Headline Nov 30, 2015/ ''' THY..... CELLPHONE.... HOUR '''

''' THY..... CELLPHONE.... HOUR '''

HERE'S A RECIPE for a terrible play: Characters are rarely in the same room as one another; conversations are typed rather than spoken.

And one side of a dispute can't be heard by the audience.

NOT STUFF of great drama but the stuff of real life in 2015 world, where the rapid spread of mobile technology has redefined the way people talk, shop and walk down the street.

As a result it is redefining how they interact onstage and, in the process, challenging playwrights, directors and set designers who are trying to figure out

matters  as technical and as-

How to  let theater audiences know what is being said on the screens they cannot see- and as cosmic as what technological change means for human connections.

"My most important and consequential arguments and fights and interventions happen on my phone every day," said the playwright Kevin Armento, whose recent off Broadway work, "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally," told the story of a high school math teacher-

And her student entirely from point of view from the boy's smartphone. "How would you even tell this story if it weren't through their text messages?" he asked "It wouldn't be believable in 2015."

Even as some playwrights embrace the integration digital communications into a stage scenes as a new form naturalism, other theatre people worry that their art form will be affected communication that values brevity over elegance and images over words. 

''TECHNOLOGY IS CREATING A CULTURE that devalues language . Our need for a sentence is less and less,'' said Sam Gold, who won a-

Tony Award this spring for directing the musical  ''Fun Home,'' ''That really affects theater, because theater is an oral medium. It's communicated through words.

While he avoids social media in his life, Mr. Gold has incorporated digital communication onstage: This summer he directed  ''John,''  the new work from the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker-

In which- one character's receipt of text messages,  [which were never shared with the audience, but were signaled by the familiar iPhone tritone alert] was a significant plot element.    

Theaters, of course, spend a lot of time warning audience members  to shutoff their cell phones, sometimes to no avail. But onstage mobile communication has become so integral to contemporary theater that a Tony-winning sound designer, Robert Kaplowitz, collaborated-

With a programmer, Jay Konopka, to design an app that makes iPhones ring or beep, or both, on cue. Next: figuring out how to make phones light up on cue, so that they cast a life-like glow on actors.

Playwrights have been exploring the perils of the Internet for years: '' The Dying Gaul,'' which ran off Broadway in 1998, featured the use of a chat room for deception, as did  ''Closer,'' which ran on Broadway in 1999.

And even before the advent of digital communication, theater makers wanted to incorporate the latest conversational technology in their work. 

Think of  ''Bells Are Ringing,'' a popular 1956 musical about a woman who works at telephone answering service, or ''Bye Bye Birdie,'' the Tony winning best musical of 1961, which features much loved show tune, ''The Telephone Hour,'' in which are vehicles for  students/teenage   gossip.

The Honour and Serving of the latest ''Educational Operational Research'' continues. Thank You All for reading and see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society:

''' Digital Communications '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless