For Many Companies, the Screen's the Thing, Too

"Interactivity is the new frontier," says Gwinup, who designed the video and projections for "Redshirts." New equipment will allow designers "to manipulate imagery in real time," he says, possibly by, say, an actor crossing a beam of light onstage.

Clark, who estimates he plugged 3,500 images into the 100-minute "The Word Begins," has consulted with manufacturers about how to improve the equipment to make projectors and video mixers more responsive to designers' needs. He also articulates why flickering images are ever more ubiquitous onstage: "They're on the backs of airplane seats, in SUVs, in the palm of your hand. It makes sense that it would filter into our storytelling."

Yet is it just a fad, coating theatrical shows with an electronic sheen?

Bad examples range from the hard-to-see film within Signature's production of "Sex Habits of American Women" last year (obscuring what seemed to be an intriguing on-camera performance by Amy McWilliams) to the brief WWF-style wrestling video currently in the Folger Theatre's otherwise projection-free "As You Like It."

Which is why Aukin, who declares that "theater is multimedia," says, "Sometimes there's more excitement about using the technology than understanding what it's good at. Hopefully it's used in a dramaturgically rigorous way."

It seems to be for Gibson, who wrote what Pinholster calls "the most sophisticated example of it I've seen." In the gender-reversed "Current Nobody," a stay-at-home father is besieged by documentary filmmakers while he waits for his photojournalist wife to return from the Middle East. Stage directions call for a "video installation interlude." A character refers to "archival wife footage." And at a pivotal moment, actors leave the stage and the action kicks into high gear, with characters followed to unseen rooms thanks to that split screen in the center of Tony Cisek's set.

Says Aukin: "Melissa's a very visual writer. She's writing for architecture in a deliberately impossible way, and you can't ignore the impulse behind it. She's cornered you."