SOURCE: Huffman, Bennett Tracy. “Twister: Ken Kesey's Multimedia Theatre.” Modern Drama 43, no. 3 (fall 2000): 453-60.

In the following essay, Huffman outlines Kesey's attempts to incorporate technology in Twister to create a new dramatic environment, positing that the play redefines the boundaries between traditional dramatic conventions and new textualities as the vanguard of contemporary cultural politics.

In 1993, following a Grateful Dead concert in Eugene, Oregon, Ken Kesey held the world premiere of Twister: A Ritual Reality in Four Quarters Plus Overtime If Necessary at the National Guard Armory. A play structured loosely around the characters from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, since its inception Twister has seen manifestations and utilized technologies in a wide variety of media, including text, costuming, music, lighting, lasers, projection of puppet silhouettes, still and video images, pyrotechnics, hypermedia, e-mail, and computerized edited video. In the play each of the major characters faces turn-of-the-twenty-first-century...