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It is one thing to write a clever script, and quite another to produce a successful show. How can a group of individuals coordinate their real-time activities in a sustained and effective way, produce a show, if they are located in different time zones, have different sleeping schedules, presumably have never met and-- most astonishing of all-cannot even see or hear one another? In this section of the paper, we provide some answers to this question. For Harris's own retrospective, more detailed account of the logistics of Hamnet productions, see Harris (1995b).
In the early stages, the most basic problem was how to attract a following, a group of people who would be interested and willing to work together on something experimental and exciting, yet extremely challenging. Second, given the rowdy nature of IRC, with hundreds and even thousands of people "coming and going" constantly, fooling around, exchanging private messages with untold numbers of individuals, all the while chatting in one or more channels simultaneously, Harris had to figure out how to manage planned, focused activity. Third, there was the need to cope with unexpected disasters of all kinds, just as can happen in RL theater--e.g., when the scenery comes crashing down. Yet another problem is that, although basic IRC commands are simple to use, it takes a good deal of practice and experience to use the software in a more sophisticated way, especially the commands relating to channel modes, e.g., +m for "moderated," +v for "voice"--granting participants the right to "speak," etc. (see Harris, 1995b). Thus, "newbies" had to be socialized to the IRC game, and even old-time IRCers needed to be taught how to adapt its structure and commands to the needs of virtual theater.
Generating Interest: Public Relations
Once the idea of the Hamnet Players began to crystallize, Harris began to spread the word among RL and IRC friends and acquaintances. Having a fair amount of RL theater experience himself, he was able to interest others with amateur or professional theater experience to join him for the experiments. Harris believes that announcements on Usenet proved to be a more successful way of recruiting participants and audience members than from within IRC itself. He also gained publicity for Hamnet activities via coverage in the media--appearances on American National Public Radio, local television interviews, newspaper coverage in the Los Angeles Times and the London Times, as was a popular article which he himself authored (Harris, 1994). We too gave the Hamnet Players some free publicity when we published a brief article about them in Wired Magazine (Danet, 1994).
#england, one of his personal haunts, and announced:
The aborted November performance of "Hamnet" failed, first of all,
because of an electricity outage following a thunderstorm in
California. The log suggests that the performance may not have
taken place for other reasons too: last-minute recruiting of
"actors" and even audience members proved to be ineffective, at a
time when few people knew of, or took an interest in Hamnet
activities. Eventually, Harris came to recruit persons to play
specific parts several days in advance, leaving only the casting of
minor roles to last-minute online preparations, one to two hours
before show time. In one of his more successful recruiting attempts,
he was able to mobilize Ian Taylor, a professional actor with the
Royal Shakespeare Company, to play the role of Hamlet in the second,
February, 1994 production of "Hamnet".
Setting a Time and Place for the Performance
To coordinate performances in time, Harris simply used the device of
Greenwich Mean Time-the mean solar time of the meridian of Greenwich,
England. Thus, he announced that the premiere performance of "Hamnet"
would take place at 20:00 GMT, and it was participants' job to figure
out what time that would be in their own local time zone. This is not
so difficult: many of us already have quite a bit of practice in
figuring out what time it is in, say, New York or Sydney, when it is
9:00 AM in London or Jerusalem, e.g., when planning to make
international phone calls. Similarly, IRCers and participants in other
chat fora who set "dates" or arrange to meet at "parties" or "pubs" on
the Net have had additional practice at this.
As for considerations of "place," this too turns out to be even less
problematic for anyone familiar with chat modes like IRC. To begin
with, cyberspace generally, as well as more specific "locations" where
communication occurs, are subjectively experienced as "places," even
though they have no physical basis. The Greek "topos", which means
"place", is the eytomological source for our current English "topic."
We often say, in the middle of a RL conversation, "Where were we?"
"Topic is place" on the Net in an even more basic sense than in real
life (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in press).
