140 characters in search of a theater tw

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J H. M

C S T

Twitter Plays

percent of Twitter is insignificant. But there’s that rare moment when it becomes profound . . .

— Jeremy Gable

Since the inception of the microblogging service Twitter, some in the theaterhave embraced the social media phenomenon as a free publicity engine, as a platform

for networking on the fly, 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 characters, the one-time maximum length of an SMS (Short

Message Service) text message. Since messages can be written and published in a mat-

ter of seconds, Twitter offers this century a decentralized and nearly instantaneous

version of what faits-divers newspaper updates offered 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 performanceof twenty-first-century literature and theater is somewhat more surprising. Respond-

ing to the implicit challenge of the platform’s extreme formal constraint, writers have

composed Twitter poems, Twitter microfiction, Twitter novels, Twitter film scripts,

Twitter opera, and, thanks to a handful of media- savvy playwrights, a growing num-

ber of Twitter plays. However trendy or trivial Twitter theater in its current forms may

seem, its advent deserves critical attention because it offers a particularly rich instance

of the ways social media are reshaping both playwriting and the experience of theatri-

cal 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 typed characters. In the second, more common variety of Twit-

ter theater, a series of posts by one or more characters constitutes a performance in real

time but in virtual space. After offering a survey of recent theatrical activity of both

Theater : ./-

© by John H. Muse

Such Tweet Sorrow

on Twitter, presented

by Mudlark and the

Royal Shakespeare

Company, .

Photo: Charles Hunter


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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 different ways Twitter is catalyzing

theatrical innovation.

Despite their differences, 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 fit 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 simultane-

ously to distant spectators — but unlike radio plays, the action of Twitter plays is inter-

mittent, proceeding in fits and starts as updates filter 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-sufficient plays in highly compressed form. But more than previous experi-

mental forms did, one-tweet plays, due to their sheer numbers, the diversity of their

authors, and the ease with which they can be published, reflect 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 Twit-

ter’s potential to blur the line between everyday life and performance in new, histori-

cally specific ways. Precisely because they eschew traditional stages in favor of Twitter’s wide and universal theater, Twitter plays help to expose the newly fragile distinc-

tion in a digital age between theatrical spectatorship and the experience of real-life

events.

T S : A S

The most extreme form of Twitter drama is the single-tweet play. A handful of ama-

teur playwrights have explored this most microscopic of canvases, 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 per-formances of thirty original plays in sixty minutes. But beginning in March , the

troupe’s New York branch began asking fans to post single-tweet plays in response

to weekly prompts (e.g., “Write a -tweet play that has dialogue and at least actors,”

or “Write a -tweet play that has a big kiss in it”). The response has been enthusias-

tic; by March the site had published more than , miniscule dramas by about

authors. Can characters “hold the vasty fields 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 lim-


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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 Twit-

ter’s inherent theatricality and stages fictional interactions among one or more charac-

ters 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: adapta-

tions, impersonations, and original plays. Twitter adaptations convert traditional plays

into Twitter’s format so that each line or stage direction fits within the confines 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 the-

ater 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 different locations, or in no particu-

lar 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 , the production supplemented

its Pulitzer- and Tony-award winning stage show with a Twitter version performed

over thirty-five days as a series of updates by the six main characters. Instead of watch-

ing a neurotic twenty-first-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, . Photo:

Situation Interactive


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ing via computers and smartphones the characters’ ongoing commentary on their fic-

tional lives. The show’s online audience — which grew to more than , 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

conflict:

— scared. Appointment with Dr. Fine. He speaks in riddles.

— taking wife to doctor. Everything’ll be fine. Just another day . . .

— agreed to hang out with this Henry kid. Don’t know why. Total

pretentious stoner type. And wears . . . wait for it . . . flannel.

