JULIET: @julietcap16 You need to remember that he didn’t tell you the truth. Do you honestly WANT to be with someone who lies to you?

Ok, that exchange between Juliet and Nurse is probably not the Shakespeare verse you remember from your high school English class. It seems that this Juliet,(@julietcap16 on Twitter) has more in common with lonelygirl15 than she does with the classic 14th century heroine. (As we discover from her Facebook profile, she loves Taylor Swift and Twilight).

But the beauty of Shakespeare is that it never gets old, and the genius of the great author’s classic texts is watching them get reinvented over and over in various eras. So it should come as no surprise that Such Tweet Sorrow, a Twitter performance of Romeo and Juliet is having its moment. A British production performed (or tweeted) by the Royal Shakespeare Company with the help of cross-platform media shop, Mudlark , it is funded by Channel 4′s digital investment fund, 4iP.

A loose interpretation of the original text, this Romeo & Juliet began on April 10th and takes place in the span of five weeks and over 4,000 tweets. Now a few weeks and storylines in, you can follow all the characters tweets on a timeline that lives on the website, read a summary of what has happened so far, and check out the playlist for Juliet’s masked birthday party on Spotify and last.fm. which include, with some irony I imagine, Beyonce’s unforgettable Single Ladies whose lyrics demand a ring on the finger. And no less cheeky, the inclusion of MGMT’s Kids, no doubt a nod to the folly of youth, with its hypnotic refrain “control yourself.”

For Juliet’s party, she invited guests on their Facebook page to RSVP and send photos of their masks. 83 people responded and a handful participated in the mask challenge. It seems Juliet has the most active social media profile, including a Youtube page with 3 videos, where we get a glimpse into the Juliet’s feelings and interests, in the teenage girl bedroom (again another nod to lonelygirl15). The  most viewed of all three videos is the first, with 13,690 views at this writing, is perhaps the one that gives the most insight into Juliet. See below.

Based on the mainstream media’s response and coverage of the project, it appears to have made some sort of impact and certainly marks a notable moment in the expansion of theater performance into social media space. While I’m fascinated by the collaborative work this project is doing across theater, literature and social media, I have to say that this attempt falls into the caveman days of of interactive fiction. I have some quibbles with the actual design of the site (including the annoying inability to move through the timeline with ease), but most importantly  I’d have to critique the experience/story designers for not integrating the performance more into the social media space.

While Twitter in and of itself is an engagement platform, the lack of context (outside of clever pop culture references and lingo) seem to kill the “play”. I guess my expectations included a high level of interactivity and audience involvement. Put simply, why would I, as an audience member on Twitter, engage this drama outside of the novelty of seeing Shakespeare on Twitter? There’s no story hook for me, no compelling invitation to participate in the (vastly underdeveloped) world of the Capulets and the Montagues, and no reason for me to stick around…since I already know the ending. If the contemporary-ness is aimed at the teenage girls who know the dance routine to Single Ladies, then it certainly fails to engage them; if it is aimed (very slightly older!) ladies like myself, it seems perhaps over simplified and too full of silly teenage drama.

I know this is just the beginning and that experimentation will be going on for a while, so I hesitate to be overly critical. However, looking at this case really drove home for me the need for completely thought-through narratives and inventive engagement strategies, even dare I say, when you are working with the master of narrative himself, Shakespeare.

You can follow the characters: @romeo_mo, @julietcap16, @Tybalt_Cap, @Jess_nurse,@LaurenceFriar and @Mercuteio

I laughed my way through the episode – their bender night followed by waking up in Hank’s convertible on the beach with some freshly tatted backsides. Aah, yes. I know these guys. They are my friends and I miss them. Ok, I know what you’re thinking – is this fictional or real? Honestly, it doesn’t matter because on my tweed couch with the wool throw in December in New York, it was a nice fuzzy feeling. So imagine my excitement when I browse my Twitter feed and see that @Gennefer is talking to @RealHankMoody. I jump in and check out his feed. It’s crazy and unmistakeable how Hank Moody-esque this guy sounds. Tweets like:

Is there anything better than waking up after a night with a great woman, having a hot shower, and then hopping back into bed?

I’m hooked. I make a mention of him to someone else on Twitter and his ears much have started burning or something because all of sudden I get this tweet:

@filmfuturist well hello don’t think u can just mention my name without introducing yourself. U have pretty lips BTW. What’s ur story?

I swear I almost fall off the couch. At first I don’t know what to say because I know Hank is a player and I don’t want to fall for his sweet talk. So I decide to keep it neutral and ask him for some dating advice:

ME: @RealHankMoody I’m nerdy Hank. What does a girl need to do to find a smart dude?

HANK: @filmfuturist don’t *do* anything other than be yourself. You’re smarter than that. Plus, your a jewel – they will find you.

I’m not sure what to do next, so, I wimp out and hit “Follow” and become a Hank Moody follower so I can watch from the sidelines as he seduces women and talks of his conquests.

I finally work up the nerve to ask him if he’ll answer some questions for my blog and he’s charming, and gracious and utterly HANK MOODY. So here they are for your enjoyment.

How does it feel to be Hank Moody?

