The Dramatic Structure of Google and Twitter
Take a second to recover from that pretentious post title, and then take a few more seconds to consider that search engines and social media both represent shifts in how we acquire knowledge, and as such, create new models for how we experience story.
Still there? The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because of the unusual structure of The Lesser Seductions of History (our rehearsals being the reason why posts have been sparse of late). It occurred to me after considering this project we’re doing that the link between the structure of social media and the play is more than cosmetic.
But first, let’s talk about Jason Grote’s 1001. After reading Jason’s beautiful, dazzling play, I began thinking of it as the first play written in the structure of a search engine. (For those unfamiliar with the play, a visit to Jeffery Jones structural analysis is a good place to start.) This statement in no way diminishes the plays wit, intelligence and heart; rather, it looks at how the play moves. And 1001 moves a lot like a restless mind with Google’s home page open.
1001 begins with a single world, and then, as if the play had opened a new tab, searches for a world thematically connected to (or inspired by a detail of) the first; which inspires a new tab and a new search, until the play has moved through a series of worlds, each linked by the search engine’s gift to expand every thought into a detailed new frame. With all these worlds open, the play can then move from tab to tab with the knowledge and context gained by them all. This is not the stately turning of pages in a gilded volume. This is an engine of searching.
Does anyone know other plays that work this way? I’d love to see more of them; that such a basic shift in how we experience the world is missing from the dramaturgy of contemporary plays cannot entirely be blamed on the immutable demands of playwriting structure.
The other major shift in how we experience story is through social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter. The idea of many narratives being present at once, each evolving in real time, each tweet or status update a trapdoor that opens up into a far more detailed profile and history; the viral spread of thought; the surprising synchronicities and dissonances; the mix of banal and revelation; the private/public performance; the intimacy and distance; the aggregation of like things into a sum greater than the parts; this is a new structure of experiencing story, and all of these ideas are present in the structure The Lesser Seductions of History. Though set in a time before social media, I’m not sure the play could have been written in quite this way without it.
Of course, I hope you won’t think about that when you’re watching the play; I hope you’ll just follow the journey of the characters.
But I’m curious to think more about how these two revolutionary ways of experiencing the world – social media and search engines – can move into our dramaturgy in ways more subtle than simply tweeting during performance; I’m curious to see how plays can learn from the structure of how these forces bring us the world.
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