— 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/kFzK

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 ofone 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 final message

above, from “Hear,” converts a speech prefix into an instruction, inviting the audience

to click on a link to hear an excerpt of the song “My Psychopharmacologist and I.” Fol-

lowing a stream of updates and sound clips is no substitute for watching Next to Nor-

mal , 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-first 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 , 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 five weeks. 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


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message. Actors playing each character improvised updates, guided by a story grid

adapted by Tom Wright and influenced 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 , lines into more than , messages in an effort 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.

followers received this early morning gush, “Goooooooooood morningggggg :):):):):):)

It happened . . . with THE most beautiful boy alive. . . . IT happened :):):):):).” If

Shakespeare by any other idiom might not smell as sweet, the very difficulty of reduc-

ing his poetry to instant messages unwittingly underscored one of the play’s central

lessons: “. . . they stumble that run fast.”

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 figures by impersonating them on Twitter. Cocre-

ator 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 DawnDanby launched Reorbit, a social media theater troupe whose fanciful Twitter posts

offer “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 robot from : A Space Odyssey , and

T. S. Eliot, among others. Once selected by the curators, interested writer/actor/direc-

tors 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 adapta-

tions 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,” 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.” Some writer/actors imagine their figure sending

updates from his or her historical milieu; others resituate their luminary in a present-

day 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


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write a one-act play in Northbrook, Illinois; and Charles Bukowski, J. D. Salinger, and

Franz Kafka find themselves living together in San Francisco and competing to find

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

Hulk — 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 contrib-

utors are “embodying that character, understanding what’s driving them” and perform-

ing alternate reality versions of their lives. 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 different, something inherently performative.” 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 experi-

ment 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 gener-

ates interest in the play. The audience can discover the character before or after see-

ing the play.” 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. Ama-teur playwright Jeremy Gable initiated the genre in the summer of . Gable set up

Twitter accounts for four fictional characters l iving in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and from

June to August posted more than three hundred updates comprising : A Twitter Per-

formance , the first recorded original play on Twitter. introduced Gable to the chal-

lenges 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.” So when he set out to write his second piece for

Twitter in early , Gable took a lesson from other serialized long-form narratives(soap operas, comic strips) and constructed a story designed to catch attention and sus-

tain it. The th Line: A Play of Brief Communication began on January , , with a

post from a newspaper reporter announcing a disaster in an unnamed city — “Break-

ing News — Subway accident at th St Station. believed dead. injured. Cause is

not yet known” — and for the next two months followed the reporter and five 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.


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Gable is not alone in devising original performances for Twitter. In , a group

of professional screenwriters organized Crushin’ It , a week-long original romantic

comedy improvised by its characters (each played by a different writer) according to a

loose scenario that evolved in response to audience input. 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 Austin-

based Hidden Room, connected audiences in London and Austin via Skype under the

pretense that a transatlantic couple, Liz and Ryan, are introducing their extended fami-

lies to each other. Both the live audience and anyone following along on Twitter were

encouraged to participate by posting comments or questions.

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 fascinat-

ing 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 dra-

matic 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 perfor-

mance in a mediated age.

N: S- T P

The Neo-Futurists have a reputation for insisting that a brief collection of momentscan 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. They share with the Futurists an irreverent, playful, and pro-

vocative attitude; a penchant for manifestos; a love of simultaneity; and an unapol-

ogetic 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 five acts, twenty characters,fifteen set changes, and two hours and ten minutes to complete. Perhaps — dare we

say it? — we can achieve even more.” Too Much Light , which began as a late-night

underground stunt in , 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 dra-

maturgical possibility, a leap from microdrama to nanodrama.


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In March , 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 first week, followers were asked to “Write a full play (-tweet) using at

least roles and a significant prop.” Later prompts strayed playfully farther afield, ask-

ing variously for plays that have “something to do with a fish,” that feature “an anachro-

nistic robot,” that have two acts and an intermission, and that include more than one of

the following sound effects: “beep, splash, whoosh, crunch.” To date the experiment

has generated more than , plays, each of which was broadcast to the Neo-Futurists’

Twitter followers, a group that as of March includes , people and constitutesboth the audience and the pool of potential playwrights for the project. At least

of those followers have tried their hands at authoring -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. As artists and writers reduce theater to its essential elements, they suggest dif-

ferent answers to the question of what about theater might be irreducible. To oversim-

plify, 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 par-ticular 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 poten-

tial to generate genuine, if fleeting, 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.”

