mee
“I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world.”
Mee began using the internet as a textual source for composing his pieces in the early 1990s. He first began making his own work freely available by posting three of his plays on Carnegie Mellon’s humanities gopher/ftp/telnet English Server in the mid 1990s. By 1996, with the help of his friend Tom Damrauer, the (re)making project, a web site with his full scripts was launched. It contained an invitation for people to “do freely whatever they want with them.”[9] He is the first and only playwright to make his full body of theatre work available on the internet.
This was not viewed by Mee as a challenge to the current copyright law or a vehicle to raise issues of intellectual property. It was done as a populist gesture towards his utopian vision of a free and democratic internet. In 1996 he said “I’m attracted to the idea of things being owned in common.” It also represented “Mee’s Golden Rule: of do unto my writing as I have done unto the writing of others.”[11]
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