creating a fake "chat" for a theatre performance

here's what I'm trying to do, I'm designing multimedia for a circus show, and one of the tasks I've been asked to look into for the concept is creating a fake "Chat" environment for the beginning of the show. the idea is as follow, while people come into the theatre/circus tent the artists are chatting amongst themselves and the technical crew and the chat is visible on mapped projection in the stage environment. We don't what to do a desktop grab, because we want to avoid any recognizable chat software or interface, and we also want complete control over what we are projecting, since it'll be mapped all over the set, with only colors to identify the various "senders".

The graphic elements, the fake projected interface part of the task I can do easily , what turns out to be a bit more of a challenge or a question mark then I originally though is gathering the text data from the "users" and getting them into max...

Here's how I'm seeing it so far:
the idea is that we would be running our own local wifi network in the theatre to wich the artist's smart phones/tablet/laptop/etc would be hooked up to. My idea is that then they woud enter an i.p address in their device web browser wich would take them to a simple "comment" type html page. I then need to get said text into max to generate the text of my projections, and retain in some way the info of who sent it so I can color code the messages in the projection to create a sense of identity.

Now I think in theory this should work, but now that I'm no longer conceptualizing and rather actually trying to do it, I'm realizing I have no idea where to start doing this! I suppose this is how we learn... I think that this is probably not that complicated, but it's an area of max I've never really delved in... and so I am clueless.

any thoughts as to where I should start looking, objects, tools, or any tips or suggestion would be great! this community has always proved very useful.

Thanks!