Travel the World From Your Couch in ‘Long Distance Affair’ (Review)

There’s an enormous eyeball in my Zoom call.

This heavily-lashed eyeball belongs to my makeup structor Julieta, who is currently in Miami, more specifically she’s coming to us live from Westchester, Miami, which is, according to her, the best neighborhood in Miami, and extremely overlooked by people who don’t live there (to say nothing of her boyfriend’s family who have since moved to Coral Gables, which she doesn’t seem pleased about).

Julieta is also a tiny bit peeved that only a few people showed up for an online seminar about eyelashes where “like a hundred” people had RSVPed yes.

She’s soldiering on regardless.

Unfortunately, I doubt any of us on the call are too keen to learn cosmetology, but that doesn’t stop her. We’re all here for the lesson, right? Right.

Except we’re not. It soon becomes clear that “Julieta” is actually one of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers from Romeo and Juliet. And her performance is just one of six possible encounters in an interactive theatre series called Long Distance Affair.

(The following contains minor spoilers).

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Long Distance Affair contains a grab bag of six different characters who audience members will meet via Zoom. Three of them (NYC, London, Madrid) perform to one audience member at a time while the other three perform to smaller groups (Paris, Miami, Singapore). You can purchase a ticket to a single “city” or a package for three of them. Interaction is essentially required for all of the pieces in Long Distance Affair as is turning one’s video camera on, while turning your microphone on is also strongly encouraged.

Two moderators manage each audience member’s “destinations” and move attendees around from a common “lobby” Zoom room to the breakout rooms that the performers individually inhabit. After each short performance, the actor’s webcam goes to black and there’s a short musical interlude to bookend the piece. Then, after a few minutes, participants return to the lobby, which has a bit of a party atmosphere; we’re encouraged to talk to each other through the somewhat chaotic live chat in the lobby while waiting for our next performance. Songs thematically related to the content play in the background (“London Calling,” “Empire State of Mind”) and the two moderators have travel-themed virtual backgrounds at the ready.

Content-wise, the stories in Long Distance Affair are all over the map, wandering from a porn addiction to an unrequited crush to previously mentioned eyelash tutorial. Generally speaking, though, the performances are all energetic and compelling, as the actors are fairly adept at reaching through tiny screens and connecting with audience members. The characters of Long Distance Affair don’t seem related other than they’re isolating somewhere in a far flung corner of the world; the closest common thread is a sense of surreality. In “London,” my companion mentions something about escaping flooding and hints at a post-apocalyptic future where you get around only using boats. In “NYC,” the character drops hints about his father, Mars, and his mother, Venus and speaks forlornly about love. In “Miami,” makeup instructor Julieta makes it clear she does not want to talk about her boyfriend, Romeo, or their two families who happen to be feuding at the moment. And in “Madrid,” Ángel discusses a very important message he has for me, specifically, from God. The other two encounters (“Paris” and “Singapore”) are more mundane and center around a socially-distanced birthday party and school bullying; somehow they lack the magic that the other four conjure up by being too close to real life at the moment.

Technically, I was also struck by how the simplest of environmental changes could be integrated into each character’s monologues in Long Distance Affair. As my London performer moved about her small flat while continuing to speak to me via Zoom, she casually turned certain lamps off and on, changing the lighting to fit with her lines. Ángel in Madrid at one point placed his laptop on top of a tall piece of furniture, drastically changing my perspective and making himself look smaller and vulnerable; sometimes he would move during the piece, sometimes his device would move during the piece. These series of actions result in dynamism that’s often missing from Zoom-enabled performances as well as a carefully choreographed optical illusion I won’t spoil here. On occasion, Julieta would lean in for an extreme closeup and then lean back, to emphasize whatever point she was making, using the distance from the camera to her advantage. And as Cupid walked around his small New York City apartment holding me vertically up on his mobile phone, I felt less like I was in a conference call and more like I was experiencing the intimacy of a FaceTime call with a good friend.

I was also impressed by the performers’ ability to cue the end of each conversation by disabling their webcams and playing thematically appropriate music; the strangeness of abruptly ending a video conference call was greatly changed by their “cut to black” punctuation of the scene before the moderator moves the participant(s) back into the communal Zoom lobby. By really probing what it means to have the viewer act as a “camera,” Long Distance Affair injects some much needed life into Zoom.

It’s an interesting experiment in smoothing over the bumps that come with technology that’s typically used in a business context, as opposed to designed for live performances. So while not every 1:1 or small group interaction fully landed in Long Distance Affair and at times the transition back to the “main lobby” could feel jarring or strange after a quiet encounter, Juggerknot and PopUP Theatrics did manage one thing that a lot of theatre makers are struggling with these days — making an online event feel both a proper event and like a community.

Long Distance Affair continues through May 31. Ticket prices vary.

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