'The Legend'

 

[This post is about Washington Irving and the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Before you get into the report on the centerpiece of that celebration, I want to point out some older posts on Rick On Theater that pertain to Irving (though they’re not all related the famous tale).

[In 2010, I posted six “Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle” (13-28 August) on the subject of New York theater, written in 1802 and 1803.  (Jonathan Oldstyle was one of the pseudonyms Irving used.)  On 25 November 2009, I posted “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children’s Theater in America,” a report on theater for young audiences in which I used a production of a musical adaptation of the story by my friend Kirk Woodward as a model to discuss making theater for children.

[In “A Helluva Town, Part 3” (9 January 2012), I included a section on “‘Knickerbocker’ and Sleepy Hollow,” a short piece on the origins of the use of the name Knickerbocker in New York and a little history of the name Sleepy Hollow (which is retold below as well).]

Washington Irving (1783-1859), often called the Father of American Literature, published the second of his two most famous short stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in 1820 (the first was “Rip Van Winkle,” published in 1819). 

Irving was born in New York City, but because of a yellow fever outbreak in the city in 1798, his family sent him 30 miles north to stay with friends in Tarrytown, where he first became familiar with the stories and legends around the nearby town that’s now called Sleepy Hollow.

In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving wrote:

There is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world.  A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose. . . .  From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow . . . .  The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.

In 1835, he bought property in Tarrytown and he moved there from New York City.  During the early colonial period, place names were pretty much traditional: someone came up with a name for a settlement, a village, or a valley, and if it stuck, that’s what it was called. 

The village of Tarrytown seems to have been established under that name, based on an earlier Dutch appellation, in the 17th century.  (The English took over the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1674 and many Dutch names were either translated or anglicized.)  The village was incorporated as Tarrytown in 1870.

The little village seven miles north of Tarrytown, however, had a slightly different story.  When it was part of New Netherland, around 1655, the area around it was dubbed Slapershaven or, literally, Sleepers’ Haven.  After the English took control, the area and the village assumed several different informal names.  In 1874, the village incorporated as North Tarrytown.

Sleepy Hollow—derived, I imagine, from an English approximation of the traditional Dutch designation Slapershaven—was then only a made-up name created in the imagination of Washington Irving.  It seems to have existed as a common usage for places, such as the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (which Irving himself named) of the Old Dutch Church and Sleepy Hollow Manor, an upscale residential neighborhood with historic homes; but not the village of North Tarrytown. 

That is, until 1996, when the residents of North Tarrytown voted two to one to rename the village Sleepy Hollow to capitalize on the famous story and to differentiate it from Tarrytown.  Once the legalities (such as notifying the U.S. Postal Service) were completed, the town where Irving’s famous and popular story is set, was finally a real place, named on maps of the state and the county of Westchester.

(In an amusing sidebar, the football team of the former North Tarrytown high school is named The Horsemen.  That ranks right up there with the sports teams from the Key West school in Florida, whose name is The Fighting Conchs.)

Around this time of year, the New York area Irving christened “Sleepy Hollow Country,” which includes not only the village formerly known as North Tarrytown, but Tarrytown itself and the nearby village of Dearman, which in 1854 renamed itself Irvington in honor of the famous writer who was living in Tarrytown, bustles with visitors looking for a Halloween experience.

For most of the country, at least in the Northeast, Salem, Massachusetts, has claimed the title of Halloween capital of the world.  But Sleepy Hollow is putting up a challenge now.  Irving’s “Legend” is, after all, arguably the most iconic ghost story in the country’s literature.  Sleepy Hollow Country is a natural Halloween tourist destination.

Year round, there are sites related to “Legend,” starting with the Old Dutch Church, where the Headless Horseman started his ride.  It still stands in Sleepy Hollow since 1699, with the Old Dutch Burying Ground where the graves of Katrina Van Tassell and Abraham Martling (the model for Brom Bones), prominent characters in Irving’s tale, can be found.  (There are tours of the church and cemetery.)

Next to the burial ground in the churchyard is the contiguous, but separate Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where, aside from Washington Irving himself, a number of famous people are buried, including Andrew Carnegie, Walter P. Chrysler, Brooke Astor, and Elizabeth Arden).

