Review: You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She Lives in Austin/Edinburgh by Hidden Room Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Austin's Hidden Room Theatre and its British partner Look Left Look Right ran this intercontinental production for the first time last March, linking Austin and London in a breathless Skype video dialogue between fictitious lovers Ryan Peterson and Elizabeth Watson. You Wouldn't Know Him/Her is an intriguing bauble, a digital spinning top and crystal ball that draws audiences into the fiction that they're assisting and supporting these young folk trying to overcome the challenges of long-distance romance.
The production and story-line have changed only modestly since the ALT review on March 11 of the first production.
That staging became a trial run for the game now underway at the Edinburgh Festival. Each Saturday and Sunday in August at noon and at 2 p.m., Austin time, the hopeful lovers will Skype-dial one another, exchange greetings, engage the supporters physically present and respond to comments supplied via the Twitterfeed with the tag #texasedinburgh
Can't make it to the Hidden Room in east Austin? You can set this playful fantasy spinning on your desktop, laptop or smartphone and watch it in split-screen at the "Watch on-line" page on their website (www.youwouldntknow.com). Since I am traveling right now in the southeastern United States, I did just that, revving up my laptop in the mountains of east Tennessee, where my brother lives. He has an extensive theatrical background and is living in a rural region relatively distant from theatrical activities.
The noon staging on Saturday, August 6, flickered to life a couple of minutes past the appointed hour, and for five minutes or so we saw nothing but the Edinburgh scene: a room of folding chairs into which bodies floated like tropical fish in a large aquarium. "They're vamping," concluded my brother, "while they're getting everything set behind the scenes." We could hear murky chatter that echoed. Eventually we realized that we had inadvertently opened the site twice in our tabbed Firefox browser. The screen flickered and, indeed, there were two images neatly presented as if they were the pages of an open book, and along the right side of the screen ran a scroll of "tweets."
To our dismay, the audio feed was catastrophic -- we were getting 50-60% of the words, with distortions and gaps, a deformation that undercut the banter and action. This may well have been no fault of the organizers -- the stuttering gaps may have occurred at our Internet service provider, or on our machines (we had two laptops receiving a wireless signal). We sat through the hour-long action, experienced growing annoyance and fed back our problems via #texasedinburgh. My brother was courteous and resigned -- evidently, this was no solution for his dilemma of rural cultural isolation -- and he went off to take a nap.
At 2 p.m. I went out onto the porch, looking out at the Tennessee woods, and opened the site again -- and found that for the second performance both audio and video feeds were superb. My brother missed it, but he would have been pleased. I have no idea how the transformation had occurred. Tech guru Robert Matney sent me a direct Twitter message of thanks for earlier feedback and mentioned that they had made some unspecified adjustments.
The Austin audiences for the opening show were relatively small, eight to ten persons, drawn in large measure from Austin theatre creatives: actors Ben Wolfe, Alejandro Villareal, Ryan Crowder, Jenny Lavery, Mason Stewart and Robert Deike, for example, just to name those whose faces I immediately recognized. The Edinburgh attendance was of about the same proportion and may well have drawn on similar sources.
This production has a strong script guideline but includes opportunities for impromptu -- the Twitter feed is indeed live, and my tweets came through the screening process with a lapse of about thirty seconds. I'd be interested in having the metrics on web attendance, for it appeared that most of the tweets were coming from within the room (Ben Wolfe was particularly prolific). Rarely did tweeted comments advance the story or offer useful side paths. They included extraneous exclamations that amounted to some digital wolf whistles. There was talk about digital love making and a series of adolescent remarks about Texas big guns.
Director Beth Burns and collaborators have developed the script further -- creating Ryan's goofy, callow brother "Aaron" and providing Liz's girlfriend with an expanded role. The story is essentially the same, however. As I watched it for the third time, finally in clear broadcast, I found myself increasingly drawn to the vivacious Rachel Watkinsson, who plays Liz. And that former boyfriend of hers -- "that's Mister James Frazier to you!" -- seemed better defined, more of a disappointed suitor than the simply malevolent presence I remembered from before. (Even so, after the second staging when audience members were invited to use the open Skype link, he was hitting pretty hard on the discomfited Jenny Lavery.)
You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She's from Texas/Edinburgh remains a curiosity, although certainly an attractive one. Its reach to the audiences in-house at each location and potentially out there on the Internet responds to the wider concerns of the theatre community about attracting and retaining attention in a world filled with other insistent attractions. Hidden Room and its partners haven't solved the problem of losing audiences to Netflix streaming, chatrooms and Facebook, but they've provided us with a fiction that seeks to deal with the new reality.
And you don't even have to leave home to participate!
Brief review by Martin Gimenez on www.broadwaybaby.com, August 18
British theatre academic Hanna Nicklin's comments on her blog, hannanicklin.com, August 22
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You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She Lives in Austin/Edinburgh (August)
by Beth Burns and ensemble
Hidden Room Theatre
to be revealed
Austin, TX, 78700
