Word Plays are like radio plays, but they don’t need the radio. They don’t need a set or actors either, except for the one delivering the words. Words alone make these plays. They build the set, they set the scene, they become the actors, their characters and their actions. Word Plays take full advantage of the freedom of the word, so every element – set, action, characters, sound and light – can do the impossible. Since talk is indeed cheap, all of this can be done on little to no budget.
Word Plays fit perfectly fine on the radio, but they are meant to be performed live, as the words are written for eye contact, for accompanying gesture and mood.
Word Plays are relatively tech-free, although on occasion projected (or otherwise displayed) text can be employed to comment on, contradict or repeat the spoken text, and recorded sound will be used (like many good radio plays) in a way that frames, accompanies, and fills out the words.
Word Plays loves words and their potential, which means their ambiguity and potential to disorient. Mind you, Word Plays try not to confuse an audience, but to disorient (both in the sense of a destabilization of place, time and identity structures as well as in the Nietzschean sense of losing value bearings, whatever that means). This may mean, at times, that the teller of the Word Plays will lie, like most teller of stories. But the teller will believe, and so should the listener.
At the heart of the Word Play is “a story”, but Word Plays prefer to tell many stories at the same time.
Word Shows may sound like radio plays, but they may take the appearance of lectures, performance lectures, Avant-Vaude performances (a favorite style), storytelling, poetry or even theatre. And since Word Plays love words, every Word Play should have a detailed program that could act as a piece of literature in itself.
“The word creates the setting and everything else”, some symbolist said this. But in addition to constructing otherwise physical objects, the words will also be the key towards constructing – or alluding to – meaning; and they will be their own worst enemy. Words will layer words over words in a psycho-linguistic sleight of hand to be taken in and taken out of the ears of the listeners. Despite being able to do everything, there is a limit to how much words can do.
