'Mad genius' MacLaughlin brings new creation to the Fringe

Experimental theater director Whit MacLaughlin moves in mysterious ways.

As the master of Philadelphia's New Paradise Laboratories, MacLaughlin and his revolving-door company have created a catalog of memorable interdisciplinary works since its foundation in 1996.

"Whit's a mad genius," says Nick Stuccio, whose Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe has regularly featured New Paradise work as its centerpiece. "He grew as the festival grew. Few artists . . . understand the nature of interdisciplinary theater [as well]."

With sample-rich musical cues as his soundtrack, MacLaughlin over the festival's history has staged the mating rituals of teens in a boxing ring (Prom); turned the Beatles into manic ghosts (The Fab 4 Reach the Pearly Gates); crafted Hugh Hefner's Playboy enterprise into a psychosexual ballet (This Mansion is a Hole); made John Wilkes Booth into an effetely egotistic patsy of the Confederate militia (Freedom Club), and reconfigured the Whole Earth movement into a psychedelic plot to levitate the Liberty Bell (Planetary Enzyme Blues) - all with help from the best fashion designers, visual artists, historians, and architects that no money could buy.

The group's multilayered projects are playfully absurdist critiques of society at large - magnetically visual and metaphor-heavy, with an emphasis on being immersive to the point of submersion.

"If it already exists, we're not interested," MacLaughlin says. "I'm not sure that what we are doing is theater. It ain't film, and multimedia describes nothing. When you think about it, the Greeks were avant-garde and multimedia: Open-air theater, where every little breeze that happens to intrude is meaningful, dancers turning toward the audience to speak directly to them, the gods hovering overhead. They would have killed to have the special-effect tools we have now."

The Greeks might indeed have killed for MacLaughlin's latest theatrical device: Facebook. This year's Live Arts contribution, the three-part Extremely Public Displays of Privacy, takes on personal and public policy regarding the notions of anonymity and privacy at a time when almost every member of the culture is captivated by what MacLaughlin calls "metaphors of interconnectivity, social access, and 'data-veillance.' "

That the better part of the project plays out on the Internet, Facebook, and iTunes is the adventure's most striking component (its staged version begins this week at a still-undisclosed site in Center City).

Written with musicians (Annie Enneking, Brittany Freece), web designers (Rick Banister, Johnny Benson), performer/composers (Fess Elliot, Beatrix Luff), playwright Larry Loebell, and sound-and-light wizard Jorge Cousineau, the cyber-musical peers into the hidden relationship between two women.

Fess is a teacher and mother who makes music no one hears; Beatrix is an enigmatic performance artist and entrepreneur whose every move is publicized. Their affair to remember begins when one sweeps the other up in an explosive but mirage-like blast of 24/7 media and mayhem. Laughs and terror ensue in very real yet imaginary ways.

MacLaughlin says he doesn't use Facebook as often as he did when he first looked at the social-networking site for his mazelike 2009 Live Arts project Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time.

"I don't browse FB like I did a year ago," he says, disenchanted with its stiffness and draconian policing. "It's gotten a bit religious about itself, like a bad parochial school."

But disenchanted or not, he has faith in Facebook's capacity to deliver fiction. "Whereas the commercial realm wants everything in there to be verifiable, for obvious reasons, fictional individuals don't have credit cards. Therefore, in many people's minds fiction might not belong on the Internet. I want, therefore, to mention the difference between verification and authenticity."

To MacLaughlin, everyone in and on Facebook is performing. But to make it theatrical, you can't simply have it be a viral micro-marketing ploy; you have to go deep - as with Extremely Public Displays of Privacy. Having his own mini-social-networking site, Frame (http://newparadiselaboratories.org) - not a box for self-promotional materials, but rather a keyhole into an otherworldly New Paradise planet - helps.

MacLaughlin talks about how some people use the virtual world of the Second Life website as a means to having a first life. "Severely handicapped people, for instance, are meeting people there, having sex, and pursuing professions out of reach in the non-virtual world," he says.

This is what convinces him that fiction on the Web is not something to ignore. "It can be realer than real. Theater should be dealing with this. Sometimes I feel that theater likes to think of itself as the 'antidote to all that virtual stuff.' This forgets that theater is a virtual realm, just like novels or movies. Besides, Facebook is just one of our locales."

In the two years since Fatebook, the world has identified a class of citizens MacLaughlin calls "digital natives" who don't give a whit what Whit - or anyone older than they or their cause - thinks is valuable. "They have different interior structures than me, think differently. We're devising ways to get them involved in an ancient art form."

If Fatebook tried to execute an online theater piece without an up-and-down curtain, scenes in no particular order, and interaction between an electronic and a real physical realm, Extremely Public Displays of Privacy is New Paradise Web-theater project 2.0.

"It's only logical that Whit head toward the Internet, as the physical stage is hardly enough for him," says Stuccio. "That said, I'm glad he has a live-stage component to this. I hope we're never so advanced that directors forget about the physical theater."

The interdisciplinary production is immersive in its use of techniques not conventionally given over to theater - video, smartphones as a performance-delivery system, text messages as mini-plays.

MacLaughlin had wanted it to be more than immersive. He wanted invasive. "Some technology was out of our reach," he acknowledges, "but give us a few more years and a few more dollars."

How he does manage to invade is through the reexamination of privacy and what he calls the therapeutic value of forced exposure. "Most theater about the Internet has been hysterical. We wanted to avoid that. One person's hell is another person's heaven."

He and his crew shot most of the piece surreptitiously in public spaces. The dramatic arc of Act 1 (all online) and Act 2 (a walking tour with iTunes components and GPS-tagged video clips) gives way to what MacLaughlin calls a "very unusual concert" at which all dots connect, officially starting Friday.

"Here is how we think about it - conventional theater uploads the reality of the world into the virtuality of the theater - sets, lights, costumes - then puts real people inside," MacLaughlin says. "With Extremely Public Displays of Privacy, we're doing uploads of people into the reality of the world. The darkened room is more or less irrelevant - or at least an excuse for an elaborate joke - in this current work."