Fletcherbetcher

Can I Touch You There? The future of wearable tech   So often in today's pontifications on the future we are provided a dystopian nightmare-scape of implanted micro-chips, roving gangs of murderous children, Mark Zuckerberg. It's terrifying stuff. Increasingly we live in a world of data. Our entire lives are compiled, sorted and sold in an endless stream of clicks, likes and scrolls. We have come to accept our lack of anonymity and privacy for the sake of more connectivity and better tuned content. Yet it seems, for the time being at least, we have levels of intrusion that we are not willing to accept. One needs only to look at the dismal failure that was Google Glass to see that. People hated the idea of other people being able to surreptitiously record interactions on a person to person basis. We may have accepted Big Brother, but it's smaller counterpart is perhaps a step too far.  But are we just postponing the inevitable? I think so. And I believe that it w...

Universality in gender is a concept that can at the same time be true, false, to that which we strive, and to that which we purposefully shun. What I mean to say is that it is a broad concept that has a multitude of meanings to a multitude of people. As many scientists have pointed out, at a biological level we are all essentially 50% men and 50% women. And I'm not talking about global dichotomies of the sexes, I'm saying each one of us carries those chromosomes around. In essence we are all born way more gender fluid than we give ourselves credit for. But then here like, comes society man and like totally ruins it (blows through a paper towel tube covered in drier sheets)  But it's true isn't it? In this crapshoot called life so much of our identity hinges on where the cosmos decides we're going to pop out. By that I mean that relatively little is determined in the womb regarding full realizations of gender or sexuality and instead it is our social conditioning ...

It is both fascinating and troubling to question why racism, with its well-earned historical stigma of wrongfulness and shame, continues to persist. It boggles the mind to think that here in America we have yet another wave of neo-nazis , a police force that targets minorities and gets away with it, a prison system that has essentially perfected legalized slavery and a series of on-going wars designed to subjugate and murder people of color. Yet here we are.   In the world of theatre, particularly as a means of livelihood and employment, white actors are hired much more frequently than minority actors. Entire seasons of equity houses might feature one or two minority actors, entire Broadway casts might feature 0 minority actors. Despite being a billion dollar industry, the Broadway league conveniently refrains from tracking minority casting figures, although they spend a great deal of energy tracking their audience demographics (spoiler alert: it's 85% white).  In...

Verbatim theatre represents a vital movement in theatre as far as I'm concerned. Through it we enable writers, artists and audiences to experience an event or topic through the eyes of those that initially lived it. We live in a complex, brutal, beautiful and constantly changing world. This is obvious. What is interesting is what stories or events strike a universal chord and whose ripples persevere in the wider swath of humanities collective memory. It is my opinion that when verbatim theatre is done well it serves to present not only a relatively factual retelling of events from a variety of perspectives but through these perspectives we arrive at a wider and more articulated understanding of what the event was and represents. It also inevitably leads to run on sentences. But I digress.   In the play Exonerated, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed over 60 people who had spent anywhere between two to twenty five years on death row. Capital punishment is undoubtedly a cont...

TWITTER PLAY Are you the guy? I'm a guy. Where's the stuff? Where I left it. Is it lost? Are you? Are you the guy? I'm the guy Where's the stuff? Must of lost it. Silence is What Happens When You're Busy Making Other Plans I resonated with the idea of silence and how poignant it can be when used effectively. One of my favorite movies is the classic Paul Thomas Anderson film 'There Will Be Blood'. Before Daniel Day Lewis drinks your milkshake and redefines the sport of bowling the movie has to begin first. And what a beginning it is. Instead of kicking us off with dialogue to illustrate who and what we are about to see Anderson instead takes us on a nearly 15 minute atmospheric dive into location and character through a wordless 5 minute romp through the (hopefully) oil laden desert.  Check it out (could only find 5 minutes) on the right. Ah, if only all montages could be this poetic. Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswitt express b...

Promenade Hamlet For this production we are going to need a bigger boat. But seriously, the play is going to be on a boat that actually sets sail and the audience is going to move around this boat to experience Hamlet. Why a boat? Well I like the symbolism behind this idea of being moorless for in many ways the characters either begin or descend into a moorless sense of self. The show would start with passengers boarding the boat for an at the sea wake (get it?) in which the ashes of Hamlet's father are to be scattered at sea; for like Peter the Great Hamlet's dad also had a connection to the sea. So the audience boards the boat and they are led into a main room where they are seated at the tail end of the wake. Grieving spouse, Claudius, framed picture of dad, coffin, you get the idea. It's somber- it's heavy. Hamlet is the last to give his eulogy but can't bring himself to do it so his family and the court leaves, and once they are out he delivers the spe...