Also in Sleepy Hollow is a bridge over the Pocantico River with a historical marker that reads: “The Headless Horseman Bridge described by Irving in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow formerly spanned this stream at this spot.”  It’s not the actual bridge, which was replaced long ago, and the location of the span Irving knew was in reality further upstream within Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but never mind . . . .

In Tarrytown is Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving from 1835 until his death in 1859 (of a heart attack at 76).  Before Irving bought the property and built Sunnyside, the land was owned until 1802 by the Van Tassel family.  There are events staged here relating to “Legend” and the house is open for tours as well.

“People want to believe in ghosts and things like that,” observed Mayor Ken Wray of Sleepy Hollow, “and it’s fun to do that.  And then you get here and you get into the woods, you get into the cemetery and go ‘Yeah, I could see this happening here.’“

There are other curious sights in Sleepy Hollow Country which aren’t associated with “Legend,” one of which is in Irvington (3 miles south of Tarrytown and another half mile further on to Sleepy Hollow).  Built in 1859-60, the Armour-Stiner House (aka: the Octagon House) is, aside from its architectural oddity, supposed to be haunted.  (It’s been featured in several horror films, such as 1981’s The Nesting.)

Sleepy Hollow Country has also built up its catalogue of Halloween events, including many that aren’t related to Irving’s scary tale.  The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson displays over 7,000 elaborately carved, illuminated pumpkins.

Sleepy Hollow itself, however, was the scene of a new attraction this fall that was very specifically planned to relate to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  It’s creators had been working on it for two years.

Since the reason for adopting the name Sleepy Hollow was largely to increase focus on the town’s connection to Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the association with Irving himself, who lived in Tarrytown and died there, but is buried in Sleepy Hollow, what could be more natural than to host a big celebration of the bicentennial anniversary of the story’s publication?

But that was going to be in 2020, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic.  So the celebration was postponed (twice) and this fall, the town mounted a special, 90-minute performance called The Legend that ran weekends from Friday, 23 September, through Sunday, 23 October.  (The production had originally been scheduled to close on 16 October, but its popularity resulted in a week’s extension.)

The Legend, in the words of its own promotional material, was “created and performed by Westchester Circus Arts” and presented by the Village of Sleepy Hollow (with a grant from New York State).  It makes “groundbreaking use of holograms of Washington Irving and the Headless Horseman, combined with live action circus performers to tell the story” of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to commemorate its 200th anniversary.  (The actors whose images were digitized for the holograms weren’t identified.)

Performances were mounted in a large blue-and-yellow circus tent on the banks of the Hudson River in Sleepy Hollow’s East Parcel, the former parking lot of the now-closed General Motors automobile assembly plant on the west side of the village. 

(The plant, known as North Tarrytown Assembly, was closed by GM and transferred to the Village of Sleepy Hollow in 1996.  The 90 acres is split into two parcels by New York State’s Metro-North commuter railroad tracks.  The west side of the tracks is dedicated to mostly residential development; the East Parcel, as the other half is called, is used for public works facilities and amenities for public recreation.)

On the production’s own website (The Legend (sleepyhollowlegend.com)), Westchester Circus Arts describes The Legend as “a simmering adaptation of Washington Irving’s iconic ghost story, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’  Audiences will be treated to a cirque/theatre noir production with narration by Washington Irving himself—in hologram form.”  (The Legend was recommended for viewers ages 10 and up, but younger children attended the performances and cheered and gasped right along with their older peers.)

(Cirque, contemporary circus, new circus, or nouveau cirque is a genre of performing arts developed in the early 1970s to the mid-1980s in which a story or theme is conveyed through traditional circus skills.  Theatre noir, as far as I can determine, is, in this usage, to theater what film noir is to cinema.)

For those who don’t already know Irving’s “Legend,” the WCA retelling, created, produced, and written by Carlo Pellegrini of Westchester Circus Arts and directed by Hilary Sweeney, WCA’s founder, is set in Sleepy Hollow and “Tarry Town” (as Irving styled it) in the early 1800s.  Irving, in the form of a hologram (created by the Montreal-based Neweb Labs), returns in the present day to tell us what he really meant by “the legend.”  

