Harry Potter + Twitter

Here's the thing- I'm obsessed with Harry Potter. If we start there, the rest of this post is going to make a lot more sense, so if you have a problem with my intense love of all things related to that world, read someone else's post. So here's how this relates to our prompt on time: JK Rowling wrapped up her series on Harry's life when the 7th book was released on July 21st. Five years later a character popped up on Twitter named @mugglehustle. This is a guy who had the brilliant idea to begin reading the series for the first time at age 25 and live tweet, chapter by chapter, his thoughts and reactions to the world that Rowling created years ago. In May of 2012, Muggle Hustle launched a durational play via twitter with the first tweet:

"@mugglehustle: Okay, so yeah. I’m going to read Harry Potter 1-7 for the first time and share my thoughts and reactions here.

@mugglehustle: If you want you can join me and relive your first experiences with the series.

@mugglehustle: Okay, got my set of books from Amazon. Here we go.

@mugglehustle: CHAPTER ONE: THE BOY WHO LIVED

@mugglehustle: Well as it stands now, this book should be called “Mr. Dursley and the Dursley’s Dursley.”

And with his first tweet on the book, I was hooked. This was clearly an extension of this guy's real personality, because it came from an honest place (or so it read to me) but was a somewhat heightened characterization of who he probably is in real life. With each chapter (some taking an hour or more to read and comment on), he took time to have asides to the audience and engage with readers: "I hope I was wearing a dope sweater. RT '@MereLaura Last night I had a dream I met @MuggleHustle and @jk_rowling at a Christmas party.'", commented when he couldn't check in for awhile: " SEND SOME RED SPARKS UP, THUGGLES. I'M TRYING TO FIND MY WAY BACK TO THE HUSTLE."; and made comparisons from pop culture to the books: "What's your March Madness bracket looking like? I have Slytherin making it to the Elite 8 and Gryffindor going all the way."

I followed this journey for a little over a year, chapter by chapter, book by book, with a stranger who I grew to love as much as I love the characters he was writing about, and although I knew the source material so well, it was still engaging, surprising and delightful to read this man’s reactions to each event in the books that I am so fond of. Through his experience, I got to relive them again for the first time.

How does this relate to pace and time? Well, I’d say that the responses @Mugglehustle had to each book was happening as it happened in real time; he set many chapters with a line about the passage of time, or what he was doing prior to starting, or a quip about whiskey going well with books before settling in, which was a constant reminder that the hour or so during which he was tweeting was actually the time passed while he read the book. The time between tweets wasn’t ignored but addressed, and the duration of that time made the hour or so of his interactions with the twitter world go by more quickly than the audience would like. An hour doesn’t feel so long when anticipation for that hour is built up over a span of a few weeks. The reality of the event is never forgotten, because everything he did reinforced that this hour was the only hour he had to be present with us doing this thing he said he would do.

That brings me to question two: If these plays bring us closer to right here, right now, what’s the next step? I don’t know. Maybe more neo-futurist plays but done from an improvisational stand-point and without any scripts. Maybe the audience gets to be a more active participant in having a say about the duration of the piece. Maybe we, as observers, could be drawn into a play as a character or scene partner at any time, so we have to be fully engaged and ready for a turn or we might miss our chance to be present. I’m not sure what the next step is, but I’m also not disheartened by turns theatre has taken in the last few years, so I think the best thing to do is keep asking the hard questions, trying new things, and assessing the effectiveness of each theatrical event as it happens.

P.S. You can read all of @mugglehustle's tweets for each book on his website mugglehustle.com.