Hyperdrama in cyberspace

September 1, 1996	Theatre Central Presents	Vol. 1, No. 3

Hyperdrama and Virtual Development Notes on Creating New Hyperdrama in Cyberspace An Article by Charles Deemer If a year ago someone had told me I would spend the summer as a "playwright-in-electronic-residence," developing a new one-act hyperdrama in collaboration with a director in Santiago, Chile, I would have tilted my head in that special way reserved for people who aren't in possession of all their faculties. And yet that has been my wonderful summer of 1996. Yet I shouldn't be surprised. Hyperdrama and cyberspace were made for one another. Both, after all, speak "hypertext," the electronic nonlinear language that develops narrative as a network of options, whether they be choices on a help menu or decisions to be made by an audience member. I wrote hypertext scripts for a decade before the project in Santiago, which is my first hyperdrama script to be developed in cyberspace, and the new environment has made my job as a hypertext writer far less cumbersome, while at the same time providing all the immediate input and collaborative advantages that I remember from being a playwright-in-residence in non-virtual (which is to say, "really real") reality. Read the article. I am, of course, profoundly disappointed that a younger generation in the U.S. (things are happening in Europe) has not continued the development of live hyperdrama as a cultural storytelling form. This article was written twenty years ago! Those interested in hypertext here go into computer games, where there is considerable money to be made. Yet my original contention, that traditional theater is Newtonian and hyperdrama is quantum (go here), remains true as far as I am concerned, and hyperdrama is a superior form for mapping dramatic reality. With my design for a hyperdrama theater, which is not the only possibility, an artistic director with vision could give hyperdrama a home. Audiences have already responded to it. Where is this artistic director? Info

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