Act one, intermission, act two, end.
That’s the usual route plays follow, but “Eiffel Tower: Revisited,” decided to take it in a new direction by incorporating Twitter into the performance.
The play is an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s “The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower,” updating the cultural references and making the performance more accessible to a current audience.
The plot is simple. A man is trying to take a picture of a wedding party on the Eiffel Tower, but strange things happen when he snaps his camera.
The play is a humorous, avant-garde piece that can be hard to follow even with modern adaptations, such as the original narrating phonographs being replaced with a Mac and PC.
Director Leigh Clemons said the social media angle — the biggest change made to the play — didn’t start until last semester.
Throughout the show, characters onstage and observers in the balcony tweet their thoughts to a projector behind the performers.
Daniel Mathews, performance theatre junior, plays the role of Statler from “The Muppets,” who can be found heckling from the balcony throughout the play, and is the show’s social media coordinator. He handled the show’s marketing and publicitity as well as the onstage Twitter screen.
The tweets serve as their script, he said, and it can be challenging to match the timing with the actions.
“Usually, you just wait for another actor to give you cues, and you can play off each other,” Mathews said. “If there’s a lag between your phone or laptop and Twitter, you might be very early or very late when your line hits.”
The audience is encouraged to tweet their thoughts during the show, which also poses a timing challenge.
Theatre sophomore Banjamin Watt plays the photographer and pulls his phone out and tweets during a dance scene involving Lion Minaj.
“Audiences are so used to characters only being in the moment,” Watt said. “Twitter breaks that fourth wall.”
He’s one of many characters that doesn’t have any spoken lines — the majority of the play is narrated by the Mac and PC.
“At the beginning, it was a challenge,” Watt said. “Every production I’d been in had lines.”
Jennifer Guillot, french junior and choreographer of several dances throughout the play, urged students to experience the play.
“It’s highly entertaining,” Guillot said. “It won’t make any sense, but you’ll be entertained.”
The No. 1 reason to go is it’s modernization, Mathews said.
“If you have an audience that hasn’t seen theatre before … how do we go about bridging the gap to make it something they can identify with?” he said.
He said they’ve solved the problem by making the play culturally relevant.
“These pop culture references, that’s what our generation is based off of,” Mathews said.
 
 
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Contact Taylor Balkom at [email protected]