Technically, the thousands of IRCers who may be logged on at any time
cannot all appear on the screen at once; in practice, they routinely
divide themselves up into "channels" with different names, from the
playful (#hottub, #nicecafe) to the professional and
serious (#www, #amiga). Although channels are not
institutionalized in any formal sense, some have been recreated daily
for years, e.g., #hottub and #initgame. Harris could
therefore invent a channel with a unique name and be fairly sure that
it would be recognized as specially designated for performance
purposes. Thus, it was no problem to announce that all performances
would take "take place" in "the hamnet auditorium." The first person
to type /join #hamnet would, in effect create it--Harris himself in
this case. It is enough for others to type /join #hamnet, and they are
there! That is, once logged onto the channel, they see everything that
takes place in #hamnet on their screen, and can themselves, of
course, type in their own contributions.
Performing the Text, Not the Play
As we began to explain earlier, in the discussion of the script,
Hamnet productions do not involve acting in any conventional sense.
Performances are more like the collective completion of a textual
puzzle. It is important to recall that the group performs not the
play, but the text. In other words, a primary goal of the performance
is to reproduce the individual lines of the text of the script on-
screen in real time. Here is an illustration of how performance of the
text works: in the December production, the person who took the role
of "Scene" received the following material from Harris online:
This rather confusing-looking sequence is a prepared file
containing all the lines of the role of "Scene," which Harris
dispatches, during online last-minute preparations, to the person
whom he has just recruited to play the role. That person's job will
be to enter the titles of the different scenes from the script, in the
correct places. /q is short for the command /query, which enables one
person to send another an extended private message (in this case the
file of instructions for "Scene") without typing /msg nick for each
line. The person playing "Scene" is to exploit the /me command in IRC,
which is used to enter a description of oneself, in order to produce
the titles of the individual scenes during the performance of the
script. Thus, by typing
the person will produce on screen, and, hopefully, in the right
sequence, the introductory line for scene l:
In addition to preparing individual files containing all the lines of
each of the 17 parts in the "Hamnet" script to be cast, Harris prepared
eight files of a more general nature, well in advance of performance].
The loading of these files at strategic points greatly facilitated
both recruitment and actual production. Some are quite pragmatic in
function; others are very playful, and help set the tone for Hamnet
activities; some are both pragmatic and playful. Here is a list of
these files with brief descriptions of each:
*If the following does not appear to you as
a table, please click here
"Wpsb" is short for the one-liner "Welcome, everybody. Please
stand by..." When loaded , the "lostms" file playfully announces,
Displaying this file in other channels was a way to attract the
attention and interest of potential participants and audience
members. In addition, Harris circulated his "recruit" file:
When displayed within the #hamnet channel, these files help keep
players' and audience members' attention focused, and encourage
them to be patient while everyone is getting ready for the
performance, under conditions where anyone can disappear at any
time! To solicit people to be either actors or members of the
audience, Harris offers them the "pora" file, as in the following
example from the December performance:
Someone called <NickD> has just joined #hamnet channel, and
tells Harris he heard about the group on NPR. After telling <NickD>
that the speaker was Harris himself, he loads the "pora" file by
typing /l pora (line 252). /l is short for the command /load. The
following 2 lines then appear on the screen of the invitee (and in
fact of everyone currently on #hamnet). <NickD> types "a,"
choosing to become a member of the audience. Those typing "p"
for participant are usually then offered a second file, the "parts"
file, listing, in the case of "Hamnet", the 17 parts alluded to
above, including the textual ones like "enter" and "exit:"
Participants are also sent the "instruc" file
There is an additional file with advice for players, but in
the latter file, the playful takes over from the pragmatic:
Here, Harris was unable to resist the opportunity to create a
delightful parody of Hamlet's advice to the actors about performing
the play-within-the-play in the original:
Unlike the language of the "Hamnet" script, most of which is IRCese,
as we shall see shortly, here Harris has retained most of the
original Shakespearean language, with only minor adaptations for
present purposes.
Ascii "Sets": A First Step Toward Multimedia Performance
The files prepared in advance for "Hamnet" performances also include
a "set" made of ASCII-only keyboard
symbols, a toy Elsinore castle. The script is also available in print
(in Harris, 1995b). Thus, with the most minimal of means, already in the
production of "Hamnet" we have a small first step toward multimedia
performance, and an attempt to provide something which at least
remotely resembles the sets in a RL production. "PCbeth" was later
to add color graphic images,
(see a detail of each image below)
All are welcome 2 participate in the World Premier of the irc
Hamlet starting 18:00 gmt on #hamnet
(logfile, November 14, 1993, L: 193-194).
