The Digital Age of Relationships - Toronto Fringe
The play Love and Information (July 9, 2017), written by Carol Churchill and recently performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival, in text alone is clearly a modern work. Consisting of 52 scenes with no character specifications, scene order, or locations, the script presents itself as a series of brief meditations on relationships, communication, and the conveyance of information in the digital age. Although the play itself has been widely praised, this production put on by Randolph Academy Presents, fell short. The actors’ techniques, lighting, and use of space were all commendable; overall the production aspects were admirable, and yet the urgency and relevance that has been associated with the script in the past was nowhere to be found.
Although recorded sounds occasionally played between scenes, and lighting was used to demarcate various locations, for a piece concerned with the age of communication and technology, the production used surprisingly little tech. As Nick Kaye argues, the use of media spaces often shows a duality in relationships; a blending of the ‘real’ and the digital. “‘Media space’ presents a collocation of spaces and states in paradoxical or dissonant relationship. Multi-media performance, in its theatrical enactment and realization of ‘media space,’ tends to amplify these instabilities” (Kaye, 128). Given this, implementing media spaces would have created a parallel between the fractures in the relationships shown, and the dissonance of the “real” and media spaces.
In an age where the digital world has become so integral, it is more important than ever that theatre is “integrating and understanding the impact of technology. Phillip Auslander suggests that all performance is now ‘mediated’ or influenced through our understanding of technology” (Anderson, 66). With such a uptick in technology both in the everyday and on stage, not only was the lack of media in the piece noticeable, it stripped any relevance from the show. The play becomes a presentation of scenes with no meaning; brief conversations trapped in a moment and lost as soon as that moment ends. “Theatre’s corporeal liveness is no guarantee in itself of audience interest and engagement, and all too often the “fourth wall” works like the impermeable glass screen of television, which does not ‘let the audience in.’” (Dixon, 130). This was just the case in Love and Information, a play concerned with how we communicate and connect; and yet making no effort to connect with the audience through such an increasingly popular form of contact: technology.
Sources
Anderson, Michael. “Mediated Performance and Theatre for Young People: How TYP is Responding to Digital Natives.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 53. no. 1/2, 2007, pp. 63-75.
Dixon, Steve. “Liveness.” A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Instillation, 2007, MIT Press, 115-134.
Kaye, Nick. “Disjunction: Performing Media Space.” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, Saffron House, 2009, 128-130.
Knowles, Richard. Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 1-23.
Love and Information. By Carol Churchhill. Dir. Andrea Donaldson, Randolph Academy Presents, 9 Jul. 2017, Annex Theatre, Toronto.
