WHO'S WATCHING WHOM? Stage actors are on camera. |
The stage is set for surveillance: A camera is set up before a door in the brick back wall, and two monitors display two identical black-and-white feeds of that same door. As we look back and forth between the surveillance and the surveilled, we have a pretty good idea that any minute now, they are not going to match up. The anticipation of the paranormal is deliciously unsettling in the world premiere of Interference, a debut play by Jacquelyn Benson and Heather Bourbeau, directed by Andrew M. Fling at the Players’ Ring.
It’s ghosts that twenty-something buddies Max and Jason (Matthew Schofield and G. Matthew Gaskell) are trying to catch, on a whim and on tape. Along with Jason’s wacky and possibly psychic new girlfriend Lucinda (Joi Smith) and Max’s ex-girlfriend Sarah (Liz Krane), who’s just moved back to town, the boys are up late with an arsenal of video and audio accoutrements. The location of their ghost-hunting is one of several neat tricks of the playwrights, as the play is performed and set in the same place, the stage of the Players’ Ring. This clever device not only puts the meta back in metaphysical, but also gives us the thrilling sense that we’re privy to a real, live ghost story playing out before us.
As the young folks’ night goes on and things start bumping, we’re treated to audio-visual recreations of what we’ve heard and what we see, and the play uses this technology to wonderful, spine-tingling effect. In one eerie scene, the camera is moved from its post at the door in order to pan the theater. Just before it begins its survey of the three-quarter-round house, we all hold our breaths, and the fourth wall shimmers — will we see ourselves? What we actually see on the screens for a moment seems a frightening miracle: a completely empty house, as if we are all looking right through ourselves, as if we ourselves are haunting the place.
There could be quite a metaphorical frisson in that idea, one that the playwrights might have elaborated upon a little more. But that would have been another play. This one keeps the haunting classically literal, and it does with great vitality, scary thumping, and plenty of techno-horror shocks. Its story also includes a romantic subplot between ex-lovers Max and Sarah, the straight man and woman to Jason and Lucinda’s eccentric comic relief. Turns out that Sarah’s reasons for leaving Max three years ago are directly connected to the supernatural shenanigans at hand; the exposition of all this gets a but heavy-handed at times but is nonetheless pretty bracing.
