By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 4, 2007

"I capture unspeakable things on film," says the photojournalist at the heart of Melissa James Gibson's "Current Nobody" at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and that might well be the mantra of current theater design. Hardly a play goes by without sophisticated projections dancing across a screen, and every now and then a movie breaks out.

The back wall of Signature Theatre's Max is like a Circuit City dream these days, with nine flat-screen Panasonic monitors beaming an avalanche of images behind the two rappers of "The Word Begins." Sports TV is part of the visual aesthetic in the college football-themed "Redshirts" at Round House Theatre. And film surrounded the actors on the small set of Catalyst Theater's just-closed "The Trial." Why is theater turning to the screen? Martin Gwinup, designer of the projections in "Redshirts" (a world premiere produced with Minnesota's Penumbra Theatre), says that's his first question whenever someone wants to hire him.

"And if anybody says, 'Oh, it's cool,' " Gwinup declares, "I'll start backing off."

But it is cool, of course, to see cutting-edge technology livening up an ancient lively art. Yet Gwinup is not alone in his concern. Director Daniel Aukin suspects people will think he's being avant-garde, what with the live video feed and four split screens he's using in "Current Nobody," (which opens tonight).

"No," Aukin says firmly. "I'm trying to tell it as simply as possible."

In Gibson's modern adaptation of Homer's "The Odyssey" -- and in more and more plays, according to increasingly busy video and projection designers -- moving imagery is the lingua franca.

The phenomenon is hardly new; in fact, the once-edgy phrase "multimedia performance" already seems to have been retired. But the cost of the toys has come down drastically in recent years. Michael Clark, projection designer for "The Word Begins" as well as for "Jersey Boys" and other shows on Broadway, notes: "For a thousand dollars, you can make a movie."

Which explains how a shoestring outfit such as Catalyst can make film an increasing staple of its repertoire, pushing the envelope each time out.

"We've never done anything like this before," director Christopher Gallu says of the videoscape he created with filmmaker Michael D'Addario to destabilize reality in Kafka's tale. "We were at an early production meeting where we said, 'Yep, that's a movie' -- at which point everybody got scared."

As Gallu details the process, it seems the biggest obstacles weren't financial but rather technical. Performing in the tiny Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, the company couldn't put the projectors back far enough to fill the wall-size screens -- so they banked the imagery off a wall of mirrors behind the stage to create the necessary distance.

Innovative as that is, it follows the comparatively old-fashioned model of stage directors laying cinematic concepts onto texts. Aukin, former artistic director of New York's Soho Rep, finds that the more organic use of media onstage is coming from ensembles. "Current Nobody" projection designer Jake Pinholster traces that back to the 1960s, with progressive troupes then and since (The Wooster Group, SITI Company) working without writers or rules.

These days, international companies seem to be especially adept at weaving high-tech imagery into the fabric of the story. The Dutch company Kassys quit the stage altogether halfway through "Kommer" at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, letting a 45-minute film complete the fascinating experience. And in "La Tempete" by Montreal's 4D Arts, performers interacted with holographic imagery that filled the height of the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower stage.

"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."