{"id":13983,"date":"2012-02-14T17:52:23","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T22:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2012\/02\/14\/13983.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:43","slug":"satellite-photos-of-great-burn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2012\/02\/14\/satellite-photos-of-great-burn\/","title":{"rendered":"Satellite photos of Great Burnham Wood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Benjamin Rosenbaum has an interesting note about the past’s future<\/a>, wherein he complains about (to simplify beyond recognition) stories that are set in the future, but it’s the future of 1985, a future without (or largely without) GPS and social media, or rather a future with a feigned ignorance of those things. There is a deeper point, and a wider one, but to go off on my own tangent…\n

A world with GPS and social media is a world that (it seems to me) is very difficult to tell stories about. Everywhere around the plot, and all through it, you have to ask yourself: why didn’t he just text her? Why don’t they link to a picture of the Mysterious Stranger and ask their friends if they know him? Why don’t they use the app to find out if it’s poisonous? Why doesn’t he look at her recent calls? Why don’t they just Google it?\n

The obvious answer to that is to set things either in the past or in a future that is lower-tech than our present. I think the dystopias and post-holocausts that have become so prevalent are derived from our present day anxieties and millennialism—but also because it’s an easy solution to this plot problem. In The Wikkeling<\/a>, for instance, there is a vast network, but (a) it only shows what The Man wants you to see, and (2) it’s broken. That’s better than the another book I recently finished, Floors<\/a>, which simply ignored the existence of mobile phones or the internet altogether, while having fantastical advances in things like holography, controlled magnetic levitation, and, um, stuff. There were good things about Floors<\/cite>, and there were bad things about The Wikkeling<\/cite>; I’m just thinking about this GPS\/social media thing. And, because that’s the way I am, the theater.\n

My Best Reader and I are working on a playscript which is set in the present day, and I am finding the mobile thing difficult. Two or three of the people involved would be very connected—texting and tweeting and so on—and I want to work it in as a plot point, or at least as a series of jokes. It does, for instance, allow two characters from different class and social circles who would otherwise have never met to have a history together. On the other hand, nobody wants to watch an actor thumb-typing for minutes on end. And as it’s a farce, there will be times when the plot relies on imperfect communication; a properly written and read tweet would screw everything up by unscrewing everything up, as it were. And texted crosstalk isn’t funny on-stage. Nor is Damn You Autocorrect<\/a>. And the cheap tricks—accidentally swapping phones so that the wrong person gets the text, or sending the text to the wrong person, or the reply-all thing—are all cheap tricks, and obviously so. Deadening. The easier cop-out is to set the thing in 1985. Or, as Mr. Rosenbaum says, to collude with the audience in a feigned ignorance of the last twenty years, a refusal of now.\n

So. Here’s my question for Gentle Readers: Can you come up with examples of plays set in the last twenty years that Get it Right? At least partially? Any aspect of it, of course, but mostly I’m thinking of the plot-point problem where the audience thinks why don’t they…<\/i>\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger has seen a mobile phone onstage, but it ended up in the guy’s underwear. You know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19498,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13983\/revisions\/19498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}