Playing for and against the microphone : the theatrical soundstage, the cinematic meeting interface

Abstract

This article argues for an analogy between the early talkies and the video telephony software-based theatre productions that have proliferated since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic: both the crude sound equipment employed for the late 1920s films and the static streaming and recording devices used to make online theatre/theatre online productions require the performer's close proximity to the microphone. The latter kind of artwork's 'user interface stage' is the site of a paradox, simultaneously fragmenting the spacetime of a written scene and reconstituting the fragments in alternately theatrical and cinematic fashions. I use Mint Theatre's The Gin Chronicles in New York (2020) as a source of examples of this innate contradiction's potential to transcend the notion of medium specificity (and its 'betrayal') that surrounded the emergence of the talkie and to help forge a new model for the Foucauldian heterotopia.