Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Jennifer Haley, directed by Peter Pasyk
Coal Mine Theatre & Studio 180 Theatre, Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, Toronto
October 11-November 4, 2018
“Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?”
(from “In a Dark Time” by Theodore Roethke, 1963)
In 2016 Theatre Aquarius of Hamilton scored a major coup by presenting the Canadian premiere of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether. The American playwright’s dazzling play from 2013 is an intellectual thriller set in the future that raises issues concerning the ethics of internet role-playing games and delves deeply into the philosophical, psychological and socio-political ramifications of these issues.
Theatre Aquarius had the luxury of presenting the play which has complex performance requirements on a full-sized stage in a theatre seating 750. Coal Mine Theatre and Studio 180 have combined forces to present the play in the small Coal Mine Theatre that seats only 80. When Coal Mine announced that the play would kick off its 2018/19 season, one had to wonder how it would cope with the play’s technical demands. The answer is that director Peter Pasyk, set and lighting designer Patrick Lavender and projection designer Nick Bottomley have come up with extraordinarily ingenious methods of presenting the play in a small space. Indeed, they even make a virtue of it since it allows them to lend both the real world and the virtual worlds of the play an atmosphere of claustrophobia that nicely reinforces the unpleasantness of the real world and undermines the supposed freedom of the virtual world where people seek an escape.
As I described the set up in my review of the 2016 production, “The action is set in the near future when use of the internet has encompassed even more territory in people’s lives than it does at present. Most children ‘go to school’ online since offline schools have become so expensive. The main contact people have with nature is by experiencing it through online simulations. Some people have become so entranced with life online that they become ‘shades’ living on life support in the real world while they spend all their time online in their favourite fictional realm. The internet itself is now called the Nether and has its own police force to combat criminal activity in the virtual world”.
I also mentioned that Haley has given her play the form of a mystery: “Detective Morris has arrested two men for illegal activities taking place online. Mr. Sims has set up an area of the Nether so heavily encrypted that the police don’t have access to it. Sims’s special area is known as ‘The Hideaway’ and Morris wants Sims to reveal the location of Sims’s private server so that his site can be shut down. The other man Morris interrogates in isolation from Sims is Mr. Doyle, a teacher, who was arrested because it was noticed that he was a such a frequent visitor to The Hideaway. Morris wants to know all Doyle can tell her about the place and about Sims. She also wants to know why he has arranged to ‘cross over’, i.e. become a shade and remain permanently in The Hideaway”.
The most important point, made clear in the 2016 production and even clearer in the present production is this: “No real children are allowed to enter Sims’s world. Everyone who logs into The Hideaway must be an adult. There online, as in every online game, everyone appears only as an avatar or electronic image. Thus, the adult users, who are all anonymous, appear in The Hideaway as either adults or children depending on what avatar they choose. The only avatar who actually looks like the real user is Mr. Sims himself who appears in The Hideaway in the guise of Papa, the brothel owner”.
“Sims tells Morris that the purpose of The Hideaway is to provide people like himself with ‘a life outside of consequence’. He and other users of the site can indulge in their perversions as avatars without harming real children. According to Sims, his site provides a safety valve for perverse desires so that the users will not act on them in the real world”.
As I pointed out in 2016, people will immediately see that relevance of Haley’s use of The Hideaway is simply an extension of the type of role-playing games that exist today: “Anyone today can log into an online game under a pseudonym, choose an avatar and interact with the avatars of other people who have logged in. The vast majority of these games involve one group trying to destroy another and players accumulates points based on how many people of the opposing group they has maimed, killed or injured. Some adults-only games include rape and torture. This game-playing is already ‘a life outside of consequence’ because any of the dead or injured avatars immediately come back to life again for the next game”.
“All Haley has done is to shift the focus of the disturbing content of some online games from killing to having sex with minors. What makes her play so intriguing is why we should find activity in The Hideaway so abhorrent when we seem oblivious to children in our own day playing at mass murder”.
“Just as people today have tried to prove that playing violent online games correlates with violent behaviour in the real world, Haley has Morris claim that Sims’s Hideaway does not act as a safety valve but rather encourages people to indulge in unacceptable behaviour that only prepares them for action in the real world. In fact, Morris has sent an agent undercover into The Hideaway to report on whether what happens there has any real world consequences”.