The story follows schoolteacher Ichabod Crane (played by Justin Durham, hand balancer and straps artist) who has, of late, been down on his luck but finds adventure when he accepts an invitation to teach the children of Sleepy Hollow.

Everything changes when the beautiful heiress of the Van Tassel fortune, Katrina Van Tassel (Zoë Isadora, third generation circus artist—a member of the famous “Flying Wallendas” family), enters the ballroom of her father’s (Carlo Pellegrini) holiday party by performing a seductive aerial ballet on silks.  Ichabod is stricken by his good fortune and believes he has the savoir faire to win Katrina’s hand—and her father’s money.

When Katrina’s presumed beau, Brom Bones (Mickey Lonsdale, comedic actor and acrobatic dancer), sees Katrina’s interest in Ichabod, the game’s afoot!  Ichabod finds himself involved in what may become a deadly love triangle, spurred by Brom’s practical—and perhaps fatal—jokes.  

What neither suitor realizes is that Katrina possesses a “very particular set of skills” and can summon “the Haunting Spirit” (Doug Stewart of Cirque Us) with incantations reminiscent of The Exorcist.  The intrigue mounts: is the “Haunting Spirit” the ghostly and ghastly Headless Horseman villagers see at night in pursuit of his prey?  Or is it something else that causes Ichabod to vanish suddenly one night in an epic battle between Light and Dark?

In addition to the cirque theatricalization of the storytelling, the WCA presentation is modernized for 21st-century audiences.  Katrina is “much more than the pretty face” that encourages the competition between Ichabod and Brom Bones.

“We figured, let’s bring it up to contemporary times and make Katrina that powerful woman who almost becomes the leader of the story,” revealed director Sweeney.

Producing The Legend had been a years-long effort by the Village of Sleepy Hollow’s administrator and grant writer, Anthony Giaccio and Fiona Matthew.  They re-engaged longtime collaborators Westchester Circus Arts to create a show that would celebrate the bicentennial of the publication of Irving’s story.  WCA had begun exploring the concept of holograms as part of the cirque performance with Neweb Labs to find out if the idea was possible for the bicentennial’s true date, two years ago. 

Westchester Circus Arts is a 10-year-old, woman-owned business, founded by circus artist Hilary Sweeney.  An aerialist for over 15 years, she’s performed in Cirque le Masque’s Carnivale, Above the Belt Off-Broadway at the Zipper Theater, Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, ImaginAerial, Grounded Aerial, and more.  Prior to her circus career she trained from the age of 5 in ballet.

Sweeney’s co-director, Carlo Pellegrini, is a veteran circus performer with over 40 years of professional circus experience who traveled the world with Lichtenstein Circus, Big Apple Circus, and Nikolais Dance Theater.  He’s a social circus educator and founder of Amazing Grace Circus, a community circus with a social purpose.

(According to the American Circus Educators Association, “Social Circus refers to the use of circus arts as a medium for social justice and individual wellness and uplifts the role of art and culture as powerful agents for change.  Social Circus practitioners support participants as creative change makers through the collective development of self-esteem, solidarity, and trust.”)

The tale is told by Irving, who’s the only character in The Legend who speaks.  “I came back 200 years later to explain what I really meant by the legend,” says the virtual Irving . . . and the show begins.

The five live performers interpret the spirit and emotional content of the story with acrobatics and circus arts.  Most of the action is center stage, but some of the performances are aerial work above the audience’s heads.

“Thanks to a pulley system stage-right,” reported John Soltes of Hollywood Soapbox, “the performers swing about from various rigs, always amazing the crowd below.”  The pulleys are operated in full view of the spectators, schooling them in the theatrical magic that goes on behind the scenes of such flying circus acts.  (It’s a peek behind the Wizard’s curtain in Oz!)

Among the more grounded work included performers balancing on their hands on wooden poles and juggling—using apples to match the spirit of the season.  The duel between Ichabod and Brom Bones, showing off Durham’s and Lonsdale’s acrobatic skills, consisted of jumping and rolling on a barrel that served as a platform.

Soltes proclaimed the presentation “a marvel to behold” on Hollywood Soapbox replete with “Gothic romance, . . . fearful trepidation, . . . dastardly villainy.”  Durham and Isadora “dazzle as would-be lovers” as they “couple obvious physical strength with touching artistry.” 

