Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✩
written by Jessica Moss, directed by Eric Double
Theatre Caravel, Next Stage Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 5-15, 2012
Modern Love is a hilarious, satirical critique of the interconnectedness supposedly provided by the internet in general and social networking sites in specific. Playwright and actor in this solo show, Jessica Moss is a wonderfully engaging performer and in her imitations of some of the brassier characters you can’t help but think that here is the next Mary Walsh.
Moss plays Trish MacTiernan, a pleasantly plump, young single woman still living at home with her mother. Trish, the kind of nice girl no one ever speaks to at parties, believes that if the lookist society around her could get past her weight issues, it might see that she is an interesting person with a quirky sense of humour. Seeing herself as a failure in the real world, she decides to go online where she would have the chance to win someone over with her personality who might then accept the rest of her as she is.
The discoveries Moss makes have all been made by various pundits in psychology before. Looking for friendship online only makes lonely people feel lonelier. Yet, the great virtue of Modern Love is how it show on a very personal level how true this analysis is. On Facebook she has more than 600 “friends” but she can’t say she knows any of them. One of the main problems when people “chat” online is that, unlike conversations IRL (“in real life”), they can edit everything they say before it appears. In a very funny sequence about Trish’s tryout of Twitter, she finds that she now has up to the minute information about all the fun other people are having--without her. If she felt lonely IRL, Twitter makes her feels worse. But Trish’s conversations IRL are not so hot either. When she has lunch with her best friend, the friend spends the entire time on her cell phone talking to other people.
When Trish tries to join an online dating website, she fails the personality test the first time. After the various horrors of being trapped in chatrooms with anonymous perverts, she give the dating site another go. This time she knows how to play the game. For the personality test with its likes and dislike, you list what you think will attract the largest number of people rather than your real interests. The result is that except for your sex and race and the gender of partner sought, all the personality profiles are alike. The site takes a terrible photo of Trish, but then via Kyle Purcell’s fantastic multimedia design, we see how the picture is photoshopped and inserted into photos with other people (whom Trish doesn’t know) and posted on the site to make it look in the virtual world as if she is popular IRL. With photoshopping, pre-edited conversations and formulaic profiles, Trish wonders how anyone can determine what is real about any of the people she meets online.
As it happens, there is one person, but only one, who persists in chatting with Trish on Facebook. Most of the play consists of her attempts to determine whether he is real and why exactly he keep writing to her. Is he actually interested in her or is he just toying with her? Moss makes Trish such a sympathetic person that we are rooting with her all the way, the audience groaning with her when she is disappointed and cheering when she gets any good news.
If there is any difficulty with the show it is inherent in its subject matter. Moss as Trish stands mostly on stage left at a fake keyboard across from a large screen on stage right. The screen provides us with Trish’s view of her computer screen. As Trish, Moss at first types and then segues into speaking what she would have been typing. We know Trish’s one correspondent only through his words as they appear letter by letter on the screen. I can see that Moss wants us to have the same experience as Trish of interacting with messages where there is no face, no inflection, no tone of voice. For an hour-long play this amounts to rather a lot of reading instead of acting, though of course we do see Trish’s reactions as the words appear.
Nevertheless, this is a very heartening play to see. Not only is it great to know that someone of the internet generation as so fully perceived its inadequacies and downright falseness, but it is also encouraging to see how enthusiastic the audience reaction is. Admittedly, this is a self-selected group who have chosen to see a live play rather than be online, but such a show of skepticism gives hope for the future. Moss’s satire of our current infatuation with communication via machine rather than face to face suggests that the truth along with our humanity is out there, but more likely IRL than with a URL.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jessica Moss. ©2012 Theatre Caravel.
For Tickets, visit www.fringetoronto.com.
2012-01-09
Modern Love