Alternate universe play

I was trying to think of a way that to solve the problem of popular plays needing to be in giant venues so that everyone and their mother can come see it before it moves to the next town. This is a problem because when you use a huge theatre, the actors have to act to the back of the room, which makes everything they do look fake and overdone - as opposed to movies and real life where you can get up close and don't have to telegraph your feelings far, far away.

And thus I came up with this genius idea - the alternate universe play, where the play never stops and two audiences see two different versions of the story.

Doing the exact same play twice simultaneously could get hard - like what happens when your character drenched with water in one scene and then has to be dry to do it over again for the other half of the audience - or what happens if you're supposed to be on both stages at once? And of course it would throw off your character's emotional continuity.

So, instead, what if you did a single play told from two (or more!) points of view. One set would be at the saloon and one set would be at the schoolhouse. Or you could do different rooms in a house. Or different people's houses. And your character would go from place to place and interact with the people there and tell their side of the story. And each audience would see it from one side or the other. .

Maybe the dad is a total hotshot at the office, but doesn't get any respect at home. This would be fun acting-wise because you'd really get to dig into your character and let them play two different roles. I know you get different scenes in a normal play, but this way you'd have to go out of your way to have each character make sense within each context to each respective audience. Or you could treat it like two alternate universes.

The stage would have to be in the middle with the audience around the outside with the two stages split somehow. In all likelihood, this would require someone to custom build a theatre to house this genre of plays, but it would be worth it, and you could use the venue for other things in the meantime. People have done this before - see Wagner and the theatre in Bayreuth - and could therefore do it again.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is a brilliant idea. I can't wait to see one.

Period Piece

Every so often it's cool in Hollywood to do these period pieces where you do some kind of dramatized/romanticized re-enactments of historical happenings or just stories to get people in the mood of how things might have been way back when. And sometimes they'll go to great lengths to make the costumes and the sets and all that really accurate, which will be great, but then they'll have like American actors pretending to be from Troy or France or whatever. You know, like an Australian Mel Gibson playing Braveheart. Or Brad Pitt in whatever that movie was that everyone but me saw.

My idea is that you really go all the way, including the language part, so that if you're doing a story about the Romans, you do it in Latin, with subtitles.

This could work really well with the Canterbury Tales, for example. The Canterbury Tales definitely have film potential, for one thing. Chaucer already has most of the script written in Middle English for you. And Middle English might even be vaguely comprehensible once you get into the swing of things.

I know there will be legions of people who will never see it because they're allergic to subtitles, but I still think it's a rad idea and should be tried at least once and probably lots of times.