The other day I was looking around for a Second Life theatre company to produce an SL version of my play. As it turns out, play production in SL is trickier than I thought. Here’s what one person had to say:
In any case, the short story is that truly performing a play live in Second Life is several orders of magnitude harder than you probably want to take on. That said, there might be some interesting alternatives we could explore. The problem is that coordinating voices and gestures is next to impossible. We’ve been working hard just to perform a single short scene in a way that’s not laughable and it’s humblingly hard.
Maybe the technology isn’t quite there yet? Anyhow, in searching for theatre-related Second Life resources, I happened upon these awesome Flickr photos of the New Globe Theatre. It’s an SL version of a proposed theatre on Governor’s Island, New York. Second Life still has some work to do to make the lighting blend correctly, but other than that it’s pretty cool.
For all you culture-phobes, the original Globe Theatre was in London during Shakespeare’s life. They built a replica in the late nineties, which blew my mind when I visited it.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I’m confused. Why would anyone want to produce a play inside second life? Would people go see it (in SL)?
Forgive me, but isn’t this essentially just a video game? It reminds me of prople getting married in Quake 2.
Prople…er…people…sorry.
It seems that there would be two key challenges in doing this:
1. Being able to make gestures quickly enough to produce a ‘performance’ with an avatar.
2. Being able to synchronize those gestures with other users.
Given that, you might consider writing a play specifically to be performed in SL, taking these constraints as a playwright would any other in writing for live theater.
Jeff: I’m a total Second Life noob, but SLers tell me that it’s more a synthetic world than a video game. One major difference that I’ve observed is that there are literally no objectives inside SL.
Apparently people are holding conferences, attending rock shows and prayer meetings in Second Life. I haven’t been to any myself, so I can’t really speak to how many or how often. However, there do seem to be endless events going on inside the, uh, game.
I imagine that you’d want to produce a play inside SL for exactly the same reasons you’d do so in real life. In SL, of course, you have a different set of challenges, but everything else is pretty much parallel.
OMG the idea that you want to perform a play in second life is ah how to put it COOL. I had never heard of second life before. Thank you for the link to their site. And yes, I would attend your play in second life.
I am intrigued.
Good luck with your ideas 🙂
Hey guys,
My company, Millions of Us, built the New Globe. At the moment, it’s not open to the public, but it will be in the very near future.
We’re very interested in putting on a play there (and yes, it’s very challenging). the reason its so hard is primarily because we need realtime voice to make the performance compelling. The problem arises from the fact that realtime voice, coming from the actors’ computers at various locations around the world, has a time delay associated with it. this means that we have to synchronize the actions of the actors’ avatars with delayed voice in ordcer to capture the “live” element that makes theatre magical. Talk about a choreography challenge!
That said, we will attempt to perform a scene from Shakespeare and would love help from anyone with a sense of adventure. You can contact me at reubenATmillionsofusDOTcom if you’d like to lend a hand.
there is an event tomorow at the New Globe. How can I attend?
romp toil!parsimony wonder stupendously thickets .
Live theater is most definitely possible in Second Life. My theater group Act Up just performed A Halloween Spooktacular. Our second production. To the person of the original article if this ever reaches you and would like to discuss your play, feel free to contact me Upo Choche. Oh, and yes people do come to plays and love it. In a three day run we had 160 attendees.
Hi Upo Choche,
I am a fourth year university student and am currently taking a Fine Arts and Cultural Studies class dealing with internet media, specifically we concentrate our subject matter on Second Life. Myself and some fellow students are working on two presentations for our class on art within Second Life. We are all Theatre majors and are looking to focus our presentation on theatre within Second Life. I would love to ask you some questions about theatre within second life.
If you could help us out at all, I would greatly appreciate it!
Thanks so much, and hope to hear back from you soon,
Danielle
Please have a look at this promo we had done (on set) for Act-Up Theatre Company’s presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The play ran about 2.2 hours with a brief intermission for three days. The audiance members were emmersed in the set. We rehearsed for approx. 1.5 months.
And here are some stills made by a patron from the audiance…
http://picasaweb.google.com/laundra/SL_Midsummer
Paggles Whitman