But what of single-tweet plays? What might we learn about dramatic form from

attempts to write plays in characters (or about two lines of text printed on a stan-

The th Line on

Twitter, by Jeremy

Gable, . Photo:

Jeremy Gable


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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 mini-

malism tests to the breaking point the strategies brevity tends to encourage — surpris-

ing 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 Neo-

Futurists staged fifty-three of them at a free performance in June 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 reflect 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.)

.”

: How much water? : Two days, tops. : So, four. : Four? What do you . . .

(Beat.) Ah. (Pause.) Well, fuck you too.

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 .” 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 artificial and parodic, reducing stories to bonesthis 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

offers little knowledge (good, evil, or otherwise) in the process: “: Apple? : Why,

sure. (voiceover ): Get out of my yard, you scraggamuffins!” Similarly, a shrunken

version of Waiting for Godot by Paul Hayes suggests, with tongue in cheek, that Beck-

ett’s play might just as well have had three lines: “: Godot? : Hold

me. : What the hell are you two talking about? : . . . (Curtain.).” Such

reductions work best when they reveal the macabre joke at the heart of tragedy’s cruel

ironies: “: I have no food. : There is a famine. : I will kill a rich man and take his

food. (kills man) : That was your father.”

Nanodramas are under even more pressure than most shorts to replace character-

ization with plot. They are typically populated by anonymous figures (often named A

or B), by stock figures, or by celebrities whose history provides their character. If most

one-tweet plays respond to this pressure by focusing on a significant or surprising series

of actions, others follow Maeterlinck in attempting to capture the intensity and drama

inherent in apparently static moments:


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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.

::big kiss that lasts for seconds, trumpets go off seconds in, rose petals fall

after seconds::

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 conten-

tion. 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 self-

consciousness. 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 self-

conscious, seemingly aware of the judgmental presence of the reader, who, having

been captured, must be successfully released. . . . The resulting exertion renders art

more artificial, theater more theatrical, as the literary work builds to a final flourish

before it disappears from view.

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 artificiality that characterize traditional endings and puts morereflexive pressure on its own conventions. Ending from the moment they begin, one-

tweet 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 significant 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 writ-

ing 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, financial means, or courage needed to pursue avant-garde playwriting to spend

time inventing microdramas featuring fish and anachronistic robots. While these plays

at times resemble historical antecedents like newspaper faits-divers or Futurist synthe-

ses, their historical predecessors are available to us only because they were produced by

newspaper staff or by professional aesthetes with access to means of publication. The

Neo-Futurist Twitter play project, by contrast, spearheaded the production and collec-

tion of thousands of impossible nanodramas by almost eight hundred unknown avant-

gardists 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.


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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),

. Photo: John

Anderson

Despite pronouncements about a flat world, only an estimated percent of Africans

have Internet access, and activities like Twitter playwriting are further restricted in

practice to the subset with the leisure and inclination to wander online. Despite these

qualifications, 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 W U T: T HE TH L INE

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 , the same week he began his first 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 characters? I demand length,

elasticity. You cannot stifle m . . . (Bows )


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Gable’s long-form experiments in Twitter theater offered a possible solution: keep

Twitter’s rea l-time distribution and pithiness, but add length and a measure of elas-

ticity by extending the fiction for months at a time. Unlike single-tweet plays, origi-

nal 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 fol-

low the action by subscribing to the Twitter updates of fictional 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 produc-

tion 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 non-

users to join the audience, and published the complete script to his web page after

the two-month performance. That the collated version looks very much like a play

obscures its radical difference from most plays. Although one can now read the online

script in a single sitting, the original audience of around 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 becauseto do so would strip the genre of its most distinctive feature: its pace. The th Line

is designed to work best as slow-drip microserial dramaturgy that unfolds over long

The th Line , .

