Image by Michael Cooper
Presented by Lester Trips (Theatre) with Factory Theatre
Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton are my people. Their brand of bizarro antics seem wired directly into my nervous system. Satirical. Speculative. Surrealistic. And that’s only a small sampling of the -ical, -ative, -istics in their ongoing and ambitious theatrical venture.
Honey I’m Home was a hilariously twitchy, unnerving and weirdly relatable masterpiece that’s still rattling about my psyche. Their follow-up, Public Consumption, well… I struggled with that one, but even that ordeal felt conceptually significant. This final instalment in their techno-visceral triptych meditation on human progress (?)—hmmm, let’s say trajectory—is… well…
It’s a lot. PROVISIONS is a lot. And it’s not even finished! It’s a work-in-progress. This SummerWorks glimpse ended with a “To be continued…” title card that made me scream internally because how dare they! I need to know how this all plays out.
Factory Theatre this November, folks. I’ll be there with baited breath and bugging eyes.
Feeling more aligned with Honey I’m Home—I’ve ditched Public Consumption from my head canon. (Sorry, not sorry.)—it follows another deeply relatable cog in the system that I feel genuinely invested in. David (Gillis) is as real to me as Janine was, even more so. Gillis and Hutton have given us a little more concrete emotional context. David’s not doing so well. Entrenched in the micro gig economy, David has little time or energy to reflect on anything, even the death of his parents is a just another task to manage through apps.
An early montage sets up his depressing situation as he is directed by an app to track down and help out a series of delivery robots who are very, uh, to put it politely… glitchy. Lester Trips’ scrappy aesthetic makes for some very funny visuals here. These hapless bots are rendered as goofy cardboard boxes scooting about with stupid little antennas. The way one is just sort of thrown onto the stage is peak self-aware theatrics.
Most of these tasks offer little more than a few dollars here and there, but the plot really gets going when David accepts a highly lucrative trip to the moon to collect the cast and crew of a reality show called “Sluts on the Moon.” The single-occupant shuttle take-off is both hilarious and exhilarating. Shout out to the sound design and composing team (S. Quinn Hoodless and Drew Thomas) for a sequence that feels very John Carpenter. The glorious view of Earth from orbit turns into a jarring gag about the looming state of the world that both tickled and terrified me.
The are echoes of Honey I’m Home in the disorientation of intrusive future tech as David must acclimate to an AI presence wired directly into this brain. As it leads David through his spacey task, this AI’s response to any obstacle is a great running gag.
Gillis’s understated delivery allows us to project our own fears, sense of humour and empathic impulses into David. She’s not a blank canvas; she’s crafted a more sophisticated avatar for us—a person we can invest in whose responses seem informed by our own attitudes. And Hutton, as a series of virtual reality inhabitants on this moon base, gives us some unnerving detachment and spasming, clearly establishing that these people are not ok. Her final character, the only one to speak here, gives us a sense that the situation might not be what David or we assume.
I’m sort of amazed at how thoroughly Gillis and lighting consultant Andre du Toit make awkward crawling through a rickety set of risers into a convincing journey through ominous air vents. Ah, air vents… this team knows its sci-fi tropes.
This rough-around-the-edges conceit is teeming with perceptive observations and distressing insights into our possible, all-too-likely future. I mean, Gillis and Hutton are riffing on stuff that’s already creeping into our lives and which the powers that be (let’s not unpack that just yet) are desperately wanting us to normalize.
I can hardly wait for November!
