“Fortinbras’ Tries a Push-Button Approach

Scott Werve is on the verge of earning a master’s degree in theater-directing from UC Irvine, but is convinced the art form he has studied is hopelessly out of touch with people like himself who have grown up in a wired world.

In theater, the operating system has remained essentially unchanged. The actors act. The audience watches. Any attempt at interactivity could lead to ejection.

For the finale to their academic career, Werve and Grant Van Zevern, the scenic designer who is his leading co-conspirator, will invite a theater audience to do what everybody else is doing in the age of the Internet: Look, listen and click. Then, if one likes, click and click some more and see if something else happens because the ticket-holder would like to see an instant change in the performance and has opted to press the button provided for that very purpose.

“I guess it’s twentysomething hubris. We’ll see if we tan shake things up,” Werve said.

“It wont be a complete melee,” assures Cameron Harvey, chairman of UCI’s drama department. Harvey heads the play-selection committee that gave Werve the go-ahead for “Fortinbras Gets Drunk,” the experiment in wired-age audience participation that opens Thursday at the campus’ Studio Theatre.

The play was written during the mid-1980s by Janusz Glowacki, who emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1982 to escape the then-Communist regime. Like Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Fortinbras Gets Drunk” revamps ‘Hamlet” by looking at it from the perspective of a peripheral character. In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Norway is threatening to conquer Denmark; when the Danish court implodes in the final scene’s self-inflicted bloodbath, the Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, sweeps in to clean up the mess.

In Glowacki’s play, something’s putrid in the state of Norway. A totalitarian thuggery rules, the governed live in ignorance, and the all-seeing secret police (personified by a character named Eight Eyes) sow disinformation, terror and chaos. Fortinbras survives by lapsing into a state of drunken buffoonery. Nobody bothers to assassinate him because nobody sees him as a threat, Meanwhile, Norway’s rulers run covert operations to destabilize Denmark. Fortinbras’ only hope is to ally himself with Hamlet. Werve, 29, read the play in the early 1990s as an undergraduate at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. As he brainstormed ways to give audiences a say in what unfolds onstage, “Fortinbras Gets Drunk” struck him as an apt vehicle. He was drawn by its examination of what individual initiative can and can’t accomplish in a world fraught with mysterious powers that alternately exert control and cause chaos.

Werve also chose “Fortinbras Gets Drunk” for its fast pace, its wild, sometimes horrific images and its far-from-rosy vision of what ensues when an individual seeker of justice and decency fights lawless power. As the audience members push their buttons, the director expects chaos to be a likely result--thereby bringing the onlookers closer to the predicament of the play.

“There’s disintegration in the world of the play, and a kind of drunken, lurching, queasy protagonist in Fortinbras,” Werve said. “Instead of just watching someone stumble through a social and political situation that’s fallen apart, you can feel and experience what falling apart is. I don’t think our production is polemical. It’s just that we can go into a place that’s chaotic and laugh at it and learn to live with it a bit.”

The audience will be able to push the performance toward rapid change--and potential chaos--in several ways. Some seats will be equipped with buttons that signal a change in the lighting. Elsewhere, the, buttons will send prompts for changes in other production factors: sound, costumes and action. It will be up to the stage manager, Emily Caster, to Monitor the electronic voting and put the outcomes rapidly into action. If the light-change buttons are being pressed most often and with greatest intensity, she would, in theory, let loose an explosion of shifting lighting. She can accomplish that--or changes in the score and sound effects--with the push of a computer key. The costumes will be shapes like paper dolls, worn like sandwich boards. If all goes well, quick changes will be possible.

There will be some controls, however, on any chaos that a full house of 90 button-pushers might generate. The playing area will be divided like a three-ring circus. In the central ring, “Fortinbras Gets Drunk” will be performed line for line the way Glowacki wrote it, no matter what. But actors who would normally be offstage waiting for their next cue will remain visible on the periphery. If the audience calls for it, the characters will jump into what Werve calls “side-scenes”--improvised, wordless playlets that expand upon or comment on the main story. But at certain moments, the sideshows will stop and the audience’s power will be taken away so that everyone can focus on what Glowacki wrote.

“There are certain points where things need to calm back down for [the play] to be understood,” Harvey said.

So the totalitarian regime of the theater paradoxically still applies.

“Since we started talking about creating something that chaotic, all we’ve done is talk about rules for shaping the chaos somehow,” Werve said. “It feels like the audience has control, but it’s an illusion. The stage manager is always in control over everything.” That’s fitting, he said, given how Glowacki’s Fortinbras is merely teased with the idea that an individual can effect change.

Werve doubts he can be any more successful than Fortinbras in overthrowing the prevailing hierarchy of the theater world. After he graduates this spring, his first job will be an internship as an assistant director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a major, mainstream theater company. “Even if we could lure artistic directors [from major theaters] to come and watch, even if they had the greatest time of their life, they would say, ‘We don’t do this kind of theater,’ Werve said. “We probably won’t get a chance to do this kind of thing again unless we hit it rich and buy our own theater.”

What if the audience gets drunk on its license to intervene? Then, Werve said, the performance crashes, just like an overtaxed computer, The stage goes dark for an instant, and “Fortinbras Gets Drunk” takes a moment to reboot. It resumes with just the central action running. “I don’t know if there’s any precedent for what we’re doing,Werve said.” “We’re trying hard to get it to work, and we hope we can pull it off.”

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“Fortinbras Gets Drunk,” Studio Theatre, West Peltason Drive and Mesa Road, UC Irvine. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 9. $7-$9. (949) 824-2787.