Since it's Shakespeare's 444th birthday, and theatre has come a long way, I thought it might be interesting to wade into the discussion of the use/overuse of technology in theatre. 

Fellow enthusiast and blogger Sarah McLellan writes:

The use of technology seems to really aggravate theatremakers' insecurities about our medium's relevance; we think we need to use technology to legitimize our existence, and it ends up being weilded around like a clumsy sledgehammer. A lighting designer friend of mine likes to joke that the measure of a green, usually unskilled director is their insistence on using "slides" in their production.

McLellan links to this Lyn Gardner piece cautioning against the dangers of allowing technological opportunities to distract artists from the need for proper craftsmanship.  I find this debate particularly interesting because multimedia, tech-heavy work is a hallmark of the downtown, indie-theatre scene, and yet these are the artists working with the most restrictive budgetary, time, and scheduling constraints. 

Personally, I enjoy technology in theatre the most when it is used as a tool for expanding the scope of the performance space.  I saw a piece by the Flying Carpet Theatre Company a few years ago called A Day In Dig Nation in which there was no physical set, and all the action was mimed.  The sound, however, had been painstakingly edited and recorded as a continuous hour-long track.  The actor had rigorously scored his actions to the soundtrack, and it was gripping to watch him mash buttons on an invisible video game controller, open a coffee-can, and drive a car, all without the benefit of any physical props.  Meanwhile, on a screen behind him, video images of the various settings in which he found himself served to transport the action effortlessly to spaces far beyond the possibilities of an actual set.  He careened from his apartment to a restaurant to a non-specific dreamscape to a crowded city street to an underground bunker in the future, a journey made possible by virtue of the technological flexibility at his disposal.  I wrote about the similarly deft use of technology in Welcome to Nowhere (Bullet Hole Road) last month, and it's an exciting phenomenon in general, even if artists occasionally go a little bit overboard.  

But you have to wonder what ol' Shakespeare would have thought, especially given the spectacular settings in which he set his works, all without the benefit of so much as a footlight.