Brooklyn:
What if the gorilla in Donkey Kong is really an abusive, down-on-his-luck meathead straight out of a Tennessee Williams script who keeps his handicapped blond paramour (the princess) captive in their top-floor apartment, periodically thrashing the Italian building superintendent (Mario), who attempts to climb the stairs to alleviate the woman's suffering?
What if Pac-Man is really a gluttonous German burgher out to gorge himself while dodging the ghosts of those he has so callously wronged, à la Dickens?
What if the pilots in Asteroids are merely profane technicians existentially trapped within a corporation that knows nothing more than to send them into the void to shoot rocks, until they become smaller rocks and smaller rocks, until they become nothing?
In other words, what if the characters and stories of classic video games were reimagined and reinterpreted as live theater in front of you?
Even as someone who writes about video games for a living, I had not imagined such a thing possible until attending "Theater of the Arcade," the most provocative and intriguing of four different shows I recently saw as part of the Game Play festival at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Running through July 25, Game Play is the most ambitious effort I know of to fuse the techniques and live presentation of theater with the themes, structures and technology of interactive electronic entertainment, also known as video games. Now in its second year, Game Play reflects the fact that people who grew up with video games populate every walk of life and part of culture in this country, including the theater. "We would have these parties in junior high school and all the guys would be playing Street Fighter and most of the girls would be off doing their own thing, but I was pretty good at Street Fighter and definitely beat a lot of the guys," said Gyda Arber, 30, the festival's executive producer. Ms. Arber, who also directed "Theater of the Arcade" (written by Jeff Lewonczyk), said that she was halfway through Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 and that she and her boyfriend recently played through Sony's noir thriller Heavy Rain not once but twice as they explored that game's impressive narrative depth.
"For the Brick, we tend to get a lot of the same audience all the time, big theatre geeks," said Ms. Arber, who is also a writer and actress. "But with the Game Play festival we find all these people come to the shows who are not big theater people but who are gamers or who are just interested in games and interactive technology. For us it's really great to be able to reach out to a whole new audience."
The Game Play festival has something for both adult gamers and children. At one extreme: On Saturday evening the new-media artist Jon Rafman led a somewhat boozy crowd through a guided tour of some of the exotic sexual subcultures in Second Life, the popular virtual-reality system (which insists that it is not a game).
"Theater of the Arcade," a series of five scenes adapted from old games, is also not well suited for young children, though the actor Fred Backus deserves praise for his performance as the deliciously rapacious Pac-Man. Several of the vignettes include significant profanity, and the portrayal of the brothers Luigi and Mario as stoners whacked out on psychedelic mushrooms in the middle of the desert as they deal with visions of huge turtles and man-eating plants is hilarious but not especially kid-friendly.
Then there is "Grand Theft Ovid," an impressive feat of engineering, coordination and storytelling in which the performers are children themselves.
Eddie Kim, 32, is an artist who teaches theatre at the Pierrepont School in Westport, Conn. During the school term his students learn classical theater. (This year they performed "Romeo and Juliet.") This summer, however, some of them are portraying classic tales of Greek mythology through live performances and existing commercial games.
For "Grand Theft Ovid" on Saturday, Mr. Kim and five students sat at a table covered in laptops and game consoles (a sixth student was up in the projector booth); the projector displayed images from various games onto a large screen in front of the audience.
Suddenly, Daedalus and Icarus were standing by the water (in the game World of Warcraft) before Icarus flew too high and fell to his death (in Grand Theft Auto IV). There was Orpheus traversing Hades (in the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) before tragically losing Eurydice a second time as a result of his impatience (in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). And then, most powerfully, there were Niobe's 14 children being slaughtered by the gods as punishment for her arrogance (in Halo 3) before she herself turned to stone.
Mr. Kim's charges even performed the tale of Apollo and Daphne in one of the most crowded areas in World of Warcraft, the dwarf city of Ironforge, attracting dozens of live online players from around the country to participate in the story being projected in a theater in Brooklyn.
Later on Saturday, after "Grand Theft Ovid," the guitarists Evan Drummond and David Hindman took the stage for "Modal Kombat," an exhibition of technology they have developed that allows real classical guitars to control the action in games like Mortal Kombat, a version of Pong and Mario Kart.
