Illusion vs Reality: The nature of Theatre

I am exploring characterization and alternate points of view in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" because I am trying to discover what similarities there are between Renaissance theatre/culture and modern gamer culture. I do this in order to show how past literature/culture can be relevantly applied in the modern day towards teaching others about still relevant concepts.

In theatre, the written word is the barest fragment of a performance. The interactions of actors, actor/audience, audience/environment, actor/environment, all these together create the story. It is one of the few forms that portrays a human story using human canvases.

It is at once experiential, game like, and multi-layered, with a plot driven by explorations, involving a similar mechanism of suspension of disbelief. Thus, I propose to do a video game adaptation of this well known play in order to sell Shakespeare to a larger audience, particularly that of the pre-teen/teen, who is just being introduced to what concepts are "hip", "cool" and other such.

Within "The Tempest", there are a myriad of possibilities for adaptation. The storyline is one of the few within Shakespeare that follow the three unities (Time, Space, Action), and has a built in magic system, with powerful characters, and themes that continue to be relevant in the modern day. Revenge, Justice, the discovery of the self, feminism, the idea of the 'Clash of Civilizations', etc...all these are embedded within it, in the minds and points of view of individual characters.

Can Illusion influence and be applied to reality? I think so, and so have those since the very beginnings of theatre in Greece long ago. Plato himself referred to it as being experiential, that one needed to immerse oneself within it in order to fully understand it, which is not being done in schools today. Instead of using a strategy for immersion, students today are just being made to read and analyze the text, which, while important, is but one of the elements of drama (the one that Aristotle would later argue to be the primary point of theatre).

Theatrical tradition is continually being created, as it has from the beginning, by individuals stepping out of accepted tradition in order to create it anew. That is what Thespis, the "first actor" did in stepping out of the chorus, which at that time was the only accepted form of theatre, to engage in a dialogue with them. This is in essence what I am trying to accomplish, stepping out of traditional theatrical interpretations and performance history in order to take a step back to the greater interactivity of the past, which I feel to have greater potential for teaching.