Metaverse Shakespeare Company's 2010 Main Canon: Twelfth Night, Act 2

The Metaverse Shakespeare Company (MSC), formerly SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC), Tuesday opened its Preview Season, exclusively to the MSC in-world group and affiliates. The repertoire features its 2010 Main Canon production of Twelfth Night, Act 2 in an open-ended run to occur every Tuesday at 6 PM SLT, and every Sunday at 1 PM SLT.

Set to occur at the four-sim SL Globe Theatre, the performance continues the troupe's 2009 production of Twelfth Night, Act 1-but, with a fresher, riper take, and its own amalgam of the year's innovations in virtual theatre.

This Open-Ended run of Twelfth Night, Act 2, like Act 1, is based on archetypes, grounded in the play's intrinsic elements, such as character relationships, set in a world that is pre-modernity.

And yet, says Artistic Director Ina Centaur, the topsy-turvy nature of the play and the era of its creation comes through, "Even though this production is set in the 'generic past', there's still plenty of Elizabethan notions and bawdry... There's the presentation of class-crossing as a ridicule-prone absurdity and the visual portrayal of that heavily-cozy-explicit language-with a wild bit where a drunk-betimes Sir Toby Belch urinates live on-stage to '[fill] an unfill'd can (II.iii).'"

Says Centaur on the music of Twelfth Night and the spirit of the open-ended run, "I've composed my own little tune for Feste's Song to Orsino in Scene 4, which will actually only be sung in select shows-but you can find its sheet music on the mShakespeare blog.

"For most shows, we're sticking with an orthodox interpretation and traditional songs, drawn from the era before and Shakespeare's contemporaries. But, this being an open-ended run, be braced for variations, and character metamorphosis-in both act and appearance."

While this will be the troupe's first production under its new name of Metaverse Shakespeare Company, Centaur asserts that the production continues to uphold the company's founding ideals in developing this nascent field of virtual theatre.

Stated Centaur,  "As with every Main Canon production, we apply new technologies to virtual theatre. For Twelfth Night, Act 2, our three technological innovations include the usage of physics, moving automatons, and visual illusion on the virtual stage. You'll see physics on-stage, in both built-in and scripted forms in our apple catches in Scene 3, and wilting rose motif in Scene 4-and, in the crawlspace of Scene 3, you'd see prim-based automaton actors in the form of rats!"

Special to this production, the MSC introduces the concept of "crowdsourced interactive set design," which allows anyone to submit a graffiti message or poster/flyer idea to be plastered onto the "City Wall of Illyria" set in Act 2, Scene 1. More details can be found at http://bit.ly/illyriangraffiti

The play stars Alestria Corryong, Caliban Jigsaw, Constantine Paulino, Ina Centaur, Kerry Takashi and Pipsqueak Albatros.

The live show, presented via SL Voice, is also available in live closed-captioning with opera-style subtitles in English, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.

Starting March 2, shows occur:

Tuesdays at 6PM SLT (PT)

Sundays at 1 PM SLT (PT)

At the SL Globe Theatre at Shakespeare (255,255,25)

To learn more, visit http://mshakespeare.com