Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Michael Spence, conceived and directed by Jacquie P. A. Thomas
Theatre Gargantua, Artword Theatre, Toronto
October 28-November 13, 2005
In Theatre Gargantua’s latest work, e-DENTITY, style far outweighs substance. To investigate human interactions in cyberspace, the production integrates text, movement, music, webcasting and online chat. Yet, what impresses most are the truly dazzling digital projections of Owen Milburn and Jeremy Rotsztain that recreate everything from abstract flurries of binary codes, to multiple open desktop windows, live chatroom threads and webcam feeds.
The play alternates digital presentations of miscellaneous factoids about brains and chips, nerves and wires, with live skits enacted by a highly disciplined five-person ensemble. Sadly, while the flamboyant visuals promise a rich, wide-ranging inquiry, the skits themselves are repetitive and uniformly negative, focussing solely on themes of isolation and ostracism. Three skits alone in the play’s 75 minutes depict naïve surfers hounded out of specialty chatrooms and the work’s only throughline concerns a woman cyber-lynched for not cleaning up after her dog. To playwright Michael Spence the internet seems not to foster learning or discovery, but only role-playing, extremism and exhibitionism. One scene, though, is sheer brilliance. A man blissfully in love speaks across space to a disturbed woman. When words blossoming from him drift over to her, she snatches and eats them. Nothing else in the piece matches this in beauty, simplicity or horror.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-11-03.
Photo: Michael Spence and Ciara Adams. ©Erin Reznick.
2005-11-03
e-Dentity