Gabby Bernard in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Sometimes I wonder what’s real,” says Rachel, one half of the millennial couple in Subscribe Or Like. That invasive ambiguity digs an ever-deeper channel right through a relationship in this very tense, fascinating new play by Liam Salmon, currently premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

For one thing, Subscribe Or Like is a theatrical exploration of the slippery frontier where human connection is losing ground, and its footing — to a boundary-free world of digital ciphers. As you’ll see in a veritable visual barrage of a production — directed by Kate Ryan and compellingly acted — that world, and the money it offers, is in every way based on escalation.

It’s mesmerizing, and kind of appalling, to see live theatre actually put onstage its thoughts about its own audience — and the seductive allure of the invisible, infinitely expandable audience of the digital universe. In the internet (and the way we live on it, with it, inside it), have we created a playground where the brute side of our nature can roam freely?

It’s 2018 and Rachel and Miles live in a one-bedroom basement apartment they can barely afford. And in Stephanie Bahniuk’s striking design, it’s entirely blue, with one tiny window. It seems to have landed from  outer space — along with seven multi-angled screens. Are they the  theatrical fourth wall made to be broken? Do Miles and Rachel actually live inside the internet?

Ian Jackson’s projection-scape moves through landscapes, continuing wall to wall, flickering across the screens, stopping from time to time to alight on distorted facial close-ups. Roy Jackson’s lighting suffuses everything — including the little basement window that might otherwise hint of a ‘real world’ outside — with an eerie blue-ish computer screen glow. There is no oasis, inside or out-, from the internet in this thriller.

In its way, Subscribe Or Like is about desperation, the thwarted creative energy of the millennial generation. And the performances from Bernard and Brown are so authentic, and the characters so fully inhabited by the actors, they make you flinch. Bernard’s Rachel works long exhausting hours as a barista, pasting on the “Welcome, how can I help you?” smile of corporate retail for meagre money. Miles can’t find a living wage job he’s willing to do, given his marketing degree. “It’s hard for me, waiting … nothing but free time.” Their future in the world seems very hard to nail down.

Pressure, recorded so dramatically in Darrin Hagen’s score and the ominous rumble of his underscoring, builds. In the absence of viable prospects, they turn to YouTube, lured by the potential of making money on their own channel if they get enough subscribes or likes. At first the videos are prankish: queasy gotcha! fun. When the subscribers are still just trickling in, Miles ups the ante … with self-inflicted physical abuse. And since we get to see him rehearsing horrifying bright ideas for stunts, and then the videos themselves, we have the chance to get tense and stay that way, then cringe. At several points I had to look away, and I wasn’t the only one.

It’s Rachel who’s the target of awful online commentary and threats. And as she withdraws into silent exhaustion and depression, you find out whether a loving and playful couple can survive a life lived so much in the demanding online universe — not to mention vis-à-vis Miles’s relentless escalation of the money-making potential of sensational YouTube content. “We’ve worked so hard. I can’t go back…” he says. “We need to step up our game.” Rachel says “let’s never speak again.” Bernard and Brown have the kind of live hot chemistry that takes you with them all the way. You believe them.

The performances will have you leaning forward, and they fling you back in your seat too. Miles has the intense, restless drive of desperation about him in Brown’s super-charged performance. He catapults, more and more wild-eyed, through the space and his relationship, a caged creature who’s improvising his escape, always returning to look at his computer screen, moth-to-flame style.

Rachel is the more uneasy of the pair, as Bernard conveys so eloquently. “All you think is ‘I need an adult’, and then you realize that the adult is you.” We gradually understand, in the subtle weave of Salmon’s theatrical storytelling, that she’s unspooling back into memory, reviewing the videos, looking for insight, and sometimes stepping forward to ask us, as live representatives of the online world of invisible viewers, what she’s missed. “Is anyone there?” she wonders, looking right at us — which is pretty disturbing. “Everything adds up to something…. Suddenly there’s a trajectory.”

Ah, that trajectory…. Like Rachel we are filled with dread. I haven’t spent a more nerve-racking evening in the theatre so far this season. I left the show shaken Saturday night. And I’m still thinking about it.

REVIEW

Subscribe or Like

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Liam Salmon

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Gabby Bernard, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: through June 11

Tickets: workshopwest.org

REVIEW