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The Roman Forum Project 2003
Virtual Live 2002
The Roman Forum 2000
Birth of the Christ Child 1999
Still Lies Quiet Truth 1998
Silent Orpheus 1997
Orpheus 1997
The White Whale 1997
SLQT 1996
The Candide Campaign
Gutter City 1995
LittleHamlet 1995
The Cake of the Desert 1996
The Cake of the Desert 1995
I Object 1995
Christmas 1994
FAQ
Who are the Plaintext Players?
Where can the Plaintext Players be seen?
How do performances work?
What do the Plaintext Players perform?
Are any Plaintext Players transcripts available?
Are there any other Plaintext Players projects?
Is there any place to read about this work?
Why call it performance if it's really text?
updated: july 2005
Who are the Plaintext Players?
We're an online performance group forging a unique hybrid of performance, narrative, poetry, and role-play, using network technology. We work on the Internet, both in the virtual role-playing worlds known as MOOs and in their successor spaces such as UpStage. In the textual environments of MOOs, the performance takes shape as text written by the performers in real time, making it a profoundly collaborative enterprise. Individually, we're writers, playwrights, performaers, musicians, artists-- anyone inspired by the idea of language as performance and vice versa.
For details on who's who, check out our list of players.
Where can the Plaintext Players be seen?
We perform online, but our performances are also seen and heard offline via live projection and speech-to-voice synthesis. Very often the virtual performers are working with "real-world" actors, creating a shared "mixed reality" where the online world and the traditional stage meet.
We have presented our shows at venues in the United States and Europe, including the Beall Gallery at the University of California, Irvine; documenta X; the Venice Biennale; LocationOne Gallery (New York); Postmasters Gallery (New York); the Sandra Gering Gallery (New York); the Xavier Lopez Gallery (London); the 1995 Digital Salon (New York); and the 1995 European Media Arts Festival (EMAF).
In addition, we have adapted our work to other media, including a book and a radio play (see below).
For more information, check out our list of performances.
How do performances work?
The performers log into their shared virtual world from anywhere in the real world. Under the guidance of a "digital director," the performers improvise complex dramas based on prepared but fairly loose scenarios. The director's goal is to provide the combination of elements--a workable structure, a space of mutual trust, clear direction, compelling storylines--that will set the performers free to improvise at a high level of inventiveness.
Although the director usually sets the themes and creates the scenarios, responsibility for the development of specific characters rests largely with the individual performers. It is the performers who really make this medium work. The resulting transcripts or performance texts defy any simple classification and are artistically rich both as literature and as performance.
What do the Plaintext Players perform?
Since we were founded in 1994, the original series of performances we've developed include:
"Demotic" (2004/2006): This project features American Memory, a single character with many voices. It is an improvisation among different kinds of performers and different modes of reality, involving sound artists and a theater actor as well as the Plaintext Players.
"The Roman Forum Project" (2003): The Roman cast returns to consider the rocky road from the disastrous U.S. presidential election of 2000 to the opening of war in Iraq in March 2003.
"The Roman Forum" (2000): Imagine meeting half a dozen of the more colorful figures from the Rome of 2000 years ago-- some benign, some ill-tempered, some prudish, some decadent, but all politically savvy. They may have been dead for centuries, but they still know how to campaign, and the year 2000 was an election year.
"Birth of the Christ Child"(1999): This work celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of the Christ Child through a re-performance of the divine comedy in a new medium. The theological and dramatological issues of the reconciliation of good and evil, and the issue of time itself, seemed pressing on the eve of the new millenium. We were artistically curious about how these issues would play out in a comedy.
"Orpheus" and "Silent Orpheus"(1997): In this version of the classical legend, many details are different. But the basic story remains the same: Orpheus, the legendary singer and poet, must go down to Hell to bring his love, Eurydice, back from the dead. He fails in this task, and on his return to Earth, he is ripped to pieces by Maenads.
"The White Whale" (1997): This series began with a report of a white whale washed up dead in Venice. Some thought it must be Moby Dick; others argued that it must be a collective hallucination, for there are no whales in the Mediterranean. Herman Melville's Ishmael (the only person alive who has ever seen Moby Dick) and other characters gathered in Venice to see if it was really true that Moby Dick was finally dead.