Photo: Jeremy Gable


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stretches of time. So while the performance was free of charge — as in fact all Twitter

theater to date has been — it required a significant investment of time and attention,

paid in nearly one thousand tiny installments.

The th Line began in medias res on January , , 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 fictional acci-

dent: a survivor named Melissa; her college classmate Seth, who witnesses the crash

and runs away; Dustin, a thirty-five- year-old therapist who loses his wife in the acci-

dent; 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

find human connection. As the updates accumulate over days and weeks, the audience

pieces together a story (familiar to many after September , ) about the way catas-

trophe reshuffles priorities, brings strangers into contact, and has repercussions beyond

its site of impact.

Despite the play’s differences from traditional drama, the subtitle of The th Line ,

“A Play of Brief Communication,” announces the project as part of a dramatic tra-

dition. 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.” By this definition, 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 play-

making or not, Twitter already constitutes an enormous, continual distributed theater

of the everyday in which a cast numbering more than million strut and fret upon

virtual stages for the benefit of audiences who follow their every move or thought. Thesite 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 low-

grade 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 conven-

tions. A user name or “handle” precedes each message much as speech prefixes in a


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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:

: @angiannini Would you be available for a follow-up interview?

: @pattycitypress Sure. Do you still have my phone number?

: @angiannini Actually, I was hoping that this time we might meet in

person. Would tonight work?

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 reflexive exchange from The th Line :

: @angiannini 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.

: @angiannini Oh. Right. Sorry.

Other conventions also call attention to Twitter’s staginess. For instance, Twit-ter 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 find 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 find 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 sti ll hugging my boyfriend

killmenow”) or undercutting a statement (“Best production of Othello ever! InTheir-

Dreams”). No longer useful for categorization, these creative tags, like the theatricalasides 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 superfluous;

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 , not as part of a Twit-

ter play but simply as an improvised addition to her everyday interactions on Twitter:


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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 SilentMayBeCrying

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, mes-

sages like these make explicit the tacit theatricality of a forum driven by self-display

and trafficking 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 cen-

tral 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.” By “real time,” they mean not that every action rep-

resented 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 flows in chronological

order, but exchanges are sporadic and intermittent, and since each user follows a dif-

ferent cast of characters, not all of the participants can hear each other. As a result, fol-

lowing an accumulation of solo and duet scenes on Twitter can feel more like channel

surfing than sitting down to read or watch a play. Like the filmic “Wandering Rocks”

episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses , in which the perspective wanders in and out of the livesof nineteen Dubliners, describing bits of action and overhearing snatches of the inner

monologues, Twitter allows discontinuous panoptic voyeurism. The important differ-

ence from Joyce’s Dublin, of course, is that in this case each of the participants encour-

ages the surveillance and filters or exaggerates her thoughts accordingly. The result is

not stream of consciousness but a stream of self-consciousness.

In November , 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 first

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 , , the

Library of Congress announced that it would acquire every post made on Twitter since

its debut in March . 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 effectively infinite number of infinitesimal slices of life.


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V R

With his Twitter plays, Gable specifically 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.” 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 misspell-

ings, 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 fictional 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 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?” 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 artificiality of the theatrical convention that warrants a group of strangers

to surveil other strangers. Twitter theater, however, can produce more thorough real-

ism 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 strang-

ers 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] offers you a

glimpse into the life of friends and celebrities, so [] will offer you a glimpse into the

lives of these four characters.” Where a naturalist stage play might offer 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 theaudience’s friends and family.” In this way, an intermittent pace that might seem to

attenuate a performance actually reinforces its reality effect.

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 real-

ity simulations, The th Line relies on the mind to fill in the contours of the event.