/q scene
*** Starting conversation with scene
/l scene
*scene* ME 1: THE BATTLEMENTS [8]
*scene* ME 2: AFTER HAMLET'S CHEM LAB [16]
*scene* ME 3: INTERIOR [30]
*scene* ME 4: THE QUEEN'S CLOSET [43]
*scene* ME 5: GRUESOME FINALE [54]
*scene* ********** PLEASE ADD / BEFORE EACH ME ********
/q
/me 1: THE BATTLEMENTS
SCENE 1. THE BATTLEMENTS
Adding [8] to the end of the line will then provide the cue to
whoever has line [9] to get his or her line on screen next. This is
an excellent example of how Harris and his associates learned to
exploit, adapt and activate the IRC software for their novel
purposes. Harris's initial idea was that individuals would receive
only their own lines, in this /query mode, and would not see the
entire script, thus introducing an element of surprise which would,
presumably, encourage playful improvisation. Even when the mode of
recruitment of players changed from last-minute mobilization to
distribution of the main parts several days beforehand, he attempted
to retain this element of surprise. He continued to encourage
improvisation. There was little or no rehearsal, though some practice
with the technical side of things was necessary. Thus, Harris and one
associate carried out a brief test, jointly reproducing a scene from
the "Hamnet" script several days before the November performance was to
take place. Over time, it became increasingly difficult to keep
people in the dark as to the nature of the script. Despite the
overall requirement of collectively reconstructing the script on
screen, Harris definitely sought to foster improvisation and
continues to believe that this is central to the mandate of the Hamnet
Players.
Figure 1. List of Prepared Files
Loaded by Harris Preceding and During Performances.
Filename Description
wpsb
Welcome, please stand by
lostms
Lost ms.
recruit
General invitation to the performance
pora
Participant or Actor?
parts
List of parts to be cast
instruc
Instructions for "actors"
castle
An ascii "set": miniature Elsinore castle
advice
Advice to "actors"
Line 492:<Producer> ***<<< WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE >>>***
493:<Producer> THAT THE LONG-LOST MANUSCRIPT "HamNet" HAS COME TO LIGHT..
494:<Producer> The MS is 80 lines long and written in irc jargon
495:<Producer> Scholars have long speculated that this rare document was
496:<Producer> the source of inspiration for Shakespeare's verbose play "Hamlet"
497:<Producer> =========================
498:<Producer> THIS CYBERPLAY WILL RECEIVE ITS FIRST PERFORMANCE HERE IN A MOMENT OR 2
Line 369: <_Producer> Everybody is invited to the World Premier
Of the irc adaptation
370: +of Hamlet starting on channel hamnet at 20:00 GMT
(logfile, December, 1993)
Line 250 <NickD> Heard about this on NPR
<_Producer> nick: that was me
/l pora
Please enter P if you wish to be a performer
Please enter A if you would prefer to lurk in the audience
255 <NickD> a
(logfile, December, 1993)
Line 138:> PARTS AVAILABLE ARE.........
139:> :
140:> audience 2 lines + ad lib
141:> SCENE 5 lines
142:> _Enter 7 lines
143:> _Exit 2 lines
144:> prompter 1 line
145:
146:> :
147:> Ghost 2 lines
148:> Ophelia 4 lines + /signoff
149:> R_krantz 5 lines
150:> G_stern 3 lines
151:> _Queen 8 lines
152:> Polonius Aaaaaarrrgggghhhh only
153:> King 4 lines
154:> Laertes 3 lines
155:> Fort_bras 2 lines
156:> Drum 1 line
157:> Colours 1 line
158:> Attndts 1 line
(logfile, December, 1993)
Line 804:/l instuc [sic]
805:> :
806:> :
807:> OK, Here's how it works....
808:> Each actor is about to receive his/her lines ONLY in /QUERY mode.
809:> Each line is numbered at the end like this.... [14]
810:> PLEASE RECORD IN SOME WAY EXACTLY WHAT YOU RECEIVE [PrtSc recommended]
811:> Where irc commands are involved the initial / has been omitted...
812:> and you are asked to add it in (in tech rehearsal we had BIG PROBS w/this!)
813:> Every line you have must be entered in the overall numeric sequence...
814:> and the entire script will appear.
