A New Generation of Theatre Kids: Pushing for 3D in the age of ADD

By Jackie Rogers

“And the pe-ople, in the hou-se , all went to the uni-ver-sity
Where they were put in box-es and they came out all the same,
And there's doc-tors, and there's law-yers, and busi-ness ex-ecutives
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same”

“Little boxes”—This song was Malvina Reynold’s anti-suburbia anti-conformist reaction to driving across California in a housing boom of 1962. Resurrected as the ironic theme song for a television show about a suburban weed-dealer mom, it’s been covered by over thirty nationally-known artists and countless others on YouTube, evidently invading everyone’s brain with the same infuriatingly catchy tune.
At the Sunday matinee of the 45th season of the Festival Playhouse at Kalamazoo College, student- recorded 30-second covers played over and over in between each of the seven student written, acted, and directed ten-minute plays.

When did the theatre, dah-ling, start riding on the anti-establishment train? No complaints. A resurgence of a cool factor for stagecraft would be welcomed by many of us afraid of what the occupation of earth by technology could mean for the future of art and entertainment. Some neuroscientists have started suggesting that speed and multiplicity of simultaneous electronic media is changing how our brain’s work.
Students in college now are part of the first wave of the completely plugged-in generation, those who can’t imagine life without their laptop or, at the very least, daily access to the internet, and they are reclaiming the stage. A good ten-minute play has just as much character and composition as the more common longer versions. Feeding more flighty attention spans doesn’t mean skimping on substance; for the aspiring playwrights it instead meant the more difficult task of exposing the substance of the work in a concentrated and poignant way.

And this makes sense. Art imitates experience and this generation doesn’t expect an old-fashioned gentle wooing. People’s lives and relationships are shaped by technology, even indirectly, as explored poignantly in Emilia LaPenta’s “Missed Connections.” The pressures of making life-altering decisions are intense, immediate and imminent, as in Matt Jones’s “Clap Switch.”

It’s still true that a lot more people see film than theatre in America. Visual effects, instantaneous scene change, gigantic screens, the zoom lens —it all makes for a more thundering sensory experience. What then, for the campus popularity of playwriting and stagecraft?

It’s not as if 3-hour monologues are suddenly becoming all the rage. Young playwrights are using theatre to remind people of the three-dimensional world by acknowledging and working with diminishing attention spans. Almost all the plays were felt as quick but meaningful; sometimes even stimulating bursts of energy, significant ten-minutes of fun and pleasingly amateur production in the dusty Balch Auditorium.

Before and after rocking back and forth to the mocking nursery rhyme-like melody, these seven “K” student playwrights, even more student actors, actresses, and mostly student directors entertained and converted members of the flat-screen fanatical generation to the joy of real 3-demensional entertainment.