Magnum Opus

The Chekhov Hyperdrama

 From the introduction:

In the late 1980s, after I had several produced hyperdramas under my belt, I became aware that a great deal of audience education would be necessary before the power and significance of hyperdrama were appreciated. At best, hyperdrama was appreciated as a kind of eccentric entertainment, the way "happenings" were appreciated in the 1960s, a trend that would continue with the later production of the most popular hyperdrama to date, Tony and Tina's Wedding.
But I took hyperdrama more seriously than this. I had come to believe, and still believe, that this dramatic form, more than traditional theater, mirrored reality as the new physicists had come to define it: traditional theater was Newtonian, a passive audience observing in the dark, while hyperdrama was modern ("quantum"), the audience defining its own play by the choices it made.
So the question I posed to myself was: what can be done to give hyperdrama respect, to have it taken seriously? My answer became: by adapting a classic work of theater to the form.
This decided, it did not take me long to decide that Chekhov's The Seagull was a perfect vehicle for this purpose. There was even an appropriate speech in the play to justify the experiment:
"Uncle, what we need is a new kind of theater," says Treplev. "A theater with new theatrical forms!"