Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Christopher Duthie, directed by Nathan Pronyshyn
Vertigo Theatre, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
February 11-20, 2014
Daniel: “By running away, I was standing my ground”
Christopher Duthie’s play n00b proves once again that sometimes plays written for children or teens can be more sophisticated than those written for adults. Too many popular plays written for adults end with the equivalent of a moral, a summary of what we are to have learned from the preceding action. Duthie’s play does not. It sets up a surprisingly even-handed debate between the plusses and minuses of online gaming and leads to a highly ambiguous and unsettling conclusion. It would be a great play for kids over the age of nine to see with their parents because of the avenues for discussion it opens up.
Duthie’s play focusses on a 15-year-old named Daniel (played by Duthie), an obsessive gamer, whose father (also played by Duthie) gets so upset with Daniel’s gaming to all hours at night that he throws Daniel’s XBOX out the window. Because of this Daniel leaves home, but what happens to him Duthie leaves a complete mystery.
The point of the play is to make us see online gaming from both Daniel’s and his father’s point of view. Daniel’s father buys him an XBOX as a reward for scoring the winning goal in a midget hockey game. After being introduced by his friend Cory to Cory’s favourite game, one rather like Call of Duty, Daniel loses all interest in sports at school, his grades decline and he falls out with Cory. Instead, he spends increasingly longer amounts of time online playing games with his new “friends” who he knows only by their avatars and gamertags.
Daniel particularly admires the leadership of someone whose gamertag is Sun Tzu (544-496 bc), a Chinese general and philosopher who wrote the famous military treatise The Art of War that has had a worldwide influence on war strategy from its time up to US planning of the 1st Gulf War. In the real world Daniel’s relative shortness means he is often passed over in school sports. In the virtual world he is celebrated in blogs as a person most likely to turn professional and enter Major League Gaming. What he enjoys in the virtual world is the feeling of belonging and cooperation that exists among the platoon headed by Sun Tzu, who asked him to join.
Daniel is so much part of the virtual world that he thinks it is unimportant to know anything about his “friends” except whether they are good players. The prime exception is Sun Tzu (also played by Duthie). Daniel eventually finds out his real name is Keith and that he lives not far from where Daniel lives. When Daniel leaves home after his father trashes his XBOX heads straight for Keith’s house. Expecting to be overawed by his guru, Daniel is disturbed that Keith looks and sounds nothing like Sun Tzu and that his house is filled with piles of garbage. When the two play one on one on Keith’s huge system, Daniel discovers that Keith is neither a good loser nor a good winner. Sun Tzu had showered Daniel with praise, but Keith goes so far as to call the defeated Daniel a “n00b”, an insult Daniel had used about others earlier in the play.
According to the Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com) and other sources, “n00b” (spelled with two zeros as in the title) does not mean the same as “newbie” or “newb”, i.e. someone who is new to a given task. Rather “n00bs” are people who “know little and have no will to learn more”. After this insult Daniel flees Keith’s house. Duthie thus makes Daniel’s frame of mind at the end of the play nearly impossible to determine since he has fled not just his father’s house but also that of his leader in the virtual world. Daniel claims the new stage he will move to will be “epic”, but does that mean he will give up gaming or that he now has confidence to become his own guru?
Duthie could have made the play quite pat and had Daniel return to his father and take up sports in the real world again. But Duthie deliberately does not in order to force us to engage with the conundrum he has proposed. Daniel is such a naive narrator that he mentions all the things – isolation, obsession, distance from reality – that are signs of gaming addiction. Daniel’s encounter with Keith ought to turn sour all the good qualities he felt in gaming. What we don’t know is whether Daniel really is a “n00b” and will not learn from experience. One worry is that even when he is in the real world on his bicycle he envisions himself playing a video game.
As an actor Duthie underplays his role as Daniel, which has the effect of making him quite ordinary and negates any sense of Daniel as a hero. Duthie portrays Daniel’s father sympathetically not as a tyrant but as someone genuinely concerned about his son. He lends Sun Tzu’s speeches a a ring of authority mixed with bombast, so that we see that Daniel in search of a role-model has latched on Sun Tzu because of his black-and-white view of the world. Duthie makes the cynical, nasal-voiced Keith immediately unattractive.
The highly effective production itself shows a perfect coordination of set, light and sound. Deitra Kalyn’s set looks like an all-white three-dimensional Tetris game paused in mid-action. On the various formations of cubes, Kaely Dekker projects videos that immediately tell us when Daniel is in the real world and when he is gaming, often switching rapidly back and forth between the two. Jeremy Parker’s lighting and sound cues are directly synched with the video to make the show an aural and visual experience as well as a psychological puzzle.
The most disturbing aspect of Daniel’s gamer’s view of life is his satisfaction that if he is “killed” then there is just another game. The non-finality of death is the key feature that distinguishes the virtual from the real world. An awareness of finality in the real world is what helps most people to cherish the little time they have. At the end of the play Duthie makes us ask not just whether Daniel has learned anything from his experiences, but whether he recognizes that life in the real world has value. This is a question many plays for adults fail to ask.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Christopher Duthie as Daniel. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2014-02-11
n00b