In a recent thread on the Plays and Playwrights Yahoogroup a number of participants asked what it meant when it is written in the body of the play that it takes place in "the present" (presumingly when it was written) but that "present-day" references are often dated by the time of a given production.
Of course to my mind, even "the present" is a specific milieu; stories set in "the present" rapidly recede into historical fiction. Certainly, when I chose to set Total War in the 1990s, and not "the present" it meant that the characters would be making cultural and political references and using technologies of that era and not of "the present" I currently inhabit.
As a consequence, I made a small number production notes throughout the script in order to explain some of these technologies that are either no longer in use, or may be disappearing in the foreseeable future. The result was an instance of an unintended outburst of laughter when at the last staged reading, the audience heard stage manager, Anika M. Colvin-Hannibal read aloud:
[NOTE: Due to the time period in which this play is set, a "Dictionary" is a large bound book with a finite number of pages of paper, and not a potentially infinite digital hypertext.]
2 comments:
And the 90's are a very strange time regarding technology references. (I have a few plays I wrote that are set in that period.)
Cell phone usage/ownership and the internet just rocketed forward from the mid 90's up to 2000.
When I was stationed overseas in the Army in the early 90's, we had long distance calling - still very expensive, but you still mostly communicated with friends and family by letters more than anything else. Indeed, I still have a few shoeboxes of letters from that time.
Near the end of my enlistment 1996 or so, there was more and more internet usage coming online, but still, most of us wrote letters and nobody had a phone in their room.
But when I think back, it is even hard for me to believe that was true.
Now, I have friends in the military, who are sometimes stationed overseas, that I communicate and chat with very regularly online or stay in touch with via Facebook.
Indeed, Art: The '90s are a very strange period, technologically speaking, because they were so transitional. At times, I could be a voracious letter writer (at least with a few select friends-- in part because I had just moved to Boston and many of my closest friends were living in and around New York.) In addition, being part of the punk-rock subculture at the time, we were also sending mail-art back and forth.
Even though I was an early adopter of email, so few people were using email during the mid to late '90s that often times I was only corresponding with a few people and as a consequence, our missives were often lengthy and could quickly become intense.
Some of the unintended humor from the stage direction I quoted though, comes from the fact that we are still in a period of transition and I find it easy to imagine that ten years from now "dictionary" or "notebook" will mean something entirely different from what it meant in the 1990s-- and so I felt the need to mention clarify that in the stage directions.
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