The SL Shakespeare Company Returns to Shakespeare with Twelfth Night:
In Their Usual Trademarked Extravagance…

Shakespeare, Second Life: The SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC) will perform a full ensemble performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Act 1 in a special short-run advance miniseason as part of their Fall Season 2008 repertoire. Opening on SLSC Thursday, November 13th (following a “sneak peek” on November 12th), the full-length Act 1 is the first part of the culmination of a summer’s worth of rehearsal-performances in SLSC’s tag-team staged reading series of Twelfth Night.

Maintaining their tradition of visual and theatrical extravagance, the miniproduction also introduces the usage of multiple rotating sets, incognito animation preloading, global lighting and weather control to SLSC stagecraft technologies. Live dynamic camera control by a director finetunes the performance with a cinematic appeal, while international subtitles, the SLSC’s “Pay as you Will” philosophy, and the play’s location in the confluence of four island simulators of the SL Globe Theatre make the performance accessible to as many as possible.

Directed by Ina Centaur and Voice Directed by Enniv Zarf, the production stars MadameThespian Underhill, Joff Fassnacht, Prospero Frobozz, Ludo Merit, Maedin Tureaud, and Lorne Harlequin, and also a motley cast of “silent actors” who create a different variation of a background crowd each time.

Miniseason schedule (All times SLT or GMT-8):
Wednesday, Nov 12 - 11 am “sneak peek”
Thursday, Nov 13 - high noon
Friday, Nov 14 - 1 PM
Saturday, Nov 15 - 2 pm - (ticketed)*
Sunday - no show
Monday, Nov 17 - high noon

*Most of our shows at the SL Globe Theatre are free, but VIP/ticketed shows charge a nominal admissions fee of L$500. The smaller audience may entice.

ABOUT The Company: <<<
The SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC) is a resident-funded and resident- supported professional theatre company that embraces the best of what Second Life (SL) has to offer. Since 2007, we have been making history by providing extravagant and unforgettable theatrical performances on Second Life. With each show, we continue to shape the field by developing and releasing a new technology for virtual theatre on Second Life. Our vision is to make live Shakespearean theatre available to anyone anywhere with a computer to create new possibilities in entertainment, culture, and commerce for residents of a diverse, unbounded geosphere. Those are the side effects of our mission: to make Shakespeare cool again! Latest News: http://blog.SLshakespeare.com

ABOUT The SL Globe Theatre <<<
SL Globe Theatre, sLiterary is a virtual reconstruction of the Original Globe Theatre that historians conjecture stood in Shakespeare’s days. It is meticulously adapted as a functioning theatre in the massively multiuser virtual world of Second Life. The SL Globe Theatre is the most historically accurate rendition of the Globe Theatre on the Internet. Its SL rendition is set in the confluence of 4 island simulators - thus allowing for the maximal number of local audience members. Web preview: http://visit.SLshakespeare.com

Drop by a free show (or a VIP-ticketed one), take photos, post to the group, and win! Drop by the SL Globe Theatre anytime before the show for a sneak peek of the sets.

SL Globe Theatre Pit entrance: http://SLurl.com/secondlife/Shakespeare/255/255/25
SL Globe Theatre Main entrance: http://SLurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/23/13/23

Live theatre is — by nature — temporal. Although it’s guided by the playscript, as implemented in the director’s vision, what goes on during showtime is quite often spontaneous, and in some cases filled with so many surprises of serendipity or misfortune that nothing appears like anything the director had in mind. But, the magic of it all is that even if the theatre burns down or if a backdrop collapses on an actor’s back… everything always ends up “right”… from one POV at least!

Virtual theatre in a MMOG is all that — and more. You have the advantage of a potentially infinite and globally unrestricted theatre, but technical issues on serverside, clientside, and yourside make the combination something of a blender jumble.

In a virtual theatre set in a platform like Second Life — which, because of its general nature and free-range customization appeal, suffers from significant performance issues when more than two dozen avatars are in the same locality — issues such as sim crashes, viewer crashes, ruthing (when an avatar’s appearance reverts to the default avatar), attachments being misplaced, textures not loading, prims not loading, local lighting being too local, collisions going berserk, and lag… often occur!

Although my test system should be more than sufficient to view Second Life, the actors all appear horribly ruthed for every single performance (even the ones where we didn’t pack the house). I can only imagine that the audience might end up suffering a different or worse POV due to system differences — but, then again, our strategy thus far has been to keep publicity inworld… such that those who visit are well aware of the quirks of Second Life, and would understand that it’s the platform collapsing as we all attempt to gather there at one point.

