011, twitter.com/C_Diercks, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 39. milyadis, Twitter post, June 3, 2009, twitter.com/milyadis (account deactivated), archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 40. Henry J. Schmidt, How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Büchner, Hauptmann, and Fleisser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 1. 41. As of March 31, 2011. Internet World Statistics, Usage and Population Statistics, www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. 42. Jeremy Gable, Twitter post, September 23, 2009, twitter.com/Jeremy_Gable, archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” 43. Gable, The th Line. 44. Gable, e-mail message to the author, June 24, 2011. 45. Ibid. 46. Gable, The th Line, February 6, 2010. 47. Gable, The th Line, February 14, 2010. 48. These examples are invented for illustration. For more on the mission creep of hashtags, see Susan Orleans, “Hash,” New Yorker, June 29, 2010. 49. Twitter.com/EmilyCorlen, May 21, 2010. 50. “Twitter Theater,” www.facebook.com/Tweatricals (accessed June 6, 2011). 51. Gable, qtd. in Paul Hodgins, “Play Unfolding on Twitter over 60 Days,” Orange County Register, June 14, 2009. 52. Gable, The th Line, January 28, 2010. 53. Gable, qtd. in Hodgins, “Play Unfolding.” 54. Gable, e-mail message to the author, June 24, 2011. 55. Ibid. 56. See Alexis Soloski, “ ‘Would You Like to Have a Question?’ ” (90, this issue). 57. In Cell, one spectator at a time arrived at a prearranged location on the streets of New Haven, received a phone call, and was led through a series of tasks by a voice on the other end of the line, all the while remaining unsure which of the people on the street around them were actors. The exact scenario may be unlikely in real life, but the mode of interaction — walking down a city street alone in a cell phone conversation — was borrowed from everyday urban life. A stranger to both events would not have known a performance was in progress. See Christopher Grobe, “Your Cell Phone # Is: #1,” New Haven Independent, June 14, 2007, www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/ entry/your_cell_phone_is_1.html. 58. Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of the Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 13. 59. See John H. Muse, “Flash Mobs and the Difusion of Audience,” Theater 40, no. 3 (2010): esp. 11 – 12 on pervasive spectatorship. 60. Joshua Sessoms, “A Philly Playwright Sets Stage for Twitter,” NBC Philadelphia, January 29, 2010, www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/tech/Playwright-UsesTwitter-as -a-Vehicle-83071097.html. 63