But unlike other simulations, it recreates experiences that in their everyday manifes-


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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 medi-

ated 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 starteda relationship, take a look at their pictures, read their updates, and then find 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.” 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 fiction and makes it an ideal venue for dramatic hoaxes. To be

sure, Gable’s news updates about a fictional disaster, unlike Orson Welles’s infamous

radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in , 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 exam-

ple, online performances by computerized chat bots impersonating humans, plays like

the Headlong Theater Company’s Cell () in which a phone conversation with the

spectator becomes the basis for an imagined world, plays performed on the game plat-

Such Tweet Sorrow,

. Photo:

Charles Hunter


19/22

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 reflections.In this light, the most fascinating lesson of Twitter theater and similar experi-

ments 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 reflect 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. Like more con-

ventional 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 ourlives increasingly resemble theater. During the run of The th Line , Jeremy Gable

justified using Twitter as his stage by saying that “ percent of Twitter is insignifi-

cant. But there’s that rare moment when it becomes profound.” Properly filtered 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 insignificant, but if we restrict attention to particular moments, they might have

something profound to teach us.


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N

. 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.

. See in particular Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, Twitterature (New York:

Penguin, ).

. The libretto of The Twitter Opera , staged by the Royal Opera House in London

in , consisted of public tweets set to popular opera standards. Rachel Shields,

“Overtures, Arias . . . and Tweets: The World’s First Twitter Opera,” Independent ,

August , , www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/news/overtures

-arias-and-tweets-the- worlds-first-twitter-opera-.html.

. Now that Facebook’s Newsfeed and Google Plus services offer 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 strictcharacter limit provides a more challenging formal constraint than rival services.

. 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.

. Prompts for March , , and June , . Jeffrey Cranor, “Twitter Plays,”

spreadsheet archive shared with the author, March , .

. Recent examples are archived on the Neo-Futurists’ Favorites Twitter page, twitter

.com/nyneofuturists/favorites (accessed July , ). Totals derived from Cranor,

“Twitter Plays.”

. Next to Normal: The Twitter Performance , Twitter.com/NNbroadway, archived at

nexttonormal.com/twitterperformance.pdf (accessed June , ).

. Next to Normal .

. Royal Shakespeare Company, Such Tweet Sorrow, www.suchtweetsorrow.com

(accessed May , ) and Mudlark, “Projects,” www.wearemudlark.com/projects/

sts (accessed March , ). For an archive of al l of the tweets in chronological

order, see Bleys Maynard, Such Tweet Sorrow Archive, www.bleysmaynard.net/

suchtweet (accessed May , ). See also Maev Kennedy, “Romeo and Juliet Get

Twitter Treatment,” Guardian, April , , www.guardian.co.uk/culture//apr//

shakespeare-twitter-such-tweet-sorrow.

. William Shakesepare, Romeo and Juliet , in The Complete Works of Shakespeare ,

ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson, ), .. – .. @julietcap, Twitter post, April , , Twitter.com/julietcap, retrieved from

Maynard, Such Tweet Sorrow Archive, www.bleysmaynard.net/suchtweet.

. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet , ...

. Reorbit, reorb.it/project.

. Steven Westdahl, Samuel Beckett , March , , reorb.it/play.php?p=.

. Thomas L. Strickland, T. S. Eliot , May , , reorb.it/play.php?p=.

. See @MayorEmanuel, Twitter.com/MayorEmanuel/; @FakeSteveJobs, Twitter.com/

fsj; and @feministhulk, Twitter.com/feministhulk.


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. Dawn Danby, interview by Jamillah Knowles, Outriders , BBC Radio , January ,

, www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/pods/allplayepisode.

. Rachel Syme, “Social Media Theater: Where Sylvia Plath Is Alive and Well,”

Thirteen.org, March , , www.thirteen.org/fourth- wall /social-media-theater

- where-sylvia-plath-is-alive-and- well.

. Ericson DeJesus, “Social Media Theater?” Electric Literature Blog, http://

electricliterature.com/blog////social-media-theater (accessed July , ).

. Jeremy Gable, , www.jeremygable.com/.htm (accessed June , ). 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.

. Jeremy Gable, e-mail message to the author, June , .

