Virtual Theatre Experience

The set and special effects are more richly rendered than anything Dreamworks has ever produced. The well-designed ensemble cast overshadows your old favorites from the original Star Wars. The story is both more believable and more fantastic than The Matrix. Of course, in RL it’s just one man on a bare stage in the dark cellar of the Capitol Hill Arts Center, but Virtual Solitaire is so fully imagined and so strongly performed that Dawson Nichols is able to pull an entire electronic world seemingly out of thin air.

A set of VR style goggles are only needed for the first few minutes of the play to convey as quickly as possible that nothing we are watching is set in the pyhsical world, and as soon as that’s established the performance’s only prop is cast aside. We’re introduced to Nathan, a tweeker who speaks and seems to live in a rush of the most buy-able techo jargon we’ve ever come across. He’s hired to help calibrate the emotional responses for characters inside a new game, ahem, “entertainment,” sorry, and things rapidly detereorate at merging fronts of hot human emotion and cold data processing. Ahem. We started to get carried away there, which you can understand if you've seen this show.

We have a hard time believing that this was written in 1997, but that's apparently the case. Dawson has done a fantastic job of giving the technology a plausible and perpetual ten year horizon. In '97 it must have seemed like Virtual Solitaire was our inevitable fate in 2007. Today it seems like a slice of life circa 2015.

Virtual Solitaire is only scheduled for two more performances: Next Friday and Saturday night. You won’t be able to crash Cloud Tectonics’ opening gala like Seattlest was able to on Saturday, but for only a ten spot you can have your greatest VR experience to date. That Seattlest saw this show in a room that contained even one empty seat is absolutely criminal in a city that holds such a high-tech opinion of itself, which brings up the fact that there's no discernable Seattle geek community, Mind Camp aside, to get info on shows like this. The fact is that most tech people are not going to be scanning The Stranger theatre listings for sci fi performances and as far as we can tell the Science Fiction Museum has not recognized Virtual Solitaire. Sad. Anyway, geeks, techies, normal people, go see it.

Virtual Solitaire
Capitol Hill Arts Center
Nov 25-26, 7pm
$10 Tickets