As far as I'm concerned, the Game Play concept, and in particular "Grand Theft Ovid" and "Theater of the Arcade," easily could be taken on the road, especially in conjunction with a game conference like DICE (for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) in Las Vegas or the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I hope to see the Brick Theater's Game Play at one of those events in the coming years.
What if Pac-Man is really a gluttonous German burgher out to gorge himself while dodging the ghosts of those he has so callously wronged, à la Dickens?
What if the pilots in Asteroids are merely profane technicians existentially trapped within a corporation that knows nothing more than to send them into the void to shoot rocks, until they become smaller rocks and smaller rocks, until they become nothing?
In other words, what if the characters and stories of classic video games were reimagined and reinterpreted as live theater in front of you?
Even as someone who writes about video games for a living, I had not imagined such a thing possible until attending "Theater of the Arcade," the most provocative and intriguing of four different shows I recently saw as part of the Game Play festival at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Running through July 25, Game Play is the most ambitious effort I know of to fuse the techniques and live presentation of theater with the themes, structures and technology of interactive electronic entertainment, also known as video games. Now in its second year, Game Play reflects the fact that people who grew up with video games populate every walk of life and part of culture in this country, including the theater. "We would have these parties in junior high school and all the guys would be playing Street Fighter and most of the girls would be off doing their own thing, but I was pretty good at Street Fighter and definitely beat a lot of the guys," said Gyda Arber, 30, the festival's executive producer. Ms. Arber, who also directed "Theater of the Arcade" (written by Jeff Lewonczyk), said that she was halfway through Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 and that she and her boyfriend recently played through Sony's noir thriller Heavy Rain not once but twice as they explored that game's impressive narrative depth.
"For the Brick, we tend to get a lot of the same audience all the time, big theatre geeks," said Ms. Arber, who is also a writer and actress. "But with the Game Play festival we find all these people come to the shows who are not big theater people but who are gamers or who are just interested in games and interactive technology. For us it's really great to be able to reach out to a whole new audience."
The Game Play festival has something for both adult gamers and children. At one extreme: On Saturday evening the new-media artist Jon Rafman led a somewhat boozy crowd through a guided tour of some of the exotic sexual subcultures in Second Life, the popular virtual-reality system (which insists that it is not a game).
"Theater of the Arcade," a series of five scenes adapted from old games, is also not well suited for young children, though the actor Fred Backus deserves praise for his performance as the deliciously rapacious Pac-Man. Several of the vignettes include significant profanity, and the portrayal of the brothers Luigi and Mario as stoners whacked out on psychedelic mushrooms in the middle of the desert as they deal with visions of huge turtles and man-eating plants is hilarious but not especially kid-friendly.
Then there is "Grand Theft Ovid," an impressive feat of engineering, coordination and storytelling in which the performers are children themselves.
Eddie Kim, 32, is an artist who teaches theatre at the Pierrepont School in Westport, Conn. During the school term his students learn classical theater. (This year they performed "Romeo and Juliet.") This summer, however, some of them are portraying classic tales of Greek mythology through live performances and existing commercial games.
For "Grand Theft Ovid" on Saturday, Mr. Kim and five students sat at a table covered in laptops and game consoles (a sixth student was up in the projector booth); the projector displayed images from various games onto a large screen in front of the audience.
Suddenly, Daedalus and Icarus were standing by the water (in the game World of Warcraft) before Icarus flew too high and fell to his death (in Grand Theft Auto IV). There was Orpheus traversing Hades (in the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) before tragically losing Eurydice a second time as a result of his impatience (in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). And then, most powerfully, there were Niobe's 14 children being slaughtered by the gods as punishment for her arrogance (in Halo 3) before she herself turned to stone.
Mr. Kim's charges even performed the tale of Apollo and Daphne in one of the most crowded areas in World of Warcraft, the dwarf city of Ironforge, attracting dozens of live online players from around the country to participate in the story being projected in a theater in Brooklyn.
Later on Saturday, after "Grand Theft Ovid," the guitarists Evan Drummond and David Hindman took the stage for "Modal Kombat," an exhibition of technology they have developed that allows real classical guitars to control the action in games like Mortal Kombat, a version of Pong and Mario Kart.
As far as I'm concerned, the Game Play concept, and in particular "Grand Theft Ovid" and "Theater of the Arcade," easily could be taken on the road, especially in conjunction with a game conference like DICE (for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) in Las Vegas or the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I hope to see the Brick Theater's Game Play at one of those events in the coming years.
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