Protamo sleeps

I have a play opening this Thursday. It's called:

The Computer Wore Flat-Soled Pumas
Directed by Me

And it's about a boy who befriends a sentient computer. Together they learn a little bit about life, love, and being a man... or a computer... or both. It also tells the story of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Who together, in their garage, constructed the first Apple computer. Only now Wozniak is a burnt out Computer Science Professor, and Steve Jobs, well, he runs Apple, and he always gets what he wants.

The play is improvised. There is no script, each night we make up the dialogue. We've been practicing being these characters, and because the characters are simple archetypes (The Burnt Out Professor, The Dorky Kid), the philosophy goes that if you put two archetypes in a scene together you instinctually know what that scene will be like. We are pre-programmed to know it. For instance...

If there is a scene where The Dorky Kid asks The Popular Girl out on a date, we know what that scene will be like. We've seen it a thousand times in a thousand John Hughes movies, we can make up the dialogue ourselves. The fun comes in making that dialogue interesting and different every night.

We are re-mixing the culture of entertainment. We grew up examining these relationships in television shows, and movies. Now our culture is informed by them. Now we can take them and play with them.

the vitals:
The Computer Wore Flat-Soled Pumas
In The Top Shelf @ Dad's Garage
Tickets are $10 (you can buy them online)
July 14th-23rd, 2005  Th-Sat at 8pm

I hope you can come, even if you have to drive from the moon.