George Brown is a man with a mission. As chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at Bradley University in Peoria, IL, he stepped up to the plate in a big way when asked if he could take advantage of the university's membership in Internet 2, an open-fiber connection with a data-transfer speed of 10 Gigabits per second. “They were looking for people to use it,” explains Brown. “Dean Jeffrey Huberman asked if we could use it for theatre.”

Actors on stage at Bradley University in Illinois performed with realtime video images of actors in Florida and Canada during a high-tech version of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play, The Adding Machine.

Brown's answer was an emphatic, “Yes,” as Internet 2 allows for telematic (long-distance via Internet) performances, with actors in multiple locations appearing in the same production. The first foray into this world of high-tech theatre was The Antigone Project, produced with the University of Central Florida (UCF) in 2004. “This was a 20-minute experiment with an edited, contemporary version of Sophocles' text with the teleconferencing as part of the story,” explains Brown.

After an additional series of short projects with UCF and the University of Waterloo in Canada, Brown opted to produce and direct a longer project: Elmer Rice's 1923 expressionistic play, The Adding Machine, which examines man's fears of being overcome by technology. The result was an innovative, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional collaboration that integrated virtual scenery, video, and sound via Internet 2 using recorded images, avatar performers, photographs, and graphics with sound. Almost 100 students, staff, and faculty were involved in the process.

For Brown, the choice of the script was largely structural: “The scenes had two or three characters on stage at one time, allowing you to video-conference individual characters. The script was very conducive to this type of project,” he explains. “Rehearsals and production meetings took place via teleconferencing using Polycom and Apple iChat programs. For the performances, we used Digital Video Transport System, or DVTS, which enables digital video distribution via the Internet.” Four recycled PCs with Pentium 4 1.5GHz processors and 512MB of RAM ran Windows XP with FireWire cards. “These systems required 30 megabits of bandwidth each, and at times, we required up to 120 megabits for the production,” Brown adds.

A video camera was connected directly to each PC, which, in turn, was connected to Internet 2 to stream noncompressed video signals, images, and sound 1,000 miles in about a second. Isadora software sent the images to one of three Panasonic PT D3500U projectors in the theatre. “The projectors created the illusion of one large image, 36' wide across the stage,” says Brown. “Much of the video was shot as greenscreen to key images into the graphics.”

A raised platform brought the live actors closer to the video screens

The audience was seated in the Hartmann Center for the Performing Arts at Bradley University, where Zero, the lead character, and the role of Daisy were seen live, with additional actors beamed in from three remote sites — Waterloo, UCF, and a studio space at Bradley. “One actor, John Wayne Shafer at UCF, played three characters: a boss, a judge, and a lieutenant via makeup and costume changes. He sat at the computer in his office with a greenscreen on the wall behind him. At Waterloo, Brad Cook played the role of Shrdlu,” Brown points out. Cook was in a small studio theatre with a greenscreen and virtually whisked to the stage at Bradley via Canada's Canarie high-speed Internet service.

“The production was almost two years in the making,” says Brown. “I teach a class in theatre and new media, and we developed some of the elements as part of that class. We started the brainstorming and storyboarding in December 2005.” In December 2006, the production process ramped up, with less than six months to opening night on March 6.