ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
JUNE 14, 2009

PLAY UNFOLDING ON TWITTER OVER 60 DAYS

By PAUL HODGINS

Leave it to Jeremy Gable, one of Orange County's more fertile theatrical minds, to come up with the world's first Twitter play (or at least the first one I've heard of). Gable, 27, until recently the artistic director of Fullerton's Hunger Artists Theatre Company, is a playwright, director, actor and energetic contributor to the county's busy grass-roots theater life.

Twitter is a social-networking service that limits participants to a maximum of 140 characters for each tweet, or e-mailable entry, but you don't have to be a subscriber to watch Gable's strange event unfold. The curious can see it online at twitter.com/twit_play.

Gable's thespian tweets, titled “140: A Twitter Performance,” commenced on Wednesday. He promises daily updates from the play's four characters over the following 60 days.

We cornered Gable on Tuesday via Facebook to ask him a few questions about his unorthodox project.

Tell us a little bit about the genesis of this thing. Where did you get the idea?

I've been wanting to write something that used a social networking site to explore online communication for a while now. Originally, I wanted to do a Facebook piece, but found that it was too difficult and time-consuming to pull off. Twitter made it easier, as I could re-post all of the characters' updates to one account. Plus, the fact that Twitter is a ridiculous concept (communication under 140 characters) that is ultimately really addictive made it perfect.

This is actually not the world's first Twitter performance, unfortunately (I wish I could claim credit on that one). The Twitter performance of the Broadway musical “Next To Normal” inspired me to get the ball rolling (and gave me some great formatting tips, as well).

Will the finished product read (somewhat) like a real script? Will there be stage directions?

It will not, which is why I've been hesitant to call it a “play” and instead am calling it a “performance.” It will read like Twitter posts from real people, as I want to keep this as convincing as possible (I've been studying a lot of Twitter updates for research). That's what will make this an interesting experiment: Telling a story 140 characters at a time.

Do you plan on staging it in some form?

At this point, I'm not sure where it would go from here, if anywhere. Twitter is such an unusual beast in that it's very cerebral. Its purpose is to lend importance to random thoughts and seemingly uninteresting events. So staging it might be difficult, but not impossible. I do know that if this is successful (or, at least, if it works to some extent), I hope to do other performances in the future.

Is it pre-written or will it develop day by day according to your whim and the directions the characters take?

I've written it out through about late June so far, and am continuing to add to it. I want to stay at least a few days ahead of the posts, mainly because I'm ridiculous about rewriting. However, I'm sure it will change and develop as current events reveal themselves.

Are you the sole author?

Yes, I am the sole author on this. But perhaps sometime down the road, other people will want to give this a try as well. And perhaps, collaborations could emerge. Which is pretty much the whole point of social networking sites, right?

Four characters in search of a venue

Here's a brief critique of “140” as of Thursday, the second day of the project.

So far, nothing much had happened – hey, what can you expect when four characters talk to each other in bursts of no more than 140 characters? But let's give the playwright some slack. This is a 60-day narrative, after all. A certain amount of scene setting is in order.

The initial assessment of this seasoned critic:

Dane is an arrested-development type. Most 16-year-olds I know wouldn't admit to watching “Transformers,” let alone liking it. Perhaps that's because he's a somewhat naive small-town kid (the action is set in Hayden Lake, Idaho, population 560).

Dane's best friend Nik is a live wire. For years I've wanted to do the same thing to Shia LaBeouf that he so merrily suggests. But what's a hip-talking 18-year-old doing hanging out with a “Transformer”-loving nerd two years his junior?

Leslie, Dane's 26-year-old stepmom, desperately wants to communicate with him, hence her presence in the Twitter universe of the play. “No one told me talking was obsolete,” she grouses. I sense tension here, and a blowup looming. Also, given the brief span of years separating her from the kids, I predict all sorts of boundaries will be recklessly crossed. Just a hunch.

Among the four characters, Nik's girlfriend Courtney is most convincingly plugged in to the zeitgeist. Her initial tweet sounds like the clarion call of our benighted times:

“Anybody know a non-crap job that doesn't pay minimum wage?”

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