Theatre review: An Undeveloped Sound leans into the liminal in look at longing, loss, and language
Electric Company Theatre’s cinematic-feeling work about a mysterious call centre raises circling questions about existence
An Undeveloped Sound. Photo by David Cooper
Electric Company Theatre’s An Undeveloped Sound is at the Fei and Milton Experimental Theatre to February 11, copresented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs
THE WORLD PREMIERE of the experimental and interdisciplinary An Undeveloped Sound, written and directed by Jonathon Young, invites questions about the limits of theatrical text and liminality.
Heidi’s (Amy Rutherford) confident assertion as she steps into a nondescript commercial outlet on an empty lot—“I am a specialist”—sets the dream-like sequences in motion. She convinces Lucian (Ryan Beil), a call-centre senior staffer and a sometimes-doorman to assign her a role in the call centre. Heidi is tasked to be Wade’s (Andrew McNee) shadow, to follow him and understand what it means to enter the workforce and become a “spokesperson”. However, it’s soon clear the centre isn’t selling a product that exists, or will ever exist. They are instead pushing undeveloped units to customers whom they are putting on hold with terms that are “indefinite” and “open-ended”.
More sinisterly, a child in a silver parka sits in the middle of the lot, often highlighted with a soft glow. The small figure, sometimes referred to as a “the developer” or “The Little One”, calls forth a past that another call-centre agent, Belle (Laara Sadiq), is trying to forget. The Little One’s presence looms over the characters, eventually taking on the symbol of hope and futility—something or someone they have been unable to let go of.
The actors are phenomenal as they explore nuances of these complex characters. Rutherford gives Heidi a confident innocence that later becomes an innocent sexuality, and McNee’s Wade is nervous and unsure but rediscovers his gift of the gab. Sadiq’s Belle has an offhand charm and wittiness that hide a desire to connect to her father and possibly a lost child—while Beil’s Lucian has sincerity and his attempts to lead a crumbling centre result in funny encounters, including one where he is also put on hold. “What options?” the customer service agent, Herb, asks. “You only have one option.”
The mood shifts are highlighted by both scenography and musical composition. Camellia Koo’s designs evoke George Orwell’s 1984—a trivision billboard looms over the call centre and the lost child—while Loscil’s electrosoundscape swells during Belle’s dreams of her past. The lighting by Sophie Tang draws our attention to the subtle changes between past futile dreams and the present fluorescent lights in the call centre. The interplay between Heidi’s character development and costume, as designed by Jessica Oostergo, is exquisite as she exchanges a business suit for a white nightdress near the finale. Meanwhile, the expert media integration by Eric Chad and Jack Chipman features in the first moments of the play, with descriptions of the setting superimposed on a sheer curtain. At each scene, the billboard rotates its prisms in waves to match the environment, often adding colour and variations onto what is an otherwise grey and dilapidated outlet.
While the audience felt a little restless during the more philosophical back-and-forths and elliptical wordplay, the themes of longing and loss were affecting. Each character questions the meaning of words, often using double entendres to push the liminal, slippage quality of text—and by extension, the in-betweenness of people, and fleeting nature of relationships.
In a play inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, the struggle between development and dissolvement, as well as the tension between futility and hope, churn and propel cyclic questions. The structure of the play is a spiral, a return to the same locations, words, spaces, and emotions that each character is drawn to. We enter a cinema-like adventure, deeper into each character’s consciousness, as they ask to be “filled in”. Is the spokesperson an actor, and their job to connect to others? Is the futility in the lack of connection, or loss of connection? What does it mean to dream and live in a world of has-beens? Who, or what, is the reason for keeping on, and what do each of these characters cling on to that keeps them trapped in this call centre? The thought-provoking work can be frustrating and difficult to follow, but successfully hints at a world that obscures meaning. The piece is not afraid to be reflective, to lose storylines briefly but revive them in later scenes, and to explore the unending sprawl of eternity. Balancing between serious and questioning moments with witty and playful sequences, the play loses its mapping at times due to wordplay, but its philosophical implications and explorations of liminality stay with you.
More strikingly, the play asks us to examine our world in a new way: What does it mean to desire and yearn for connection in an increasingly closed-off society? To develop, and to build, without thought for meaning? What do the developers hope to accomplish, at the end? The final, haunting image, involving the lost child and a billboard flashing “eternal self storage coming soon” leaves those questions provocatively unanswered.
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