Describing the virtual recreation of Iriving as “exquisite hologram technology,” which “allows the performers to focus on their physical work and not have to remember any lines of dialogue,” Soltes advised that “audience members should strap in for a wild ride.”

He admonished ticket-holders, however, “not [to] go in expecting the death-defying feats that larger circus companies employ; instead, they should sit back and enjoy the stunning singularity and intimacy of the one-on-one cirque experience.” 

Soltes concluded by affirming that “The Legend is an enjoyable entry in the Halloween season of Sleepy Hollow Country,” adding, “One hopes that Westchester Circus Arts and the Village of Sleepy Hollow make this legendary Legend an annual tradition.”  (He wasn’t the only reviewer to express such a wish.)

On Woman Around Town, a website that offers guides for women to New York City and Washington, D.C., MJ Hanley-Goff began by describing the start of her Legend experience: “The flaps of the circus tent whipping from the winds coming over the Hudson River was a perfect, though most likely unintended, special effect during a preview performance.” 

Hanley-Goff went on to give a general run-down of the show:

With a “cirque theatre performance,” three of the main characters swing about the stage in an “aerial ballet” telling the story about an innocent schoolteacher who falls under the spell of the seductress, Katrina, and is out to win her hand.  Standing in his way is another suitor, Brom Bones, and the two end up in a battle that is more a gymnastic dance than street brawl, as a dark spirit spirals his way across the flowing drapes hanging from the circus top.  

News 12 Connecticut, an outlet of a group of regional cable news channels in the New York metropolitan area that provides news coverage 24 hours a day, labeled The Legend a “horrifying and thrilling entertainment experience.”

Debra C. Argen and Edward F. Nesta proclaimed The Legend “spectacular and mesmerizing” on the website Luxury Experience, an online consumer resource.  They found that “its gravity-defying aerial work . . . had our hearts pounding with excitement, and the acrobatic groundwork . . . added another essential element of surprise and daring to the nuanced performance.”

The writers found the holographic Irving’s description “[h]auntingly narrated” and “[d]eftly and creatively told,” and reported that the performance “had us on the edge of our seats with the hairs on the back of our necks sticking up as we watched the legendary tale unfold above and around us.”

Because “the performers are well-versed in their disciplines,” the writers deemed “their performances . . . engaging and dynamic.”  They affirmed, “We love the contemporary cirques, and Westchester Circus Arts was truly brilliant,” singling out “the exhilarating aerial work performed by Justin Durham, Doug Stewart, and Zoë Isadora.”

Argen and Nesta declared that attending The Legend was “the perfect way to get a jump start on Halloween!”  The production provided “a sensational . . . experience,” the writers asserted, adding, “If you love Halloween, you must see The LEGEND.”

Theater and Computers

Some time back I was doing some reading to catch up with the latest developments in theater tech and staging concepts. This included some experiments in the employment of computers in performance in ways that went beyond lighting control and scenery shifting. A long time ago I had read an article in Time that reported on a new computer program, developed at MIT, that let playwrights test scenes on screen without hiring actors and a stage. Actors, directors, and designers were aghast, as you might imagine, considering this now-primitive computer theater the nose of a very scary camel inside the tent. If playwrights learned they didn’t need actors, directors, and designers to see their work come alive, what might ensue? We could all be out of business permanently.

Well, that hasn’t come to pass yet, and it’s been over 20 years since that report appeared. Film has been invaded by computer technology, especially in the action-adventure genre, and computers have become standard equipment in theaters for scenic and lighting control (which might exercise IATSE), but the only area of performance in which computers have become an issue of contention is music--the substitution of computer-generated music for real instruments played by live musicians. (This is a real issue for AFM members and has been the focus of much action by that union.) But computer-generated acting does exist, still mostly at an experimental level, though it has been used on stage a little already. It’s coming, that’s for sure, unless some other, more applicable technology arrives first.

