Bill Stiteler does not want to see your play 08/14/2010 3:37pm

I'm writing this post on my iPod touch as I wait for the box office to open for the first show of the last weekend of Fringe 2010. I want to talk about a couple of things, related to how technology is and isn't changing theater.  The biggest change is also the subtlest: this is the first year without a mass produced printed schedule. There were a few available at the venues, bit no stacks and stacks of newsprint waiting at the venues. And I didn't hear any complaints—which if you know the Fringe, is a miracle in itself. This was the first Fringe where it was assumed you had access to a computer.  This was also the first Fringe where I started turning down programs, figuring that if I wanted info on the cast or the show, I'd look it up online. Ten I was hit by his notion: do we really need programs? What purpose do they serve? Do I really care that Boy With Guitar was in Paint Your Wagon last year? Do I need to know what the director thinks about, well, anything? Do programs serve any purpose other than giving the audience something to kill a few minutes with before the lights go down? While I used the Fringe website more than ever for figuring out which shows to see, I trusted the Fringe reviews less than ever. The system is too easy to game. It's simply to easy to create email addresses to game the system. I found myself using Twitter, searching the #mnfringe hashtag and taking advice from there for the simple reason that there is an identity attached to a name. There were also a plethora of bloggers, pro and am, poring over the festival, whereas a decade ago we relied on journalists from the Strib, PiPress, and City Pages.  But even as I sit here, misspelling words on my tiny touch screen, posting it wirelessly, and all told using more computing power than sent Man to the Moon to tell you whether you should see Fartasaurus Rex, what makes the Fringe a theater event doesn't change. We move into the darkness and watch another person talk to us. We go out to Bedlam (for one last time) to talk to others about the experience.  Everything around theater changes, the tools of theater change, but theater itself remains at the core what it was when Thespis first stepped out and said "Look at meeee," and the chorus grumbled "I could have played that part." Or more prosaically, when the Magic Men (to borrow a phrase from Carrie Fischer) stood by the fire and told us the stories of who were are, where we came from. The voices, the costumes, the makeup, lights, and stages are all just different tools: theater is in the story. The telling, and the listening.  Theater is social media. It draws us together. To talk.  And to hear.