Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1996 - 44

used moving views of the viltual world. In the
trial scene, live TV images of two actors were
replicated on a 3 x 4 grid projected on the
This movement within the \~rtual
worlds took many forms. While it sometimes represented physical movement of
the characters through the setting such as
Zero and Shrdlu lising out of the ground
in the graveyard, more often it reflected
Zero's changing state of mind. In scene
three, when a dazed Zero retul11s home after killing his boss, the ful11iture is floating
in mid-air and the walls of his living room
are spinning and tilting wildly. In jail, Zero
dreanls of past excursions to the beach
and the audience travels there with him,
only to be wrenched back to his ceU as the
daydream ends.

At its conclusion, I considered the project
a success. Just as in any production, there
were moments that were effective and others that were not, but we learned as we
went through the process. Many of the
carefully plarmed uses of the new teclmology failed to achieve the effects we desired
willie other uses that occurred to us in the
midst of the work achieved the project
goals admirably. Certainly, the physical
structure of the actor/audience/\~rtual-
world interface was successful.
Computers in the future will be faster

Zero addresses the Jury (70)
Zero rises from his coffin (11)
Zero and Shrdlu in graveyard (12)

\\'I1'TER

10). In the prison scene we moved through
the viltual world of tent and prison bars. The
ptison bars were supplanted by a transition
to a seacoast scene as Zero and his wife recalled the one happy moment in their otherwise bleak 25-year marriage. A most
impressive scene occurred in the graveyard
as Zero rose from his coffin via a trapdoor in
the floor (Figure 11), meeting Shrdlu in the

CO CL SID S

screen to form the jury of 12 people (Figure

TD&T

after life. As the two of them walked through
the graveyard (Figure 12) and encountered
the talking head (Figure 13), the vil-tual
world was, again, manipulated in real time by
the Virtual Environment Dliver. A similar

and therefore the virtual-worlds will be
rendered \\~th more detail. Better projectors will make the images brighter and
more vibrant. Kew technologies will generate 3-D \iews without the need for special
glasses. 'ievertheless, in tlus production
tlle interface did aclueve tlle goals set out
for it. VR was used not for its own sake,
but in service of the play. Through it, we
were able to execute scene changes witllout a single pause in the action of tlle play.
We were able to stage complex scenes and
special effects tllat would have been extremely difficult and expensive otllelwise.
Perhaps most importantly, we used tllis
new technology to present a work of expressionist tlleatre by depicting tlle world
as seen through the ntind's eye of tlle main
character. Our scenery was fluid,
metamorphasizing witll Zero as he endured Ius many trials, denials, enlightenments and Ius final doom.
It is this perspective, tlle inner reality
of tlle characters, that is so vital to expressionist work and is so often lacking in pro-

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