WILD
written by Miranda Allegar - December 1, 2020
Wild, written by Mike Bartlett, is a truly timely piece, commenting on government transparency, international scandal, and isolation. Presented in October of 2020 by Quantum Theater via live-stream over several nights, Wild speaks to the anxieties of an election year months into a fraught pandemic-induced lockdown. The piece is described as a “whistleblower thriller,” focusing on an Edward Snowden-esque character in hiding, having just fled the country after leaking sensitive government information revealing their surveillance on the general population. Further still, Wild speaks to the transitional space we now find ourselves in between the virtual and the physical, utilizing the sets and in-person acting of traditional theater intentionally placed within the virtual to acknowledge, and ultimately burst through, the fourth wall of screens and streaming platforms.
Across the two acts, Andrew is visited by two mysterious figures, each claiming to represent a shadowy agency that can help him, calling to mind WikiLeaks. The play comes to a crescendo as first an unnamed woman and then a man try to convince him to partner with their corporation, each claiming to represent someone who could help Andrew survive. The entirety of the show takes place in Andrew’s hotel room, where he cannot leave for fear of being found out.
Wild marks a departure in the Quantum Theatre’s digital programming, its first to be broadcast from a set with embedded cameras rather than from performers’ homes, allowing for an experience that lives a little more comfortably within the world of live theater as we know it. In doing so, the piece does more than simply return to theater as we knew it, instead finding its magic in precisely the combination of the virtual theater of now and the physical theater of sets and props of the past. It exists explicitly as a virtual piece – not by default, but rather through a celebration of what the medium allows.
Particularly resonant amidst the pandemic and this election cycle are the questions of isolation, trust or lack thereof, the death of mystery with globalization, and, perhaps most chilling, how to know how much we should panic. As the two operatives push Andrew for cooperation, all characters are left wondering: who needs each other more? And what happens to our identity, our sense of nationhood, when the illusion of America shatters? The play is a study in the pervasiveness of paranoia, the inability we increasingly feel to trust anything absolutely. In one scene, Andrew begs the woman to prove her veracity. She offers to plunge a hot needle through her finger and does so, to Andrew’s horror. Yet, with time, all is revealed to be a hollow act, a pantomime of reality.
At the climax of the play, the two operatives reveal they are working together, but, for Andrew, this is the least of the concerns on his mind. He realizes that the woman’s injured finger was an illusion, that the desk phone with “cut lines” is instead empty, devoid of all necessary machinery. The whiskey in the mini fridge isn’t quite right. Everything is slightly off. Ultimately, the hotel itself proves to be an illusion.
As the woman speaks into the many surveillance cameras positioned around the hotel room, through which we have been watching the play unfold, she describes the interconnectedness of our current world, the blurring of ideology, government, into a vacuum that is pure power. Speaking to her audience, she challenges us, saying that the real surprise remains how much the people of this society are willing to take, to give up, to retain the illusion of security. Andrew collapses through his hotel room into darkness, a void, emerging onto the YouTube Live platform through which the audience has been watching. He struggles as he smashes into the fourth wall, now trapped between our world and the world of the show. As the show ends, he is reminded that he doesn’t exist without proof of his existence.
This final scene more than any other highlights what makes Wild such a compelling show right now. It feels adapted to the online world, benefitting in fact from the frame where the audience suddenly finds themselves a part of the story and the surveillance that exists so centrally at the story’s heart. Further still, in a time when we’ve all been indoors and online for so many months, the tendency to solipsism remains strong. It’s chilling and personal to pause and reflect upon whether or not we exist without proof, without perception.
"Wild” is a part of the Quantum Theatre’s digital 2020 season.
