Ryan North’s upcoming project is as exciting to me as his innovative use of the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform. I don’t have a lot of spare time these days, so instead of my sharing my thoughts about it, take a look at its brilliance for yourself.
What really excites me about this are two things: (1) that I could teach Hamlet alongside To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure in a speculative future where students see how Shakespeare and experimental literature come together at last in an orgasm of hilarity, and (2) that North’s innovative use of the crowd-funding tier structure serves as an interesting model for (perhaps less-guaranteed to crowd-please) experimental, hybrid-media literary projects… like the ones I always seem to be working on…
Anyway, I want to see this project fully-funded so that I can see what is up his sleeve at the final tier. He’s already promised a stage performance where the entire Internet votes on what happens next – where else could he go?
I wonder though… How would it intend to handle such a type of nonlinear narrative? Since Hamlet is already a linear story, the best he could achieve while still being educational enough would be a variant of the “pretty line syndrome.” (Described here: http://lparchive.org/Final-Fantasy-X-2/Update%2038/) Since we tend to have a lot of these sorts of things already, I’d hardly call that experimental.
It would really be experimental if the entire plot structure of Hamlet was just torn apart entirely. … but then, would it still be Hamlet?
“Experimental” is too strong a word for what he’s proposing, it’s more of a comedy/satire, but it does sound fun and at least some of the same thematic approaches to the form would be there to talk about and relate to more truly experimental work.