ComputerGeneratedTheatre

Computer-Generated Theatre

Use a prose generator, such as what Bob describes here, to create the basis for a skit. The performers then have to act it out, or something based on it, as best as they can.

Bob : I will be barred from any serious theatrical production if I do this but I feel compelled. Take the text of Beckett's Waiting for Godot or equivalent revered play, run it through a modified 'travesty' filter and perform that. "travesty" statistically analyzes a given text according to the word (triplet?) frequencies and generates nonsense text via a Markov chain algorithm to produce deceptively realistic garbage. We could build this as a web application so we could print scripts real-time or we might just pregenerate the scripts so we can practice them.

(Peter: I'll bet money that the name "travesty" comes from the Stoppard play ''Travesties,'' in which a Dadaist poet rearranges the words of a Shakespeare sonnet to hilarious and unintentionally-ribald effect.)

(Peter: Come to think of it, this might be a lot of fun to do to a Shakespeare play.)

What might be cool (though time-consuming) is to perform a bit of the original play and a random bit and see if the audience can tell the difference.

Or just mangle one character's lines.

Otherwise, we can convert a few pages of Waiting for Godot into a Mad Libs template and just ask the audience for word suggestions (or hand them cards to fill out before the show) and perform Waiting for BLANK (the original suggestion).