Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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written and directed by Danny Pagett
Scapegoat Collective, Artscape Sandbox, 301 Adelaide Street West, Toronto
October 20-November 5, 2017
Human: “One input, many interpretations”
In his new play Cloud, Danny Pagett has taken on the enormous topic of the influence of new technology on human interactions. From a writer, actor and director best known for comedy, Pagett’s play is remarkably earnest in tone and sobering in its conclusions. The play concerns the discovery of a “practical collective consciousness” and its ramifications. The problem is that anyone familiar with popular sci-fi dealing with the subject will know long before the characters that such a development will not lead to anything positive. Interleaved with scenes of the play are lectures about the topic from someone known only as Human (Anand Rajaram). This running commentary makes the play explicitly didactic and the characters feel as if they are merely tools to illustrate the points the playwright wishes to make.
The play begins with Human addressing the audience directly and speaking about the theatre and theatre-going. Having established a metatheatrical frame for the play, he asks us to think of how we as a group receive a play. There is “one input, but many interpretations”. That is how it should be and that is how it is in real life where viewers of the same event may differ on what exactly happened.
As we discover Edward and Jessica have made a major breakthrough in computing. One may have wondered what the next step is after social media’s power on the internet of linking everyone on the planet to everyone else. Edward and Jessica have found it. Via an implant on the back of the neck people will be able to share their accumulated knowledge, emotions and experiences directly with everyone else in collective consciousness in an entity called the Cloud. All minds will merge. What one feels, all will feel. Everyone will become everyone else.
Edward and Jessica’s goal in creating the Cloud is nothing less than world peace. Their rationale is that if everyone experiences and thinks what everyone else does that there will be an end to conflict. Before launching the Cloud, Edward, Jessica and Geoff decide to test it on themselves with results both exhilarating and disturbing that they had not foreseen.
Edward speaks of the Cloud as “equalizing” people, but that is exactly the problem. If everyone is connected to everyone else via the Cloud, all individual thoughts and traits will cancel each other out leaving people with the general white noise of indeterminacy.
In Cloud, Pagett clearly worries what the future may hold after social media has so successfully blurred the difference between public and private. Pagett takes this notion to its extreme by positing a system that actually melds the contents of individual minds. The problem is that this vision of the future and its negative outcome has already been anticipated innumerable times in popular culture. The negative view of people all sharing the same thoughts is at least as old as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) where people are chemically and psychologically brainwashed from before birth to think alike. The Netflix series Sense8 (2016-18) has explored the confusion caused by being linked to another mind.
The most prominent and menacing depiction of shared minds is the hive mind of the Borg introduced in 1989 in the Star Trek television series Next Generation and continued in the series Voyager until 2001. Thus, while Pagett approaches the topic from the angle of an expanded internet rather than pre-birth programming or robotic assimilation, that fact that the system is doomed to fail in creating peace and that its users will be troubled until they give in is, in the history of sci-fi, old news.
Further, we really do not need a character like Human to guide us through the play by explaining the implications of every scene. The import of a scene should be implicit in it. The commentary only increases the feeling that the characters Edward, Jessica and Geoff are not really characters as much as puppets the playwright is manipulating to illustrate his thesis.
Since the scenes with Brenda come out of nowhere and are not integrated into the plot until late, and then to no purpose, that leaves only one strand of the story that works well dramatically. That is the relationship between Tyler and Perry. Unlike the Edward-Jessica-Geoff strand, this strand feels driven by the characters, and, in fact, it demonstrates the flaw with Edward and Jessica’s “collective consciousness” programme more effectively than does the Edward-Jessica-Geoff strand.
Despite the difficulties with the play itself, Cloud is well acted, designed and directed. Primarily through the force of their personalities the cast makes the two-dimensional figures they play seem as much like rounded characters as they can. Tim Fitzgerald Walker makes Edward earnest but slow to anger, Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah makes Jessica equally earnest but quick to anger and Jonas Widdifield lends Geoff a general air of untrustworthiness. Alexander Plouffe and G. Kyle Shields, who have played gay lovers before as part of Circle Jerk, give up the comedy of the earlier play and give the most believable, naturalistic performances of the evening. Newcomer Ally Caruso presents Brenda as a young woman who is satisfied with her life even though Brenda seems to have had little experience of what life can offer. Anand Rajaram, whom audiences will associate most with comedy as in plays like Mustard, surprises with his serious delivery, perhaps giving a nod and a wink, but otherwise lends his explications a taste of foreboding.
Lindsay Dagger Junkin’s set design consists of four cloth-covered walls that look like upright box-springs able to be lit from within. These can be rolled into numerous configurations that with the help of Melissa Joakim’s moody lighting design suggest a wide variety of locations. Most outstanding is Andy Trithardt’s spacey background music that perfectly creates an unsettling futuristic atmosphere. As a director, Pagett, gives the action strong forward momentum that does not let up despite the change from one strand of narrative to another.
One topic that Pagett mentions only in passing is how the system that Edward and Jessica create can so easily be used for evil rather than good. We need only think of the herd mentality fostered by totalitarian regimes in the past century to realize that people don’t need a super-internet to be be mentally connected and galvanized as one to perform deeds that they might individually shun. It is good that Cloud ultimately upholds the value of individuality. But what it could do more forcefully, is to show what real dangers on an ethical and political level the surrender of individuality can lead to.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah as Jessica, Tim Walker as Edward and Jonas Widdifield as Geoff; Anand Rajaram as Human; Alexander Plouffe as Perry and G. Kyle Shields as Tyler. ©2017 John Gundy.
For tickets, visit www.eventbrite.ca/e/cloud-by-daniel-pagett-a-scapegoat-collective-original-production-tickets-34987551709.
2017-10-23
Cloud