"The Candide Campaign" (1996): In this four-part election-year series, the naive and sentimental young Candide pitted his Majority Party against Baron.Samedi's Death Party. Assisted by his running mate, howweird the horse, and his political advisor, the malevolent she-demon Monkey-General, Candide aimed for the Highest Office in the Land. For winners and losers alike, it was a fast-moving, unpredictable, and sometimes chaotic free-for-all in the best tradition of American politics.
"Gutter City" (1995-96): Set both in the present and the Civil War, this serial drama followed the adventures of Ishmael after his rescue from the shipwreck at the end of Moby Dick. Haunted by the ghost of the white whale, Ishmael strove to make sense of life on land in the midst of our most terrible war and, more immediately, to avoid becoming cannon fodder at the hands of the Monkey-General.
"LittleHamlet" (1995): In this reworking of the Hamlet story, all of the characters' formerly unspoken needs, fears, and desires came to the fore. Between Gertrude's naked lust for her son, Polonius's drivel, and Claudius's constant denials of guilt, it became clear that Hamlet's tragedy is the very stuff of farce.
"Christmas" (1994-95): The longest series so far featured the ongoing adventures of an archetypal trio: Big Man, Little Man, and Bloody Zelda. Little Man's efforts to control Big Man and keep him away from the violent Bloody Zelda took them from the desert to the Werewolf Woods, from the courtroom to the DownUnderWorld.
Are any Plaintext Players transcripts available?
At the moment, two full transcripts of online performances are available here, one from the Orpheus series and one from the Gutter City series. You'll also find brief excerpts from many of the performances sprinkled throughout the site. In addition, the Plaintext Players radio play is available on site, as are a poem and a play based on the 1996 "Candide Campaign" series, as well as the scripts of the 2003 Roman Forum Project and the 2000 Roman Forum, both of which were developed from online improvisations. (see next question for details).
Are there any other Plaintext Players projects?
Antoinette LaFarge and various collaborators have created a number of related projects based on the Plaintext Players work, several of which are online. These include:
Still Lies Quiet Truth (1998): A theater work based on the Candide Campaign transcripts. It premiered in the New York International Fringe Festival.
SLQT (1996): An epic poem drawn from the Candide Campaign transcripts.
The Cake of the Desert (1996): A radio play intended as a monologue for male or female voice. It had its premiere performance on PseudoRadio's "Art Dirt" show in August 1996.
The Cake of the Desert (1995): A 30-page graphic novel based on the transcript of the ninth performance in the "Christmas" series. It was originally published in a limited edition by Haifisch Press (Germany).
I Object (1994-95): A series of 14 text artworks created for the web. All the texts of I Object are excerpted from an episode in the "Christmas" series entitled Guilty as Lambs, Innocent as Sin. This episode, featuring a trial, offers a highly condensed review of our legal system, in all its aggression, good will, hypocrisy, compassion, absurdity, and desire.
Is there any place to read about this work?
Yes, there are a number of articles about online performance and the Plaintext Players:
"Media Commedia" by Antoinette LaFarge and Robert Allen, in Leonardo (summer 2005) [PDF]
"Life and Death in the Digital World of the Plaintext Players" by Marlena Corcoran, in Leonardo (fall 1999)
"Houdini's Premonition: Virtuality and Vaudeville on the Internet" by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, in Leonardo 30:5 (1997).
"Did Anyone Bring a Word or an Ax?: Towards an Id Theater" by Antoinette LaFarge, originally presented at the 1997 College Art Association Conference.
"A World Exhilarating and Wrong: Theatrical Improvisation on the Internet" by Antoinette LaFarge, originally published in Leonardo 28:5 (1995).
Why call it performance if it's really text?
Mainly because we still think of text as something written, but Plaintext Players texts are genuinely performed-- a unique hybrid of drama, fiction, poetry, confession, and oral storytelling-- a kind of media commedia or virtual vaudeville. This work tends toward absurdity, extravagance, humor, and surprise. Under cover of a Rabelaisian surface, the performers explore unsettling psychic terrain: gender and identity shifts; the attractions of violence and cruelty; the boundaries between truth, lies, and stories.
Online performance exploits a number of the most idiosyncratic aspects of the Internet: the sense of being immersed in a virtual world; the ability of people anywhere in the real world to be virtually present in the same time-space; the collective preference for pseudonymous interaction; and the beauty of lag as a disrupter of normal communications.
Moreover, it takes advantage of the fact that what is perceived as the lowest of low tech in the computer world (text) is paradoxically an enormously high-bandwidth medium for ideas, for adventure, for imaginal experience generally.