Ctrl+Alt+Delete: A chronicle of dot-com era

Lisa Baertlein

SAN JOSE: A new play showing here, "Ctrl+Alt+Delete," one of the
first literary efforts to chronicle the dot-com era, has failed to excite the
critics much -- but audiences are buying it like investors once grabbed the
painfully overvalued stocks of the Internet boom.

"'Ctrl+Alt+Delete' crashes more often than a shoddily designed piece of
software," theater reviewer Mark de la Vina wrote in the San Jose Mercury
News, Silicon Valley's newspaper of record, after the play's debut.

But negative reviews are seemingly irrelevant to the Silicon Valley
theatergoers who flock to see the play, particularly dot-commers stuck with
worthless stock options, messy resumes and shattered expectations.

The play bursts with nostalgia for the bygone era, and a chance for dot-commers
to view their own recent boom-and-bust stories on stage. They relate to the
play's characters, who are obsessed with their swelling portfolios, glued to
their cell phones and jumping from one venture-capital lovefest to the next.

"It's accurate," said one veteran of the Internet frenzy, who drove
about 30 miles just to catch the play and described her own story as stranger
than fiction.

"I went through three IPOs (initial public offerings), one after
another. ... It was just too good to be true," said the woman, who for 26
months between 1998 and 2000 oversaw investor relations or media relations for
those newly public companies.

No, she did not hit the jackpot with a single one of the IPOs. One of the
companies underwent a 20-for-1 reverse stock split, another had done a 50-for-1
reverse split and the third was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, she said.

Her losses are in the thousands of dollars.

Crash and burn

Audiences have been as forgiving of the script's shortcomings as venture
capitalists once were of Internet start-ups' shoddy business plans.

During shows, knowing belly laughs rain down like seed money at the height of
the boom. "It was a very, very close depiction of what went on,"
Forrest Williams, a member of San Jose's City Council told Reuters.

In one scene, Eddie Fisker, the play's ambitious young entrepreneur, reaches
a conclusion already painfully obvious to dot-com investors who saw their assets
shrink with the Nasdaq meltdown: He realizes that Gus Belmont, his cowboy
boot-clad money man, is not all that interested in seeing his "gizmo"
through to production.

"I'm sorry, I thought we were going to start making my gizmos, but what
we're going to make is announcements," Fisker laments. "What we're
going to make, son, is money," Belmont gushes.

From garage to gizmo

Spurred by Charles MacKay's 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and
the Madness of Crowds" -- which chronicles, among other things, history's
great scams and bamboozlements -- San Francisco native Anthony Clarvoe set out
more than a year ago to tell the story of the coming dot-com debacle.

The playwright, who now lives in New York and a decade ago based another work
on a Silicon Valley garage start-up, was already writing "Ctrl+Alt+Delete"
when the San Jose Rep called to commission a play about the region's latest gold
rush.

"I thought I would be prophetic," said Clarvoe, who acknowledged
that Wall Street's bears beat him to the punch.

Clarvoe may yet get another chance to predict the future, say some of the
industry die-hards who saw the play. They still talk hopefully of the California
entrepreneurs' long history of finding the next big wave to ride.

Silicon Valley is still writing its story, said Williams, who has had a long
run as employee of and consultant for tech icon International Business Machines
Corp. since moving to Silicon Valley in 1968.

The area played a key role in the early space program, the US defense boom
and most recently, was the epicenter of all things Internet. "There was a
lot of innovation here as a result of that. We're in a positive position to
start at a different level," Williams said.

The dot-com veteran of three IPOs in about two years said she was not yet
clear of recent events. "I'm still figuring out how to fill out that
bankruptcy form," she said.

The play had its world premier at the San Jose Repertory Theatre late last
month and is headed to Michigan State University's Wharton Center for Performing
Arts when its Silicon Valley run wraps up on Sunday.

(C) Reuters Limited.