Play about reality TV fails to connect

At last — an Edmonton playwright is tackling the insanity and absurdity of reality TV.

Andrea Beça, an up and coming director/playwright, and has sharpened her sword to skewer the pop culture contradictions of reality TV in a Big Brother clone titled Bunburying, now playing at the TransAlta Arts Barn until May 8.

In this world, any Joe/Jane Schmuck can become a star just by dramatizing their superficial lives and shallow dialogue. It could be you. It could be me.

The five characters — four competitors and a rundown host —meet under the watchful eye of a camera, live out their personal dramas as if they were a matter of life and death.

Their scintillating discussions, whether debating weight gain (where there is none), cosmetic enhancements, love affairs, food, tattling and even boredom simply become a competition for who gets more face time on camera.

Their lives are so trivial that even the inconsequential morphs into a major schism.

From the outside perspective, this 90 minutes of navel-gazing rapidly loses its charm. Without a doubt some of the monologues bristle and there is cross-purpose tension.

However, the quirky, experimental structure appears to defeat the parody. Beça has written this as a series of scenes or vignettes that could have been plucked out of any housebound reality TV series. But there is no cohesive throughline. No beginning, no end. Just a series of random chats tied together by the host.

In addition, every actor plays four characters interchangeably. Men play women, women play men. An effective technique in small doses, this non-stop exchange becomes cumbersome and mildly irritating.

Unfortunately, the funny gets lost and, unlike reality television, you never find out what makes the characters tick. The heart appears missing and where there is little heart, the connection between actor and audience is broken.

Although actors Ryan McKinley, Sarah Horseman, Delia Barnett, Zachary Parsons-Lozinsky and St. Albert’s David Johnston are cheeky, energetic and extremely supple in shifting from character to character, the audience is left with a confusing blur of images.

But experimental theatre is all about presenting a vision in new and intriguing ways. And if reality TV gets on your nerves, Bunburying more than adequately reflects the absurdity of phoniness and insincerity.