In 2016 Luke Brown and his designers created two levels on the stage. the upstage lower level was the dimly-lit interrogation room and the behind it was the brightly-lit world of The Hideaway that would open up as a stage-upon-the stage. In the far smaller space of the Coal Mine Theatre set and lighting designer Patrick Lavender has also created a bi-level set but because both areas are so small, he has had been especially ingenious about using light to keep the two realms separate. In the Coal Mine production the interrogation room is not mere dimly lit but pitch black. Strategically placed spotlights eerily pick out only the faces of Morris and the two men she questions.
For a transition from the interrogation room to The Hideaway, the back wall of the set does not open up since it already is open. Instead, Lavender had a frame surrounding the front of the interrogation room briefly blind us with light before the lights go on in The Hideaway. Unlike the 2016 production which used physical set elements to creative this virtual world, Pasyk has had projection designer Nick Bottomley create an over-saturated projection of the interiors of The Hideaway to emphasize its nature as a virtual realm that suggests a real place but one which is clearly not real. Transitions back to the interrogation room involve another brief blinding with light from the frame around the main stage. Despite the discomfort of the periodic blinding, the current production has the advantage of causing the real and virtual worlds to take on an even more distinct visual appearance than did the two in 2016.
In terms of cast, the 2016 production had the overall advantage. As Detective Morris, Katherine Cullen is as oddly aggressive as was Andrea Runge in 2016, but Cullen does not suggest as clearly as Runge that Morris’s aggression is a pose Morris deliberately takes to distance herself from Sims and Doyle nor that Morris will eventually have difficulty maintaining such a pose. After all, as we discover Morris’s own father became a “shade” and quoted a poem by American poet Theodore Roethke that asks one essential questions of of role-playing games: “Which I is I?
Under Pasyk, David Storch takes a radically different approach to Mr. Sims than did Randy Hughson in 2016. Hughson explained the usefulness of The Hideaway in channelling pedophiles like himself away from the real world and into the virtual world in the calmest possible manner with anger erupting only as a slight change of tone when Morris’s persistence became too annoying. Storch, in contrast, plays Morris as enraged from the very beginning and having to calm himself down to explain the usefulness of The Hideaway. Unlike Hughson, Storch makes Sims appear suspicious and that air of suspicion carries over into his portrayal of Papa in The Hideaway. Where Hughson was all sweetness even when issuing a reprimand, Storch’s kindness in the virtual realm always seems like an act.
Mark McGrinder presents Woodnut as very kind and gentle but gives less indication than did Tim Funnell in 2016 that this kindness and gentleness form a façade behind which a stern investigative mind is operating. On the other hand, while Grade 6 student Mary-Maria Bourdeau was very good as Iris in 2016, Hannah Levinson’s greater experience on stage is telling. Levinson is able to be a sweet little fantasy girl while also able, unlike Bourdeau, to suggest that this sweetness is sometimes a simulation of a feeling with Woodnut and sometimes the real thing as it is with Papa.
Anyone who did not see the Theatre Aquarius production in 2016 will, of course, be unaware of these differences. All a newcomer to the play might notice is that the interactions of the play in Pasyk’s production could be made to feel a degree more urgent and more dangerous than they presently do. Nevertheless, that hardly diminishes how effective the present production is in posing the ethical problem of a “a life outside of consequence” that the virtual world seems to offer.
Haley is so even-handed in presenting the pros and cons of the virtual world as a means of attracting people with incurable, socially harmful disorders away from the real world that you will find it disorienting to see that sometimes you agree with a character who is an avowed pedophile and disagree with the views of an inflexibly puritanical agent of the law. This disorientation is exactly what Haley wants her play to engender and achieving this is exactly where Pasyk succeeds most.
If you have never seen The Nether before, you must see it now since it is an important play and receives such a dazzling production. Even if you have seen the play before, in watching the current production you will find you can focus less on the play as a mystery and more on how cannily Haley has her characters argue about the advantages or disadvantages of a life lived in a virtual realm when the real world has become devoid of anything natural. The conclusion you reach after Pasyk’s production intriguingly may not be the same one you reached before.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Hannah Levinson as Iris and David Storch as Papa; David Storch as Mr. Sims; Papa Robert Persichini as Mr. Doyle and Katherine Cullen as Detective Morris; Mark McGrinder as Woodnut and Hannah Levinson as Iris. ©2018 Tim Leyes.
For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com
2018-10-13
The Nether