Photo credit: Emily Cooper Photography
Review by Victoria McIntyre
Is the internet a cult? Are online communities good for us? Is misinformation harmless or dangerous? Is the future of reality virtual? How is technology changing the way we think? These are all questions that Pi Theatre’s Truth & Lies asks audience members.
Directed by Richard Wolfe and Jordan Watkins, this collection of three live performances and one virtual reality (VR) play is striking, experimental, and memorable. The same four actors, Carmel Amit, Kwasi Thomas, Manuela Sosa, and Robert Garry Haacke, (joined by Andrii Krupnyk in the VR play), perform in each of the shows with a stunning ability to move between theatrical worlds.
A patchwork of projectors hangs in a dark room. Not a chair in sight, we are invited to roam freely around the Vancouver Opera Rehearsal space. We are invited to take a tour of our own minds.
In an interview with Stir, Wolfe states that the venue “is set up to evoke the physical flow of a gallery installation.” While this intention is clear, once the plays begin, the space takes on a different meaning. More than anything, the glowing screens showing YouTube videos and Instagram posts in an otherwise dark room evoke the sensation of mindlessly scrolling online. Even the lack of chairs and the hesitant divide between audience members who are standing and those who are sitting on the ground promotes the eerie uncertainty cultivated by each performance. The lack of direction on where to sit aligns with the plays’ collective message about the lack of directions we all receive on how to use the internet. As the playing space continuously shifts around the room, some audience members even have to move out of a sudden spotlight for an actor. While not planned, this moment too serves as richly metaphorical for the random and unexpected content that we consume as internet users.
The first play, QAmom by Sebastian Archibald, follows a flirtatious text exchange, supposedly between a man and a young girl. Two desks and two computers are on stage as actors Manuela Sosa and Robert Garry Haacke type back and forth, exchanging messages that appear on projectors behind the actors. Each text bubble is accompanied by a coy voiceover—the first of many ways Truth & Lies plays with the audience’s auditory experience. Spliced between their text exchanges are video clips from a mommy vlogger who is cultivating an army of fellow angry moms. With references to Alice in Wonderland, the audience watches Sosa’s character, Alice, fly down an internet rabbit hole that leads her to a community-led mission to take justice into their own bloodthirsty hands.
Sosa’s body language, frantic, yet confined to the space behind the desk, aptly captures the internal spiral of someone who finds herself hopelessly swept up in an internet echo chamber. This show genuinely engages the audience while keeping its actors tucked away behind their desks. Archibald experiments with different methods of storytelling, proving that text messages can be an effective theatrical device. The writing is casual, emotional, and brimming with suspense. Each plot twist is well-earned and carefully executed. By the end, the audience is left wondering if any online community, even those with good intentions, can become sinister.
Vishesh Abeyratne’s Sin Eaters of the 21st Century is a dark comedy that uses masks, heavy metal music, and pixilated projections of disturbing images to tell the story of a group of content moderators who sacrifice their own mental health for the well-being of everyday internet users. As with most comedy-horror combos, the audience oscillates between unease and hesitant laughter. The play juggles weighty themes, like taking advantage of undocumented immigrants, with surreal humour that suggests the employees are engaged in a secret cult.
The high energy in this show is its biggest strength. There is never a slow moment. The audience is buoyed by the quick pace and playful movement. One stand-out scene is when the content moderators’ boss leaps onto a desk in the midst of a job interview and starts feverishly speaking in tongues. In Sin Eaters of the 21st Century, Abeyratne reminds us of the valiance of the unseen workers, the knights of the 21st century who protect us all from horrific online experiences.
Disrupted by Lucia Frangione is the twisted tale of a shut-in Instagram influencer set against the backdrop of the Trans Mountain pipeline’s impending expansion. Camilla posts videos in a short blue dress, a bright orange wig, and impossibly sparkly silver boots as the sexy “Spytrix.” Meanwhile, her activist sister, Aya, does all she can to raise awareness about the pipeline. Aya’s efforts are supported by her well-meaning boyfriend, an ASMR YouTuber. Disrupted presents a somewhat confusing patchwork of ideas for a short play. The connection between each storyline is, however, fully realized by the end of the performance. Misinformation acts as the rich thematic bridge between Instagram thirst traps and environmental injustice.
One of the highlights of this performance is Frangione’s engaging and wonderfully alienating use of technology. When the actors talk over FaceTime, the audience has a unique opportunity to watch a video call from an outside perspective. This experience reminds us that FaceTime is an intimate yet distant form of communication. The physical space between Camilla and Grig, the man she’s having cybersex with, is so glaring that any connection they seem to feel for each other rings false. This same distance grows within Camilla herself as she struggles to separate fiction from reality when her online persona becomes a delusion.
After the show, we are invited into a cozy backroom filled with warm wooden furniture and weighted-down bookshelves. Oil paintings line the walls and patterned cushions are built into the chairs. This is an office space that looks like it could be your grandmother’s living room. A Pi Theatre employee reminds everyone to move their drinks to the side because “you’re not going to know where your feet are.” The idea of being inside of your own body, your own consciousness, yet being somewhere else entirely is an eerie and unbelievable thought that we only really experience when we’re dreaming. But as audience members don VR headsets, the landscape around them transforms. Pippa Mackie’s Smother Me in Your Love is a ten-minute virtual play set in the very room where the viewers stand. Suddenly, you are in your current reality, but not. In the room that you entered, but also somewhere else. The choice to set this intriguing whodunnit, based loosely on Othello, in the same physical space that the viewer has already entered is clever and unsettling.
Suddenly, a woman in a white nightgown is roaming around the room, desperate and searching. A couple is having a pillow fight. A man is eating a doughnut and questioning you with accusatory eyes. He wants to know what happened. He wants to know what you did. Watching this VR theatre performance is like participating in a thought experiment that asks: what if you could dream while you’re awake—and what if someone else could control your dreams? Smother Me in Your Love takes over your agency, forcing you to imagine that you’ve done things that you’ve never done. How couldn’t it be true? You’ve witnessed it happen right in front of you, in 3D, in the very room you walked into moments ago.
While much of virtual theatre can feel like a stretch of the medium, Smother Me in Your Love sticks to what theatre does best. It inspires wonder and fear and excitement by watching people talk and move around a room. Mackie uses technology not just to enhance your immersion in the world of the story, but to turn you into a player in the unfolding drama. With VR theatre, audiences can become active participants in a play without having to learn a single line.
With text messages, Youtube vlogs, Instagram thirst traps, censorship, and ASMR, patrons are sucked into a theatrical space that creates the dizzying sensory experience of doom scrolling. The added element of a VR headset suggests where our obsession with online life may take us next, and may take us forever. But, in Disrupted, a flickering hope is whispered into our ears as Kwasi Thomas asks us what we feel, what the air is like around us—because that’s what’s real, not what’s on our screens. He speaks in a calming voice, designed to wake us up, gently, slowly, from a lifetime of sleep.
Pi Theatre’s Truth & Lies played at the Vancouver Opera House Rehearsal Space from June 22nd – June 25th, 2023
Victoria McIntyre is a writer currently working on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓əta (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is the Reviews Editor at PRISM international. She is also an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published by The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, The Goose, The Hart House Review, and others.