Transformative work of the year (so far): To tell my story, showing near DC now

To Tell My Story: A Hamlet Fanfic by Alexandra Petri 

Runs until July 30

Although the structuring conceit is a loose retelling of Hamlet, with a modern-day fangirl as the tragic protagonist Elsie, there are a number of other fandoms represented, most obviously Harry Potter, secondarily Twilight (though only identified as “vampire” in the promo materials, grrr), MCU (similar, grr), LoTR, Sherlock, and Historical RPF (Abraham Lincoln).  Some observations:

1.     Just as Ready Player One hails as its ideal reader an 80s fanboy, this play hails a 21^st-century fangirl.  I laughed a lot. 

2.     Me, a pedant: Technically, this isn’t a “fanfic,” but a “fandrama” or “fanwork,” though I understand why they used the more well-recognized term.

3.     For a number of reasons, commercial “fanworks,” if you accept the application of that term to them—and for this play at least I think we should—tend to be metafictions, interested in the mechanisms of storytelling (see, e.g., Jasper Fforde’s series, Dumas père’s Kean as remixed by Sartre, Supernatural’s Fan Fiction and Slash Fiction episodes), especially if you include in the metafiction category retellings from the perspective of a character whose experience is elided from the original (see, e.g., Wide Sargasso Sea, Lo’s Diary, The Wind Done Gone, Jacqueline Carey’s retelling of LoTR).  This play is no exception, as the title indicates, and I also sense a reference to Hamilton’s “who lives, who dies, who tells your story”—especially since Petri’s play, much more than Shakespeare’s, emphasizes that you (the character) have little to no control over those things.  In Petri’s version, Elsie is not able to orchestrate the narrative for Horatio to repeat.

4.     The program fascinated me because the format is very specifically taken from the Archive of Our Own, with its major tags, additional tags and kudos count, as well as fandom categorizations.  And I’m pretty sure all the additional tags are canonical, even though some of them are not what we envisioned when we set up the additional tags field.  That’s folksonomy for you.  Anyway, obviously I don’t think there’s any trademark problem, and wouldn’t be for a creative work even if it used more of the Archive’s trade dress, but it’s notable that the AO3 now provides some standard formatting choices.

FFrom outside, a wall inviting audience members to share their fandoms.  I recognized maybe half?