Act 2: During

PCS had set the balcony aside for the twitterers and bloggers.  i’d been really convinced that all the typing and computer screens around me would be really distracting but i really didn’t notice them.  perhaps it’s because in my house there’s almost always a laptop open, almost always some keys being typed, but the electronics really didn’t detract from the experience.  the couple near me who came in late and then talked audibly for a long time until i shushed them are a different story (as an aside: who TALKS during a play??  i’ve seen like a million plays and i’ve never, never had to ask anyone to be quiet before.  also, i sorta sat on the arm of my chair when i sat back down from shushing them and i have an enormous bruise now that hurts every time i do anything - like sit or walk.  Yes, that’s right, i have a shushing injury).

So, other peoples’ typing wasn’t distracting for me, but mine was.  the split attention (paying attention to the play while trying to think of something to say) was part of it but the bigger problem was just the practical mechanics of having to look away from the action onstage in order to type, of having to deal with my treo when it randomly crashed a couple of times, of losing signal and doing that asinine moving-the-phone-all-around-looking-for-bars thing.   Apollo is a big, multimedia extravaganza and doesn’t rely on any kind of traditional narrative structure.  On the one hand, this twittering experiment fits in perfectly with the themes and style of the play.  But, perhaps paradoxically, i think it might actually be easier and more pleasant to live-twitter/blog from a more traditional play.  The problem with Apollo is I’d look down to type a post and when i looked back up something totally different would be happening on stage and I’d be really discombobulated.   But, ultimately, because I feel like the play wasn’t really about being coherent in that way, perhaps it didn’t even matter.

During the first act, I felt really self-conscious about the twittering.  not about the act of twittering but about the content of my posts.  One of the commentors on Alison Hallett’s blog post said “Like everyone else, I spent too much of the first act trying to come up with snark and ignoring what was happening on stage.”  I have to say, that was not my experience.  In fact, I would say I spent the first act trying NOT to come up with snark and instead to come up with responses that had some sort of content and, and this is weird, that were mostly positive.  I think a few things were happening to me right from the start:

1. a weird feeling of being a guest and therefore trying to find the good/nice.  we had these great seats and cheap tickets and i didn’t want to be a total jerk about the play even if i didn’t like it so before the play even started i had this sort of “if you can’t say anything nice…” feeling at the back of my mind.  I was pretty much actively trying not to be snarky.

2. a commitment to actually try to make the experiment work.  not in the sense of making the experiment a success (like “twittering during a play is great!”) but rather committing enough to the experiment to find out whether it’s a good idea or not.  in other words, i felt a responsibility to the experiment and i took it seriously.

3. my natural tendency to like plays while i’m watching them and only kick into critical mode later (see my previous post) helped ensure mostly positive or neutral posts

So…here are most of my first act posts:

thinking abt richard powers’ prisoners dilemma #apollo 8:16 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

so unnecessary to explicitly introduce him as lbj, the hat did it #apollo 8:15 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

put em up, shoot em down #apollo 8:13 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

martinis made me laugh then I had tears in my eyes #apollo 8:12 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

oh! *actual* metal spheriod! #apollo 8:11 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

metal spheroid! #apollo 8:10 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

meta meta meta #apollo 8:09 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

usually find this sorta choreography stuff repellent but its working for me #apollo 8:08 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

thinking abt what kind of storytelling will be able to tell the history of the ‘war on terror’ #apollo 8:04 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

gravity’s rainbows flashbacks #apollo 8:00 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

god, the shadows are lovely #apollo 7:45 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

oh I love a montage! #apollo 7:43 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

find myself wondering how many paper airplanes will have been made by the end of the run #apollo 7:40 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

So, yeah, even at the beginning, when I was still trying to post “useful” posts, i seem to have managed a pretty banal mix of non sequitur and pretension.   Things pretty much deteriorated from there because Acts 2 and 3 were much harder to post about - they required more attention and they were a lot more serious.  Breaking away from the action on stage felt increasingly inappropriate.  Also, I ran out of steam and a lot of my posts started to be of this variety:

lady hitler! #apollo 9:20 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

jules verne! #apollo 9:19 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

Oh and don’t worry, i still had plenty of pretension left:

the 20th c as ballet, family drama, rabbit hole, labyrinth #apollo 9:30 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

nooses have replaced the well-lit lights. how do we come to terms with the 20th c. #apollo 9:27 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

the power of objects. the cruelty of beauty. #apollo 9:25 PM Jan 17th from mobile web

And it’s really not surprising that my #apollo posts would be a mixture of non sequitur and pretension because that’s what my USUAL twitter posting is like.  I tend to use it not so much for the “i’m having cereal for breakfast” kind of post (though i do that too) but for stuff like:

cups = convenience! 1:28 PM Jan 13th from TwitKit

Or for reciting song lyrics that strike me:

grab me/grab your skeleton key 1:48 PM Jan 8th from web

My #apollo posts, after some initial attempts to sound smart (mentioning gravity’s rainbow within the first half-hour, i should be ashamed), pretty much devolved into simply reporting what i saw on stage (”pens!!!!!”) or to quoting what i heard (‘a person can be two things’).  There’s nothing really wrong with this, to some extent that’s what the medium is, but I do wonder about the value of those posts for…well…anyone.
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