815:> EXAMPLE: If you have a line numbered [14], wait until you see
816:> somebody else enter line [13] and then enter your line [14]
817:> OBVIOUSLY IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU INCLUDE THE LINE NUMBER
818:> IN YOUR INPUT-IT IS SOMEBODY ELSE'S CUE.
819:> NOTE: Some actors have more than one line in sequence....
820:> So, if you have both lines [13] and [14], you cue yourself for [14]
821:> +=========== 30 sec PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS
(Hamnet, logfile, December, 1993)
Line 1754:/l advice
1755:> :
1756:> :
1757:> Enter the speech, I pray you, as I /QUERY'd it to you,
1758:> trippingly on the kybd
1759:> but if you screw it up, as many of our Unix users do,
1760:> I had as lief the town-crier took my /LOADs
1761:> Nor do not flame the chan too much with your attributes, thus,
1762:> but use all gently
1763:> for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind
1764:> of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that
1765:> may give irc smoothness.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your
players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not
saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for
in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of
passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness.
(Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2: 1-9).
Getting into "costume" for performances is a matter of changing
one's nick. When casting is completed, Harris signals all to change
their nicks; their identity is thus doubly masked--the usual nick
being further transformed into the one needed for the performance.
Thus, to get ready to play <Ophelia>, one must type
Here is how this works in practice; the following sequences come
from the February performance:
At first, only two players complied, and their changes of nick are
acknowledged by the IRC software:
Then, <aurra> (Leslie Csokasy in real life), Harris's designated
"stage manager" in the February performance, issued a second call
for people to change their nicks.
Coping with the Real Troubles of Virtual Theater
Just as in RL theater, disaster can break up the performance at any
moment, so virtual theater has its vulnerabilities too. Knowing
that he might not succeed in casting all roles, or that people who
had committed themselves to playing a role might not show up, or
might be cut off by a netsplit at any moment, Harris had prepared
each
individual line of the script in a mini-file. This enabled him to
enter each line as needed, in other words to play any and all
roles, if necessary!
There are two kinds of technical problems which cannot, however,
be so easily solved. The less serious of the two is lag, or delay
in seeing one's contributions on screen (see the section on lexicon
in the script, above). The more serious problem is that of
"netsplits," sometimes also called "netburps":
The problem is extremely common on IRC these days, and is
exacerbated by the growing number of persons using it.
Having learned from the premiere December performance of "Hamnet" how
difficult it was to manage the various logistic aspects of production,
Harris enlisted the aid of another person, nicknamed <aurra>, to
serve as as Stage Manager in the February production. In later
productions he even added an Assistant Stage Manager.
In addition to these two chronic problems, there were still other
technical difficulties that caused havoc, at least temporarily.
During the December performance, Harris, of all people, was
unintentionally kicked off the #hamnet channel by an add-on program
designed to remove people flooding others' screens with whole
screenfuls of text. Playing both <producer> and <hamlet>, he was
kicked off when he loaded the Elsinore castle scenery file, which
had been designed to fill exactly one screen (Harris, 1995b: 505).
Moreover, because the channel had been designated private,
"the play's producer and 'star'...was shut out of the theatre and
had to beg to be let in again!" (Harris, 1995b: 506). Something
similar occurred during the February performance. Ian Taylor, the
professional actor playing Hamlet was "bumped" accidentally by a
bot from the performance (see Harris, 1995b).
/nick Ophelia
Line 926:<Producer> OK, ALL PRE-CAST ACTORS CHANGE YR NICKS PLZ
(logfile, February, 1994)
Line 929:***Cis now known as PROLOGUE
...
933:***Uros is now known as G_Stern
(logfile, February, 1994)
Line 971:<aurra> ATTN PRECAST MEMBERS, PLEASE CHANGE YOUR NICKS TO YOUR ROLE ...
973:Dudester is now known as _Enter
...
977:***LoverMan is now known as Colours
978:***Nibbles is now known as Ghost
979:***SysBotMgr is now known as Kingg
980:***PROLOGUE is now known as Prologue
(logfile, February, 1994)
When {netlag} gets really bad, and delays between servers
exceed a certain threshhold, the {IRC} network effectively
becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of
people seem to be signing off at the same time and then
signing back on again when things get better
(Jargon File, 1995)
Hamnet article:
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