In a Second Life theatre set in the intersection of four-sims (currently, that is the only way to hold a large event on one location, as each sim is limited to 100 avatars), there are also problems with simcrossings. For a round theatre like the Globe, audience members may get “eaten by prims” as they cross sim borders, due to physics oddity. This bug should really *not* be an issue, as a virtual world whose “safe lands” to walk on spans only 256×256m2 … is a small world indeed! (Please vote here.)

The SL Globe Theatre is set on the intersection of sLiterary, Primtings, Skin City, and Shakespeare, and is home to the SL Shakespeare Company. It has an entire sim dedicated to the stage (and VIP audience members), and thus has an audience capacity of up to 300, supporting up to 400 local avatars.

Now, when a sim crashes, it basically looks like 1/4 of the Globe is gone. And it’s not always obvious that that’s what happened. You’d think it’s because your viewer spontaneously derezzed the view further than a certain viewdistance, but when you see ocean instead of land — the vast emptiness of an area once teeming with green map dots on the minimap makes it evident that the region has crashed.

Time is an interesting complication to get straight and universal for a medium accessible to an international audience. Daylight Savings Time, especially, becomes confusing when different regions of the world observe it differently or not at all! We had scheduled 10 runs starting on “SLSC Thursday,” but skipped Wednesday (assuming it might be downtime Wednesday), but I’d forgotten that the 10th and closing show occurred on DST… until the day of the show.

Second Life Time is actually PST or PDT, when DST is observed. But, those across the pond apparently don’t observe DST until more than two weeks after California switches over. Interestingly, we had a crowd arrive at both the 3 PM PDT and the 3 PM PST. We thus ended up doing an “encore finale” at 4 PM PDT (the old 3 PM PST), where we had the voice director do a speaking cameo for Francisco, after spontaneously upgrading the old Francisco to Horatio (who could not make it to the 4 PM). We also had a missing Francisco for the 3 PM, and had the Ghost voice out the role of a visual truant Francisco.

Chaos? No, but there does exist method in the madness… The only sane way to accept it all is to keep an open mind — and to take it all… passively, as accepting of everything as you can.

And, of course, we didn’t get to sign a restrictive license from DPS where we aren’t allowed to deviate from script. The advantage of performing a play written by a guy who’s so set for posterity there are (literally!) busts of him ubiquitous… and especially when we’re not certain if the plays we have are accurate per se, and when we’re pretty sure his players improv’ed their way through… is that when all else fails… the play is free to become truly live… temporal and spontaneous as the spoken word.

In closing, I’d like to address the cynics who believe that this endeavor is in vain, both because of platform and nature of the medium. While I’m well aware that there are plenty of greenscreening technologies that interface, in real time, real actors with virtual sets, the beauty of having a theatre in a virtual world is that… the theatre is actually *in* a world. I think that distinguishes a play from something seen on a 2d screen — you can see it at various angles if you tilt your head a bit… or a much wider angle if you become restless and start pacing through the seats. And, when it’s over, you can continue to “live” in the virtual world knowing that you’ve just attended a major Shakespearean production… perhaps with your virtual family or with friends separated by great spans of space and time. Although you’d view it using a technological interface (and, perhaps, with your view limited by this interface), it’s immersive, and you’re a part of it.

(Cross posted at Hamlet Production Blog - Ina Centaur Blog doesn’t allow commenting, but feel free to comment on the other blog)

Antics is to fall in love with — both as a previz tool and as a rough blocking tool and as one of the most easy to learn and customize machinima-making tool so far (they allow for direct import in .3ds format). (Also, I can totally imagine bringing in the renders into AfterEffects to convert to cartoon-ish form to make production quality cartoons!). I especially love the camera shots and transitions, the intuitive keyframing and smart camera sync’s, although their zoom/navigation system is a bit confusing — and lack of custom shortcuts is almost as painful as building in SL. Their basic build system is SketchUp-esque (well, sans push-pull - you have to click the wall button to add walls), but it’s intuitive to block out a 2d floor plan and then to click add walls. Like other OpenGL programs, their textures are limited to base 2’s. Interestingly, the system is powered by a command line system (such as “go to chair”) with more-or-less obvious theatre syntax.

They’re kind enough to offer a free unlimited version (it just lacks premium content). And they happen to be running a medical competition when I chanced to find them, so here’s my entry–basically the first thing I made in Antics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH-ohpjzEUc