Have Fun with Reality at Rimini Protokoll's Best Before
On the Boards is wrapping up their 09/10 season this weekend with a production by Rimini Protokoll, a theater company based in Munich, Germany. Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before, premiering in January at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, BC, makes this single stop in the U.S. before continuing on its nation-wide tour.
Best Before gives us a stage hotwired as a video game console and each audience member holding a controller. Each controller correlates to an avatar on the screen and collectively we make up the virtual population of “BestLand”. On the stage are our four “experts in daily life” - Bob the politician, Duff the video game tester, Ellen the traffic flagger and Brady the electronic artist - who steer the action and periodically interject vignettes from their life stories. Live music is provided in the form of Ron Samworth’s bluesy guitar.
The game is relatively rudimentary: usually your character is asked to move to the left or to the right of the screen to establish your identity within the community. Do you want to be male or female? Do you want to have ambition and compassion? Should abortion be legal? Should BestLand’s cheaters go to jail? Brady makes our decisions final with her all-masterful keyboard. Ellen traffics the timeline: we are 2! 15! 36!, and so forth. Duff cracks one-liners. The mood is lighthearted, jokesy, fun. Everyone laughs as one avatar physically pushes another into having an abortion.
Yet Best Before becomes somber as our characters’ ages tick upwards. As the citizens of BestLand turned 76, Bob (who is also 76) stepped to the stage and delivered a touching, end of life reflection that brought tears to our eyes. The gaming is fun, yes, but Best Before delivers that fun with a steady, tangible reality … and in some odd circular sense, the experience of the show is reality.
And reality reared its ugly head as the performance last night suffered a technical glitch that crashed the program near the game’s culmination point. Here the “life experts” had to scramble to deliver the show’s closing without the planned-for technical oomph. But it wasn’t awkward; it was an experience. Together, we made it work.
Best Before is yet another example of how contemporary performance companies are playing with audience participation in unique, unpredictable, even uncomfortable ways. Locally we saw this with The Satori Group and their latest original theater work, Winky. This “tangible intimacy” between audience and artist is the foundation for Lingo’s A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light (which runs through May 15th).
Stefan Kaegi, co-artistic director of Rimini Protokoll, says, “We’re trying to invent new formats with many of our plays - trying to invent rules in a certain way that makes something performative happen. It’s not an artistic idea of a text or of a certain composition that stands behind these pieces. It’s rather an idea to maybe connect people in a different way.”
Through Sunday, May 9th, 8 p.m. Add'l matinee Saturday, May 8th @ 2 p.m. // On the Boards, 100 West Roy Street // $24, tickets here.
