Review Rundown: The One With Robots Both Real & Virtual

This week finds us in London, Los Angeles, online and in virtual reality for a few shenanigans of both the theatrical and game variety.

Shall we?

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Good Night Sleep Tight — ZU-UK
Free; Sheffield, UK; Through June 27

One day my parents put me down and never again lifted me up. It is this thought that plays through my head, as the smiling woman in her nightgown appears, stating it is my bedtime.

Led to a child’s bed, my “Mother” dresses me in red pyjamas, counting off the buttons she does up for me. She smiles too much. But I feel very cared for. Even if I am much taller than her.

Lying down on the bed, goggles are placed over my eyes. Footage of a child wearing red pyjamas lying in a bed and of the artist Persis Jadé Maravala play as she puts me to bed. I feel my Mother’s gentle touch as she kisses my fingers.

This is a level of unexpected intimacy, startling to myself and my plus one.

I am then made to sit up and watch, as if in a dream, grainy drone footage of a town, while I am informed that the day will come when I will die. I just want to lie in my tiny bed and have the nice woman hold my hand.

While the intimacy and care of the performer are a delight, the actual VR experience fell flat for me. My plus one, who experienced this work back in 2017, said the video had been filmed for the previous art gallery, which explained why my childhood bedroom unexpectedly had a massive glass window covered in signs.

In conclusion I found the experience entertaining and enjoyable, before the VR started. The set design was sweet, with scattered toys and books, and the care from the ‘Mother’ was charming. The VR broke my immersion and I felt, in the dream section, I was simply sitting up in bed watching a video, which I was.

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— Thomas Jancis, London Correspondent

The Last Clockwinder — Pontoco
$24.99; Meta Quest & Steam VR; Available Now

[It’s The Last] Clockwinder’s narrative that will enrapture the hearts and minds of the larger immersive community. Like the puzzles, the narrative’s design is a tour de force. The story’s throughline is silent regret and hopeful reconciliation. Granted, this is the bread-and-butter of most indie video games, VR or otherwise. The ingenuity of Clockwinder, lies in how the characters and their interpersonal dynamics are defined.

– Patrick B McLean, Chicago Correspondent from his FULL REVIEW

Mother Nature — Grayson Morris
$20; Hollywood Fringe Festival, LA; through June 25th

Fringe Festivals are often where ideas get tested out in front of a live audience for the first time, and that’s definitely the vibe with solo performer Grayson Morris’ Mother Nature. Morris embodies the titular character in a series of linked vignettes that run the gamut of clowning, puppetry, and audience participation. All in all, it’s a mixed bag.

On the night I caught the show the audience was very, very reluctant to play and much of that comes down to a lack of what they call an “alibi” in LARPing. Morris doesn’t take a beat to cast the audience in a role within the world of the show, even though the production seems to want to treat us all as children in a nursery school. Which is a neat conceit, at its core. Making this suggestive subtext the text, right from the start, could go a long way to warming the audience up to play.

There’s an anger underlying this work that might seem to clash with the idea of inviting play, and yet with that invitation missing it becomes all too easy to remain detached from the goings on.

Between some participatory puppeteering and a blanket fort vignette it is clear that Morris has the ability to build unique moments that connect. Yet it is not always clear that the piece is all that interested in making that connection so much as getting the audience to follow instructions. Which seems to me a paradoxically safe choice for a work whose back teeth have such bite. — Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

The Orchard — Arlekin Players Theatre
$29 (online); Remote (Live in NYC); through July 3, 2022

Sometimes an artist doesn’t know how to get out of their own way. The same is true of theatrical productions and, sadly, that’s what is happening with Arlekin Players Theatre’s The Orchard.

It’s evident that there’s a good, possibly even great, new take on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in this hybrid in-person and virtual production beaming out of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The cast clearly understands the assignment and the translation by Carol Rocamora brings a living lyricism to text that can sometimes fall flat in adaptation.

Yet the desire to play with the bounds of technology both in the house and into our houses finds the production undermining its greatest strengths over and over again. An onstage robot arm acts as both a universal prop/set-piece and as a camera whose view can occasionally be accessed by the at-home viewer. At times this allows for an intimate closeup or a telling detail, but on the night I saw the show it could just as easily have meant a dead angle on the stage. This made the mere fact that we could access it a kind of “agency trap.” Give us something to click and we will click it, but it better add something to what’s already there.

A pre-show prologue (which, apparently was less pre-show and more “parallel show” according to The New York Times) did a good job of creating a processional narrative out of a series of videos embedded into a browser-navigable virtual theatre building. Engaging in and of itself, it didn’t really seem to link up to the piece as a whole outside of a thematic connection and the double casting of Mikhail Baryshnikov as Anton Chekhov himself. In the play taking place inside the theatre, he plays the pivotal role of Firs with a wan soulfulness that is ultimately heartbreaking. Yet this frame is just that: a frame that largely stands apart from the whole.

It’s possible to imagine that the cumulative effect of all this technology could create a version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), and I suspect that may be director Igor Golyak’s goal with this adaptation. Alienation is a double edged sword, as it can lead to disassociation as much as liminal rapture. I found myself unable to follow the show at points, only to be drawn back in by the quality of the acting… only to be pushed back out by the latest tech stunt. Muttering “just let me watch the damn thing” while sitting in front of my computer can’t be the intention here, could it? (Mind you, I’m someone who has seen a lot of virtual theatre at this point, I wonder how it all struck the newbies.)

There’s a lot of interesting ideas being bandied about in this production, and in the moments that clicked it was clear why the company was doing this play at this moment in time. Unfortunately, as robust as the heart of The Orchard is, it could not sustain the conceptual layers that were piled on top of it. — Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

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