The Wikipedia Plays

The Wikipedia Plays, first performed in August 2007,[1] is a performance comprising seventeen plays, each ten minutes long, by the Off-Broadway New York theatre company Ars Nova.[2]: 7  The play was created and staged by the company's then associate producer, Kim Rosenstock. Each is based on the title of an entry in Wikipedia: Rosenstock selected these by following wikilinks from one article to another.[3]

The complete sequence runs: "The Defenestration of Prague" → "Bohemia" → "Prokop the Great" → "Democracy" → "Yale Law School" → "Bill Clinton" → "Global Warming" → "Uncertainties" (see Uncertainty) → "Weather Forecasting" → "Troposphere" → "Turbulent" (see Turbulence) → "Golf Ball" → "Wooden" (see Wood) → "Particle Board" → "Stiletto Heels" → "Fetish" → "Castration Anxiety."[4]

The play has been seen as belonging to a movement in contemporary theatre favouring long performances of sequential short plays, being compared with the Neo-Futurists' Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (1988), the work of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and 365 Days/365 Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks (2006).[2]: 7–8 

  1. ^ Andrew Gans, 'Ars Nova Presents The Wikipedia Plays Beginning Aug. 3', Playbill (27 June 2017).
  2. ^ a b Muse, John H. (Winter 2010). "Eonas in an Instant: The Paradoxes of Suzan-Lori Park's 365 Days/365 Plays". Journal of American Drama and Theatre. 22 (1): 7–31.
  3. ^ 'Jarrow, Miranda, Etc. Take Part in "The Wikipedia Plays"', BroadwayWorld.com (18 July 2007).
  4. ^ Jeffrey O. Gustafson, 'Review: The Wikipedia Plays', The Signpost (6 August 2007).