You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She Lives in Austin/Edinburgh, Hidden Room Theatre & others, August 6 - 28

by Michael Meigs

Austin's Hidden Room Theatre and its British partner Look Left Look Right ran this intercontinental production for the first time last March, linking Austin and London in a breathless Skype video dialogue between fictitious lovers Ryan Peterson and Elizabeth Watson. You Wouldn't Know Him/Her is an intriguing bauble, a digital spinning top and crystal ball that draws audiences into the fiction that they're assisting and supporting these young folk trying to overcome the challenges of long-distance romance.

The production and story-line have changed only modestly since the ALT review on March 11 of the first production.

That staging became a trial run for the game now underway at the Edinburgh Festival. Each Saturday and Sunday in August at noon and at 2 p.m., Austin time, the hopeful lovers will Skype-dial one another, exchange greetings, engage the supporters physically present and respond to comments supplied via the Twitterfeed with the tag #texasedinburgh

Can't make it to the Hidden Room in east Austin? You can set this playful fantasy spinning on your desktop, laptop or smartphone and watch it in split-screen at the "Watch on-line" page on their website (www.youwouldntknow.com). Since I am traveling right now in the southeastern United States, I did just that, revving up my laptop in the mountains of east Tennessee, where my brother lives. He has an extensive theatrical background and is living in a rural region relatively distant from theatrical activities.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She's from London/Texas, Hidden Room Theatre and Look Left Look right, March 5 - 13

Artists are intrigued by the possibilities of social media, a fascination that they share with commercial enterprises, institutions, marketing strategists and your old granny. In 2010-2011 the share of the U.S. over-55's on Facebook quadrupled to 9.5%, because of a more than nine-fold increase in the numbers, to just under 10 million creaky Facebook boomers.

It's no surprise that Austin with its happily volatile mixture of knowledge industries and creatives is exploring that fuzzy junction of social tech and art.

Beth Burns and collaborators at her Hidden Room Theatre, particularly the gifted actor and technological practitioner Robert Matney, have cobbled together with London's Look Left Look Right theatre an alluring trans-Atlantic theatre experiment. Adjusting themselves both to time zone differences and to the disynchronous switches to daylight savings time, the companies convene again this weekend on Saturday and Sunday for You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, etc. You can 't get a ticket, by the way, at least not in Austin, for all twenty-five places in the east Austin loft apartment are filled for the 3 p.m. sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Promoters had announced the venture for all four weekends in March but have for unspecified reasons curtailed to only two.

But you can join in directly, on-line, thanks to some crafty engineering via the Round House Theatre in London, venue for the UK participants. The theatre's live feed will feature both Skype video feeds as well as a edited and controlled Twitter feed of comments you and others generate using the tag #TexasLondon.

Austin principals in person and London principals in remote will engage SXSW media visitors tomorrow, Saturday, March 12, with a discussion of the experiment.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .