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photo by Bryanna Reilly

photo by Bryanna Reilly

Reality Theatre makes a mockery of human interaction – and we totally deserve it

August 7, 2017

Veronica Appia

Editor-in-Chief  

Let’s be honest here.

We take our technology very seriously  – especially in the millennial world. Many of our careers depend upon it, many of our social interactions depend upon it, and apart from any necessary reasons to have our devices permanently glued to our hands, we are, simply put, addicted.

It’s easy to get lost in hours of endless photo-swiping, or to spend time tweeting useless information, or to naively peruse “How To” videos on anything and everything.

It seems very normal and ritualistic, until we step back and think about how ridiculous it all is. And that is what Julia Lederer’s Reality Theatre manages to achieve.

The hour-long show, directed by Rebecca Applebaum, is comprised of a series of vignettes that poke fun at our technology-driven world, while pointing to the fact that face-to-face human interaction has been taking a back seat to texts and 140-character snippets for quite some time now.

Actors Akosua Amo-Adem, Krista Morin and Andy Trithardt star in the vignettes – some of which more thoroughly drive the theme of the show than others. One skit in which Morin plays a typecasted spoon in a Beauty and the Beast Broadway production is a riot – especially for any theatre insiders out there who know the drill – but this character’s particular disconnect from reality seems slightly out of place among the rest of the vignettes.  

Arguably, the most notable skit is a hilariously absurd, Dorian Gray-style drama about a man living in contemporary society (though originally from the 1700s) who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for immortality. This skit stars Morin as the eternally youthful man, Trithardt as his blissfully ignorant friend and Amo-Adem as the devil’s assistant who works incognito (or not so incognito, I should say) at Starbucks Headquarters.

All in all, Reality Theatre functions well as a set of satirical sketches that make a well-deserved mockery of contemporary human interaction. However, while it does its intended job, the show as a whole can benefit from a deeper connection between the vignettes in terms of theme, length and pacing.

Presented by QuestionMark-Exclamation Theatre, Reality Theatre plays as park of SummerWorks Festival until Aug. 13. For more information, visit http://summerworks.ca/artists/reality-theatre/.

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