. Jeremy Gable, The th Line: A Play of Brief Communication, January , , www

.jeremygable.com/thline.htm. Because the compiled script is unpaginated, all references will be to original message dates.

. Crushin’ It: A Social Media Love Story , StoryOh, http://CrushingItStory.com

(accessed June , ).

. Jo Caird, “Truly Involving Theatre,” WhatsOnStage.com, March , , www

.whatsonstage.com/blog/theatre/london/E/Jo+Caird+Blog:+Truly

+Involving+Theatre.html.

. See Greg Allen, “A Not-So-Quick History of the Neo-Futurists,” NeoFuturists.org,

neofuturists.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=&Item id=; and

“Neo-Futurism in a Nutshell,” NYNeoFuturists.org, www.nyneofuturists.org/site/index

.php?/site/whats_the_whatism (accessed December , ).

. Greg Allen, preface to Neo-Futurist Plays from “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go

Blind” (Chicago: Chicago Plays, ), .

. Cranor, “Twitter Plays.” The prompts were available on the New York Neo-Futurists

Twitter page on the following dates, respectively: March , ; August , ;

November , ; April , ; October , .

. Twitter Counter, NY Neo-Futurists Twitter Statistics, twittercounter.com/

nyneofuturists (accessed July , ).

. See John Muse, “Dimensions of the Moment: Modernist Shorts,” Modern Drama

, no. (): – ; and “The Paradoxes of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Days/ Plays ,”

Journal of American Drama and Theatre , no. (): – .

. Greg Allen, “Neo-Futurism in a Nutshell.” . Sean McCain, Twitter post, April , , twitter.com/sdmccain, archived in Cranor,


. Cameron McNary, Twitter post, April , , twitter.com/cameronmcnary,

archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.”

. Cesar Torres, Twitter post, March , , twitter.com/Urraca, archived in Cranor,


. Martin Schecter, Twitter post, March , , twitter.com/martinschecter, archived

in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.”


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. Paul Hayes, Twitter post, March , , twitter.com/kollektor, archived in Cranor,


. Kevin Mullaney, Twitter post, May , , twitter.com/ircmullaney, archived in

Cranor, “Twitter Plays.”

. Chris Diercksen, Twitter post, April , , twitter.com/C_Diercks, archived in

Cranor, “Twitter Plays.”

. milyadis, Twitter post, June , , twitter.com/milyadis (account deactivated),

archived in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.”

. Henry J. Schmidt, How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Büchner,

Hauptmann, and Fleisser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), .

. As of March , . Internet World Statistics, Usage and Population Statistics,

www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

. Jeremy Gable, Twitter post, September , , twitter.com/Jeremy_Gable, archived

in Cranor, “Twitter Plays.”

. Gable, The th Line .

. Gable, e-mail message to the author, June , .. Ibid.

. Gable, The th Line , February , .

. Gable, The th Line , February , .

. These examples are invented for illustration. For more on the mission creep of

hashtags, see Susan Orleans, “Hash,” New Yorker , June , .

. Twitter.com/EmilyCorlen, May , .

. “Twitter Theater,” www.facebook.com/Tweatricals (accessed June , ).

. Gable, qtd. in Paul Hodgins, “Play Unfolding on Twitter over Days,” Orange

County Register , June , .

. Gable, The th Line , January , .

. Gable, qtd. in Hodgins, “Play Unfolding.”

. Gable, e-mail message to the author, June , .

. Ibid.

. See Alexis Soloski, “ ‘Would You Like to Have a Question?’ ” (, this issue).

. 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: ,”

NewHaven Independent , June , , www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/

entry/your_cell_phone_is_.html.

. Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of the Theatre

(Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .

. See John H. Muse, “Flash Mobs and the Diffusion of Audience,” Theater , no.

(): esp. – on pervasive spectatorship.

. Joshua Sessoms, “A Philly Playwright Sets Stage for Twitter,” NBC Philadelphia ,

January , , www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/tech/Playwright-UsesTwitter-as

-a-Vehicle-.html.

140 characters in search of a theater tw

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