"The role of death is an inordinately large and varied one in the work of The Plaintext Players, and makes itself felt at several levels. The individual plays can each be seen as versions of one great morality play. It is a paradox that in being played out on the tiny screen by actors who are smaller than life, the characters achieve an almost allegorical grandeur that is larger than life. This is seen clearly in "The Candide Campaign," where the young Candide, brimming with lunatic vision, casts himself into the lists against Baron.Samedi, a voodoo loa and head of the Death Party. Candide and the Baron are running for president; president of what is never specified. Watching this play, the audience--real life or online--is implicitly asked to cast their vote for Life--or Death. Most people are dead, maintains the Baron, and so will vote for him. There is no clear reason to vote for Candide, except for his very presence, the alternative he offers to casting one's lot with the inevitable. What if we just said no? What if, in the face of the obvious, we voted for the youth, the horse and the monkey? For the inchoate urge to live?"

. . . . . Marlena Corcoran, from "Life and Death in the Digital World of the Plaintext Players" in Leonardo 32:5, 10/99.

A "pronounced fluidity between audience and performer occurs in the online world, particularly in the highly interactive and generative world of the MOO. . . . Performing in a MOO is an experience where the proscenium has been removed entirely and it as though the entire physical boundary between audience and performer has been ripped and filled with electronic fluid, allowing the vaudevillian experience to travel into cyberspace. Even though the rough-and-tumble physical comedy of [vaudevillians] Weber and Fields was prototypical of the kind of kinetic chemistry that made vaudeville popular, MOOs carry on such a sense of interaction without physicality, taking interaction out of the restraints of the physical world into virtuality."

. . . . . Thyrza Goodeve Nichols, from "Houdini's Premonition: Virtuality and Vaudeville on the Internet" in Leonardo 30:5, 10/97.

"It is no accident that online theater takes place on a network, because the decentralized structure of networks strongly resists control. Networks are a dynamic Underworld where the id makes itself at home. We tend to think of networked virtual worlds like MOOs as a new cultural form, but the original virtual world is the Underworld and its variants, such as Elysium, the Afterlife, and Heaven. To the extent that it is still with us, I believe the Underworld is the master world from which all virtual worlds draw their psychic resonance."

. . . . . Antoinette LaFarge, at the College Art Association Conference, 02/97 [29K text]

"This is far from the heritage Shakespeare of disciplined diction, perfect pentameters and oh-so-familiar plotting. It's not the sort of event when Hamlet can be relied upon to take his revenge. Poor Yorick might well say alas, but unpredictability is the essence of the whole package. It's an instant, before-your-very-eyes creation played out by a cast who are not gathered on a single stage but dotted around at their terminals in New York. They have been allotted characters and an outline scenario, but then it is up to them to type in whatever dialogue or directions they wish."

. . . . . Naseem Khan, in The Manchester Guardian, 10/95

"The language of online theater [is] often fragmentary and elliptical; crude, buffoonish, and frivolous; callous and cajoling; tender and violent by turns. It is a language that shows off the beauty of particular things and celebrates the miracle that they exist at all."

. . . . . Antoinette LaFarge, in Leonardo 28:5, 10/95. [43Kb text]