Looking Glass VR
Alice in Wonderland is already VR, without a headset
What if the audience wasn’t just sitting still in their seats?
What if all the members of the audience could pass Through the Looking-Glass with Alice, with the text backward on one side and just right on the other?
“Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” is about all her adventures after the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen and the folks you know from Wonderland. She sees lots more craziness, starting with a young man fighting a monster.
The Jabberwock is a one of four characters in, The Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, a no-nonsense poem written in nonsense language. Those who know it, tend to LOVE it. Those who don’t, have no idea what I’m even writing about here.
For an aficionado or a newcomer, The Jabberwocky is a whack-job version of the classic Heroes Story. Son leaves home, defeats impossible adversary, returns, chortling in his joy.
Alice can’t understand the words. No one can. But it’s not necessary to understand the words to understand the story. As Alice says,
Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed some thing: that’s clear, at any rate
In Virtual Reality, there is no Fourth Wall, unless you choose to use one. But why would you?
Why wouldn’t you want the audience there in the Tulgey Woods watching the Hero fight the Jabberwock up close and personal. Moving around to get a better view if they feel like it.
Each of the 35 people who attended our performance in VR followed Alice through the looking-glass and were present for the battle.
Then they followed the Hero, with the Jabberwock’s head, galumphing back home to his Mother.
The end. That’s The Jabberwocky.
But Alice is just getting started in the Looking-Glass World and she leads the whole audience through the woods (not something audiences usually do) and sees someone off in the distance, sitting on a wall, who turns out to be Humpty-Dumpty.
I’m not making this up.
Lewis Carroll appropriated the main character of a classic kid’s poem and portrayed Humpty Dumpty as smart but completely self-absorbed. Possibly dangerous to others but definitely dangerous to himself.
Eggs should not sit on top of narrow walls, as Alice points out. But Humpty Dumpty, big-time know-it-all, is, like, ‘no problem, little girl, because first I’m not fallin’ and second if I did, which I’m not, the King promised me all his horses and all his men would get right on my case and we’ll be fine.’
We know how that works out.
But it gets better. The King made this unfortunately reassuring promise as an Un-Birthday Present. Dumpty proceeds to overwhelm Alice with data-driven logic that 364 Un-Birthdays are obviously a better deal than just 1 Birthday per year.
Alice prefers the magic of Birthdays, but Humpty-Dumpty’s world view has no room for magic or even human values, only values that can be enumerated. Unfortunately, the Un-Birthday present will end up costing him his shell. Lewis Carroll should be read in Business Schools today.
Because of his way with words, Alice next asks Humpty to explain the meaning of, The Jabberwocky, which he confidently proceeds to do. An easy VR construction allows the audience to follow his definitions on a very large screen hanging in space somewhere over his head.
Many of the words are what Humpty calls ‘portmanteau words,’ where the meaning of two words get packed into one, like a big suitcase. ‘Slithy’ is lithe + slimy, like ‘Brunch is breakfast + lunch.
It’s just fun. There might be no other justification for it.
Eventually Alice takes in as much as she can and gets ready to move on to whatever’s next. We all know what happens to Mr. Dumpty.
He falls. It’s pretty funny. Tension resolved. The end, again.
Curtain call, leading into a discussion of what it all means.
We have no freakin’ idea what it all means. Not, The Jabberwocky, although its meaning is subtle — I mean what new possibilities for creativity and connecting does this little exercise in VR Theatre reveal?
- The cast members were never physically together for rehearsals or performance. Their physical bodies were in three different countries, two different continents. It took approximately 2 minutes for each cast member to stop what they were doing and join the rest of the cast for one of the three scheduled rehearsals. No driving, no parking, no overhead. Cast members do not need to live near each other in VR Theatre.
- We neglected to track where the people who attended came from, but we know it’s all over the place. None of them had to drive anywhere either. They could have chosen to do a lot of other things on December 18, exactly one week before Christmas. It was easy to come to an event in VR and with almost no publicity, 35 people did.
- When we all talked informally at the end, the one common theme was no one had any idea before the event what to expect. As a result, they were delighted. Also, people loved being inside the show and being able to move around.
- There were no direct expenses. The Jabberwock’s costume, with detachable head, and the Humpty Dumpty egg were created as a labor of love by one of the cast members. He’s good at it and it definitely took some time during a busy period of the year. However, the costuming and props required orders of magnitude less effort than these objects do in the physical world. Moreover, the world used for staging the show was already in place, thanks to Master World Builder Alan Chao and Tripp for making it available.
I love The Jabberwocky. I memorized it when I was in seventh grade and I have recited it for large and small audiences on-demand or as a surprise ever since. I was pretty sure staging it somehow in VR would be a nice little treat for whoever showed up.
The unexpected part for me, and the part that delighted me the most, was how all the cast members took what I started and made it better. Being part of a little guerilla team where everyone comes together for the gig and contributes is one of the best things life has to offer.
The Jabberwocky is our first story through the VR looking-glass and, like the book, it is just the beginning.
Because what we learned is that anybody anywhere can become a team and put on a show for anyone else anywhere else, without having to get a grant first.
Pictures for this story by Ender and Rattles.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
