..a novel take from a fashionable Globe writer:
Cyberspace gets upstaged
Originally an art-house hit, e-Dentity opens Tuesday in one of Toronto's top theatres. Ivor Tossell looks at how it made the leap
IVOR TOSSELL
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
In two of Toronto's grandest theatres, two productions are under way. One is The Phantom of the Opera. It involves a chandelier, a soprano, and Andrew Lloyd Webber: the kind of spectacle these theatres were built for. Down the road, at the Royal Alex, the other show is called e-Dentity, and it's about life on the Web. Could it be? At long last, has somebody written "Internet: The Musical"?
Not by a long shot. But here's a large-scale production, recruited from Toronto's alternative theatre scene, that has some big ideas about how to bring the Internet to the stage.
E-Dentity plays out as series of vignettes, each one brooding over the needs that drive people to find themselves online, looking for something. Its sketches range from a Christian girl who unwittingly hijacks a chat room of cynics to an office worker trying to placate the boss in one window while slaying orcs in another.
The show's origins lie in 2004, with Theatre Gargantua, a small Toronto company that specializes in avant-garde, highly physical productions. Jacquie P.A. Thomas and Michael Spence, the husband-and-wife team behind the show (Spence wrote and Thomas directed) were experimenting with working digital projectors into a new play. Working with video artists, the two discovered that the Internet could provide a wealth of visual material to project -- and the kernel of an idea formed.
Spence says the two started out wondering how the Internet could be used as a tool. But "as soon as we started looking at what it could do, it started telling us stories," he says. In short order, the Internet became the subject of the play itself.
Some of those stories were inspired by from the news, like the online shaming of a young woman caught letting her dog relieve itself on the subway. Others emerged from characters in chat rooms, the once-ubiquitous online spaces where strangers, hidden behind pseudonyms, gather to type witticisms, come-ons and obscenities at each other.
(Once, in the name of research, the Gargantua company trooped off to a cybercafé and took to the chat rooms, where, eventually, three different female actors realized they were being chatted up, simultaneously, by the same anonymous interloper.) If the show's vision of the Net sometimes seems a little dark, filled with libidinous cheaters, cranks, angry mobs and cannibals, its creators insist that they don't have a beef with the technology itself. "It's too simple to say that the Internet is good or bad," Thomas says.
Spence goes one better, mentioning a scene he wrote about an online group for body-pinning enthusiasts, where members offer encouragement and support for each others' self-mutilation.
"There's something malevolently positive about it," he smiles.
The production was first staged in the fall of 2005 at Artword, a 150-seat Toronto theatre that has since been demolished to make way for condos. It was a success with the critics -- as well as a producer from Mirvish Productions, who was in the crowd at Thomas's invitation.
The producer evangelized e-Dentity to his bosses, which led to a meeting with David Mirvish and ultimately a commission to lengthen the show, and scale it up to fit the 1,500-seat Royal Alex. The show could represent a gamble for Mirvish; e-Dentity's high-tech setup has led to reduced sightlines, which has closed the theatre's topmost balcony.
"For an audience that's settled into the Phantom-style theatre, this is a bit of a shock to the system," Spence says.
As for the Gargantua crew, the transition from art house to the oldest working theatre in Toronto has been both heady and educational.
"It's obviously a different production universe. But it's not like suddenly, when there's a bigger budget, all the problems go away," Spence says.
"They just morph into something else," Thomas adds.
Many of those challenges stemmed from the show's technical ambitions, which revolve around the question of how to stage the Internet in the first place. The online world might be a vivid imaginary playground, but in practice, it involves a lot of (how to put this?) sitting on one's ass, staring at a screen and typing.
To its credit, e-Dentity never pretends otherwise. In fact, it seizes on these banal images and runs with them. Is there dance? Yes, performed on rolling office chairs, as cast members hammer out rhythms on wireless keyboards. Is there song? Not exactly, but the cast provides a live ambience by humming into their headsets, loud and long, in something like a Gregorian chant.
As for the screen, this is where the projectors come in. All of e-Dentity's action happens inside a six-metre-high frame, built of metal trusses, that roughly recreates the space the troupe used at Artword. A transparent screen covers the front of the frame. Working behind it, the cast interacts with an array of giant projected images of computer graphics and Web pages that are cast before them, as if they were all trapped inside a sort of virtual monitor.
Some the visuals are preprogrammed, but elsewhere the show gets more daring. The cast includes two remote performers, who interact live with the on-stage actors using webcams; in the show's earlier incarnation, these performances were beamed in from as far afield as Australia. In other sketches, the on-screen images are being manipulated in real-time to match the actors' gestures, as they "throw" words and Web pages across the stage.
The producers have been kept busy trying to keep the content current; three years, after all is a long time on the Internet. The show's emphasis on chat rooms has decreased over time, though other early ideas proved prescient. Years ago, wrestling with how he could dramatize slow-moving Web forums, Spence came up with the idea of "video forums," in which people would leave videotaped messages for each other.
His idea, of course, predicted the arrival of YouTube -- born in 2005 -- where video conversations are now commonplace. The production doesn't jump on the YouTube bandwagon, though; e-Dentity keeps its video forums generic. Indeed, in most places, the production opts to paint the Internet with a broad brush. Real-world Web junkies will recognize the concepts, but the details might seem foreign.
But the latest fads of an ever-changing Web pale against the lessons it teaches about human nature, which doesn't seem to be evolving in a hurry.
"None of these things that we're learning are new, necessarily. Mob mentality is just something that exists in humans. But the Net provides a convenience," Spence says.
"It's one stop shopping," laughs Thomas.
"We are creatures of convenience, and now it's easier to be anonymous in a mob," he continues. "You don't need to leave your living room."
Special to The Globe and Mail