Now, I’ll confess that I like technology in theater. I don’t mean that I reject theater-unplugged, as it were; but I can be bowled over by the clever (and theatrical) use of tech in a performance when it enhances the live elements of theater. I was amused when Harry Guardino did scenes with a projected cartoon in Woman of the Year in 1981. When Emily Mann used closed-circuit TV on stage in her Broadway production of Execution of Justice in 1986, I thought it was neat. I was delighted with Penny Arcade’s use of live video in Invitation to the Beginning of the End of the World (Invitation to the Beginning of the End of My Career) in 1990. I don’t reject theater tech out of hand, though there are many who disparage the use of anything beyond a Fresnel and a Leko on stage. What I don’t appreciate is using tech to emulate movies as if the goal of theater were to become a live-action video game.

While I was revising an old essay on documentary drama (another version of which appears on ROT as “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October), I began to consider the use of computer-generated imagery on stage as a real, if somewhat gimmicky, application. Computer controls long ago changed the way lights, sound, and sets are designed and run in the theater. As of now, however, computer theater’s a speculation, but if we expand the idea into some of the emerging technology that is already in experimentation for live theater, we get intriguing potential developments: satellite broadcasting (that is, from remote locations), CGI and holography, virtual reality, computer sensors and motion capture, bluescreen technology, Internet productions (live performances transmitted via the Internet). There are certainly other computer applications that are not yet part of the public awareness, still in experimental stages in laboratories, which would expand this short list, but some of this computer technology is already in use in performance. Experimental theater artist George Coates has been using CGI and other computer (and proto-computer) techniques in his work for three decades and universities (where the technology exists for now) have been testing various applications of computers on stage beyond controlling the lights and the set changes.

The name for this hybrid theater hasn’t been settled on yet, either in the lit or in common parlance. “Virtual reality (or VR) theater,” “cyber theater,” and “computer theater” have their advocates, but all have other meanings that create ambiguities. Other terms exist, too, but most have broader or more limited applications than the computer-assisted theater to which I’m referring. The leading contender right now seems to be “digital theater”--the one I’m going with for now--though that, too, has alternative meanings referring to other applications. (Among these are the recently-launched program in London of broadcasting live theater performances to screens at remote theaters, including in North America and other continents; the Internet transmission of performances staged in a studio or another location and viewed on home computers; and a method, developed by the Digital Theater System, Inc., for recording surround sound for films and video.) The two most significant criteria for the kind of digital theater I mean is that it must focus on live actors in a performance space with living spectators present for the performance. (For the performance to be theater, as distinguished from, say, dance--which has already been experimenting with computer-assisted performances more than theater--a certain reliance on text or narrative must be evident. But my emphasis here is on the computer aspects of the performance, so a dance or performance art presentation would serve just as well for my purposes.) Whether the cyber element is a digitized actor or virtual scenery is irrelevant to my point--except that it would have to be substantial to make the production rise to the level of digital theater, something more than a computer-generated special effect. (Though a few years old already, the best article on this subject, with several examples of the kind of technology to which I’m referring, is “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre,” Theatre Topics 11.2 [September 2001]: 107-30, by David Z. Saltz, who is director of the University of Georgia’s Interactive Performance Laboratory.)

There’s a history, short of course, for digital theater. The pre-history picks up with the George Coates Performance Works, founded in San Francisco in 1977. He started with electronic sound systems that manipulated music in live performances the way a recording studio does on tape; as electronic and digital technology advanced, so did his theatrical experimentation. (Going back further into pre-history, we encounter the works of other avant-gardists in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s who used the technology of their eras in experimental ways--film, projections, amplification, and so on.) Moving into the 1980s, we begin to see the true early stages of digital theater as computers became small enough to bring into the theater and studio and powerful enough to do more and more complex tasks in creating works of art. Music and visual art were the first forms to capitalize on the new machines that were being invented for communications, recording, and writing or drafting. Artists merely turned the quotidian devices from office and school work to art. By the ‘90s, the Internet and other advancements in the cyber world had become part of everyday life and artists spread out into the potentialities the new tech offered. Film and eventually TV capitalized on the new possibilities almost immediately; it was a natural fit: electronic devices for the electronic media. Dance took advantage of the new tools next. As the technology became cheaper, simpler, and more powerful and flexible, artists found more and more ways to use it in their work, and digital theater was born. In 2002, for instance, Kabuki director Koji Orita used a computer-projected image animated in real time by an actor in an off-stage room to portray a mythical creature on stage opposite a live actor. Digital theater’s still in the early experimental stages now, but just as sure as the Lord made little green apples (as Harold Hill put it), it’ll be on our stages soon enough.