It feels fucking great at times.  But being a single dad is hard work.  I don’t think I do as admirable a job as I’d like, although Becca, my daughter,  does get fed and shelter is provided.  I do live a hard life, but I surround myself with women that care about me.  At least for a few hours at a time.  My strategy is to string them all together to form a 24/7 support structure.

Where did you learn your game?

My game? Are you referring to my writing? I wrote short stories and poems throughout school and really hit my stride in college. I read a lot too. Books and lately blogs, such as yours.  It keeps my mind active, my vocabulary current and my wit sharp.

I’m dying to know what the teenage Hank Moody was like – were you a stud then too?

Not really. I mean I was shy, but I always said what I thought, didn’t hold back, told it like it was.  I think that brutal honestly was seen by girls as something different to what they were experiencing at the time.  And different is attractive in many ways.

Seems like the only person who really scares you is Sue Collini. Is she ballsier than you?

Firstly, I’m not convinced that Sue is a woman.  So until the results of any tests come back to conclusively determine her sex, I’d like to not comment on the record about her balls.   In reality she’s a pussycat.  One of those that hisses a lot.

I swear I saw you once at a party in Bel Air – in the poolhouse, making it with a girl AND a guy – was that you?

I’m not ruling the possibility that is wasn’t me out. I’d like to think not. But a lot of crazy shit went down in Bel Air that I’m not too proud of.  Let’s just say that if I can’t remember and there is no photographic evidence, then it didn’t happen.

Most guys who play girls like you are called douchebags – why do you think that title doesn’t apply to you?

I’m very fond of women.  I care about them.  I genuinely desire not to hurt them.  I love their attention and desire their touch.  Their kiss awakens me.  I think about them, their hopes and dreams.  I talk to them.  All of them need attention.  All of them need to feel good.  All of them make me feel good.  Douchbags deliver a win/lose proposition to women.  My girls are treated well and respected. Win/Win.

I worry about your writing – when will you write again?

Yes. I’m in the middle of writing a new novel now.  A lot of my research is being done online via twitter (@RealHankMoody).  Its been a very tough road to overcome writers block.  Especially when I’m preoccupied trying to be the best father figure to Becca.  But I hope to have it completed by summer.

I despise your rap but I’m totally seduced by you – mind if I come over?

As long as you cook me breakfast in the morning.

In surveying the various projects out there, I found myself drawn to Twistori, which is an interesting take on this  trend. By limiting their tracking to only real time uses of the words LOVE, HATE, THINK, BELIEVE, FEEL and WISH, the project draws your attention to the verbs that create human emotion. Below, I have simply screen-grabbed whatever came through the feed in the 2-3 minutes span I was watching it scroll through.

The makers of this project acknowledge that their inspiration comes from another project called We Feel Fine which actually tracked emotions mined from all over the web in the form of text and image, and then organized them into a fascinating compilation and creative analysis of human feelings. It took me a while to wrap my head around what they were actually doing. I should say that the the authors of the project Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, are together a combination of computational, creative and sociological whizkiddery. But don’t let that deter you from looking through this project, and apparently their soon-to-be-published book on the project. In their explanation of the project and its methodology they say:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

I surmised after reading through their material, that they are in fact going about storytelling in a quasi-scientific way – and I say “quasi” only because while data is real, what they are seeking to document is really the range of human emotion.  So while they do uncover patterns in people’s feelings/behavior, it never quite seems that the purpose of the project is purely statistical despite their use of all this computational skill and technology.

There are fascinating ideas in the individual words and images here and it begs the question, “where does science/technology meet art and storytelling”?

The conversation continues.

So here’s where I step back and ask: was the success of Paranormal an anomaly in the Blair Witch manner, or is it in fact the beginning of a wave? While I get that this film is probably scarier in a “real” way than say, Saw VI, that paragon of torture porn which it trounced at the box office, I have to wonder if the convergence of all these phenomena at the same moment spells more than just “great content”. There are a lot of “firsts” here: certainly the use of Eventful.com, which until now has been used primarily for live music events; there’s the suddenly powerful force of immediate social media like twitter and of course, there’s the sheer desperation of the studios to make a buck, any buck in the midst of a funding crisis akin to none other in recent Hollywood history.

Assuming that none of these factors are changing anytime soon – ie, access to social media, immediate audience responses (that can make or break opening weekends), and a cashflow issue not likely to be resolved so fast, will models like this soon become ubiquitous? It seems inevitable to me. I’ve always been dubious of Hollywood test screenings and the magic scores that determine whether a movie gets released or not, or if characters or endings should be changed. It seems that at a certain price-point (an din this case rather extremely low), these studio people should be delighted to have ways of gauging audiences interest in their films. It’s such a low-risk strategy that I wonder if Paranormal’s success will send a message to the powers that be.

But of course, the million dollar question remains unanswered: is this a marketing/distribution strategy that will work for a film without this sort of draw – the horror, the midnight screenings, the sheer “viral-ness” of it? And will there emerge other platforms, such as Eventful.com, which can perhaps draw different groups of people to an event they can feel they have participated in bringing to the rest of the public? Certainly, there are some indie film communities springing up around various audience engagement concepts. And I wonder how those will shake out in the months and year to come – since that is really how quickly I believe we will see vast transformation in the world of audience-content relationships.