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____________________
ILLUSTRATION BY
WILLIAM DUKE

PART ONE: GODOT AMONG THE AVATARS

"A country road. A tree. Evening." Two guys in hats -- Didi and Gogo, as they call each other -- are stranded in a desolate void, awaiting someone named Godot.

Finally, one of them cries out: "It's Godot! At last! Gogo! It's Godot! We're saved!"

It's a false alarm, as Samuel Beckett wrote the line. But wait! In this performance, there is somebody there -- some dude named Muscleman, a recumbent beefcake model straight out of a men's underwear ad. He pops in and asks, "Why are you waiting for him, anyway? I forgot."

I've seen at least a dozen productions of "Waiting for Godot," but none quite like the one presented a couple of weeks ago at the Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colo. The text was Beckett's. But the "stage" was a Palace chat room on the Net. The characters were those in the original play -- joined by anyone else logged onto the Palace that night who happened to stumble into the virtual room ("The Waiting Room") where the drama was unfolding. The audience included not only lurkers inside the Palace itself but festival attendees in a theater, watching on a projection screen.

The Palace is a two-dimensional visual chat room filled with graphical "avatars" representing participants, so Didi and Gogo took form through more than just their typed dialogue. On screen, they sported the blobby happy-face avatars that the Palace uses for "guests"; they became droll Everymen, with little dunce-cap fezzes in place of Beckett's bowlers and a limited palette of expressions and hoppy moves. Since the Palace lets you use Macintalk digital voice synthesis, Didi and Gogo also "spoke" in identical, robotic voices. (Macintalk valiantly struggles with the phonetics of unfamiliar words, so here, "Godot" came off as go dote.) The result was stiff but not unaffecting -- a kind of digital puppet theater.

In "Waiting for Godot," as one critic famously put it, "nothing happens, twice"; in chat rooms, nothing happens over and over again, as people gather every evening and, mostly, wait for something to occur, for someone to say something interesting, for some diversion to help pass the time. To the artists who conceived and executed the stunt they called "Waiting for Godot.com" -- Adriene Jenik, Lisa Brenneis and Jonathan Delacour -- Beckett's existential vaudeville offered a perfect commentary on the world of online chat. At the same time, the Palace chat system provided an unruly public environment for a theatrical experiment -- a space for online street theater in which bystanders could stagger onto the "stage" at any moment.

Thus the apparition of Muscleman, who -- like Thumper, a saucy-looking brunette pin-up, and several other avatars -- crashed the performance and interjected some ad libs. At one point, Didi and Gogo left their "Waiting Room" home to visit a crowded Palace space called the Pit, where their presence evoked comments like, "I think we should all change our names to Dodo and Gigi" and "didi and gogo r u hackas?" The improvisatory interruptions came full circle when Muscleman, getting into the spirit of the event, changed his avatar's name to Godot. That made this "Godot" a first: one in which Godot finally shows up.

As far as I've been able to discover, this "Godot" is also a first of another kind -- a maiden effort to bring the structure of drama and the weight of a classic text into the crude, ephemeral environment of online chat. In a post-performance discussion, the performers and their audience came to the same conclusion: The hovering possibility of interference -- the ever-present threat of street-theater-style disruption -- was precisely what was most compelling about the show.

I had always imagined the first drama that would get staged in a chat room would be Sartre's "No Exit," with its celebrated sound bite, "Hell is -- other people!" ("L'enfer --c'est les autres"). But in the world of interactive art, it turns out that the spontaneous and unpredictable interventions of "other people" are infinitely more fascinating than any script, no matter how profound or beloved. When you present art with no boundary between stage and audience, the heckler and the interloper triumph: People will pay less attention to the work itself and more to how "other people" prod and poke it. Muscleman will trump Beckett every time.

That's not necessarily a crime. To be sure, Beckett was obsessive about protecting his plays from tampering, and most likely he'd have abhorred the cyberspatial incarnations of his Didi and Gogo. But Beckett's dead -- and the world today is full of interactive artists, all struggling with the very questions this "Godot" raised.

Interactive artists -- whether they produce CD-ROM movie-games or "serious hypertext," Web sites or live performances -- want to use digital technology to share some of the power of creation with what used to be called their audience. The technology offers a kaleidoscope of new possibilities for participation and collaboration. In the past, artists who wanted to play around like this were limited to small groups in their immediate community; today, technology lets interactive artists reach a potentially mass-scale audience. And so they dream of what was once an impossibility: improvisation on a global scale; art with the depth of a classic, the immediacy of a video game and the reach of TV.

But there's one problem they're still struggling to solve. How do you cede some measure of control or authority to the audience, reader, listener, "user" -- yet still deliver a work that's expressive, moving, memorable, satisfying?