For good or bad, computers will become an element of the theater world. Along with the work of Roy Ascot, GCPW, and the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, some universities, especially MIT, the Interactive Performance Laboratory at the University of Georgia, and the Virtual Reality Theatre Lab (now the Institute for the Exploration in Virtual Realities) at the University of Kansas, have worked with computer-generated imagery in live performances. Computer sensors and motion captors allow actors to interact with sets, props, lights, sound, and CGI’s. The Internet and satellite transmission allow actors distant from one another--even as far away as different continents--to act together in the same play at the same time as live actors appear with projected images of a distant actor. Plays produced on the World Wide Web using webcams already represent a kind of guerrilla theater where actors perform in public spaces as spectators, warned to tune in to a certain website, watch on computer screens at remote locations. (While this may be a form of digital theater by a looser definition, the lack of a co-present audience at these productions puts them outside the type of theater I’m considering. The technology, however, can be adapted for use with live, co-present spectators.)

A few years ago, I was at the Shaw Festival in Ontario and one of the plays that season was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man. As I was watching the show, it occurred to me that this would have been a great play on which to experiment with computer-projected images. Since the title character was invisible for so much of the play, his stage "appearances" consisted mostly of standing off stage somewhere, delivering lines over a mic while the rest of the cast and the stage techies accomplished all the physical stuff. Like the mythological character in Koji Orita’s Kabuki production, a gauzy version of the character might appear in projection on the set as the actor “performs” off stage in real time.

Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice had live closed-circuit video on stage, but it was either prerecorded film--from The Life and Times of Harvey Milk or news coverage of the murders--or transmissions of images from the stage as if they were on-location TV broadcasts. But Mann did do some of this while characters were still coming on stage from the wings--as if the TV cameras were following newsmakers--and the audience saw the screen images before the live actors were visible. That's a rudimentary precursor of what I'm imagining. With the Internet and satellite transmission, the images can be created live from a continent away; and with holography, they can be projected not onto a screen, but onto the stage.

Just as film actors (and TV weathercasters) now perform before computer-generated bluescreen images that to the spectators look as real as if the performers were filmed on location, I can imagine actors in the theater working against projections or even holograms from a real location historically associated with the events of the play, what might be called virtual scenery. We may perhaps see King Lear ranting before the actual Stonehenge or Hamlet live on the ramparts of the real Elsinore castle in Denmark.

Singer Natalie Cole famously performed a 1991 duet with the video image of her dead father, Nat King Cole, but we might soon see live on-stage actors interacting with computer-generated images of long-dead historical figures--a kind of live-action Zelig.

In Woman of the Year, Harry Guardino acted with that animated drawing--but that was a fake, of course: the projection wasn't really reacting to Guardino. In a revival, however, the actor might actually interact with a projected cartoon animated in real time by an actor off stage.

In And Then They Came for Me (1996), audiences not only heard the recorded voices of survivors of the Anne Frank hideout, they saw these people on video tape projected onto the stage in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the future, actors would be able to appear on stage with actual participants live from the site of the events depicted in the play. Think of a three-dimensional video conference (or a Star Trek holodeck). A live actor in the theater could act with another live actor miles away, but in real time.

A further step along this continuum might be to put a live actor on stage with real events that are happening at that moment somewhere else in the world. In my original documentary theater essay, I suggested that the epitome of the genre would be what I dubbed drame-vérité--from cinéma-vérité, filmed actualities--a form of reality on stage. I said it couldn't be accomplished--and given the technology of the early '80s, it couldn't. But the march of technology has made that possibility more likely and not unforeseeable at all. I'm not sure, but I think all the technology necessary is available, though it's very expensive, obviously, and not entirely reliable at this stage of development. But we know that that situation doesn't last very long.

Theater may or may not be deliberately emulating movies, but I project, based on these technological "advancements" that sooner or later, movies and plays will be one and the same thing: you'll go to a theater for a "live" event that's really holograms and computer-generated images, whether it's Hamlet and Horatio, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, or Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. It'll be a theatrical version of virtual reality. (Shortly after that, they'll hook you up to electrodes and project the performance right into your mind--a combination of play, movie, and dream.)