Istvan Dugalin ➤

Lauren Gillis & Alaine Hutton in Public Consumption | Photo by Eden Graham

Last year, Lester Trips (Theatre) forged a herky-jerky pathway into me, prodding at my paranoia about AI and smacking my funny bone with the absurdist, techno-body horror Honey I’m Home. Oh, poor Janine, with her awful job and unmanageable virtual existence. Many of that show’s conceptual and thematic concerns also feature in Public Consumption, a companion piece presented in partnership with Factory Theatre, but this new one really tried my patience.

Once again, this wild, intelligent and adventurous duo, Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton, are wearing an impressive bunch of hats here as creator-performers and have gathered input from a small army of acclaimed collaborators. A whole year later, I still have a visceral, psychic connection to poor Janine, but Navy Caine—a famous actor now cancelled and convicted—I just couldn’t find any fucks to give him.

We know very little about what he’s done specifically other than vague references to cannibal texts and abuse allegations that make him an obvious stand-in for Armie Hammer. We know little about him generally. Hutton, a master of expressive and articulate body language, does evoke an obnoxious male arrogance and entitlement, though it comes off more pantomime anti-hero than an authentic portrait of a flawed human.

As his lawyer, Gillis seems a little more grounded. Her head appears in projected video chats, trying to steer him towards the best options in his quest to avoid prison time. She’s certainly the funnier of the two here, though I’m really confused about this weird bit where she sticks the web-cam into her facial orifices. A lot of people seemed into it though.   

The unnerving premise here is that he can trade his sentence in for some innovative community service in the world of online content moderation. He’ll be training an AI—Ducky (with a tinny “quack-quack”!)—to identify “obscene material.” Now, there are trigger warnings about the content of this show. (“If it’s on the internet, it could be mentioned in this show.”) It’s really just audio from the videos Navy is instructed to watch and it’s not all that bad. Maybe I’m just a depraved freak, but this didn’t go nearly far enough to even nudge my moral or aesthetic limits.

And I didn’t buy Navy’s disgust and outrage either. I know his response has been devised to humanize him, make him seem like not such a bad guy, but come on, if he’s so fragile, how am I supposed to believe he’s a cannibal-sexting predator? There is some intrigue when he becomes the subject of the cringe-inducing fan fictions he must listen to and takes objection to being violated, but… he’s a actor, surely there would be some satisfaction in being such an object of obsession. As a character, he doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

As an audio-visual experience, I can vibe to it though. A bare, black and narrow tunnel of a set allows for some dynamic and evocative theatrical events. When Navy is in the virtual space, Gillis’s Ducky presents as a disembodied head floating in the dark void with him. It’s both eerie and hilarious. I also loved Denyse Karn’s psychedelic projection design.

The series of short, interstitial art films woven throughout are a bit of a mood-killer. It gradually becomes obvious that they are meant to be poignant, but I found them flat and boring. Their dramatic context is revealed late in the game, but I couldn’t connect to them emotionally. Like so much of Navy’s supposed trauma, it all reads so hollow and contrived.

Oh, there are nuns again! The finale, in which Hutton and Gillis perform the “Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé, really embodies the theme of consumption. It’s a grotesque, rather gloriously relentless spectacle that put me on a roller coaster of fluctuating feelings—bafflement, irritation, genuine and sublime giddiness, and eventually utter exhaustion.   

While this didn’t do it for me, I’m still on-board for whatever these crafty weirdos do next. Art is hard! With this sort of ambitious theatrical abstraction, sometimes you soar off the rails into some unhinged cosmic truth and sometimes you just smash into a wall—or your own butt—and hope folks appreciate the outrageous mess.

Public Consumption
November 27 to December 7, 2025
Factory Theatre, Studio
(125 Bathurst Street)
70 minutes

Lauren Gillis & Alaine Hutton in Public Consumption | Photo by Eden Graham