MOTHERLOD_^E

Theatre Works kicks off its 2023 season with a highly inventive, fast-paced black comedy satire that takes place within a Windows PC computer and uses The Sims game as its structure and metaphor.  The ‘characters’ on stage are SIMS, created, controlled, explored and experimented with - at first - by three teen girls - whom we see only on a huge video screen; it’s maybe back in 2000 when The Sims game was launched. 

But already on the real stage as we take our seats, five actors move rapidly and robotically about a dimly lit middle-class period ‘home’ interior.  They trot in fixed patterns of brisk, repetitious movement.  They’re in orange and black uniforms and have happy, inane smiles,  They tidy, clean, arrange flowers, fluff pillows, and sort garbage.  We guess these are ‘staff’ - they come as standard SIMS within The Sims game being played by the teens.  (Later, still cheerful, these ‘staff’ will assist in more tidying, such as removing dead bodies.) 

Then, with a dramatic lighting change (design by Sidney Younger) and a burst of Jack Burmeister’s excellent and perfectly complementary sound design, the show begins.  Five more complex but still incomplete SIMS appear on stage.  They are types: a blonde bombshell, who laughs, then cries, then laughs, then cries; a good-looking but searching-for-charisma guy in a suit; a kind of floppy long-haired guy in a dressing gown; a ‘French’ maid, and a tall and standard ‘pretty’ young woman.  Their creator can change any one of them at will.

We see that only one of the teen girls playing the game and creating these SIMS is really, really interested.  She stares wide-eyed and open-mouthed, rapt in her SIM creatures - and what she can make them do… and what she can’t.  She is making and exploring another, alternate (better, safer?) world to see its possibilities… What would it be like to be a… gender-fluid person?

It’s a busy stage: something is going on everywhere - plus video screens either side containing commands for the SIMS (e.g., ‘KEVIN - BOOST CONFIDENCE’), banal text message exchanges, and PAUSE and PLAY.  You’re not quite sure where to look - and because the entire cast is so thrillingly precise, so disciplined and so ‘in character’ at every moment, you’re bound to miss something.

But this apparent lack of focus is deliberate.  Director Belle Hansen knows what MOTHERLOD_^E is about: what’s happening on stage is messy, repetitious and cliché (and very funny), always constrained by the imagination and limitations of the SIMS creators, the girl playing the game. 

In the show’s second half, it’s, say, 2023, and that girl has grown up; now she’s a mature woman looking back at her creations, and is a bit amazed, embarrassed, disdainful, bored, and vicious…  One SIM gets put on an exercise bike - and then forgotten.  She pedals on, and on, and… It’s funny, but we keep checking her out; how long can she go on?  The now disinterested mature woman leaves the room (PAUSE on the screens), returns (PLAY), ignores her screen while she masturbates… Bored again… Bring on The Grim Reaper.  Implicit here is the resort to violence.  Can’t do anything more with her, he’s boring - kill ‘em.

Under the wit and sharply observed comedy here, there’s a feel of an almost weary, almost bleak cynicism or disappointment about the limits of imagination, the banality of ‘alternate reality’ - or the banality of those trying to create an alternate reality - and the inability to take these SIM characters beyond cliches.  (MOTHERLOD_^D, in its take on Gen Z and millennials reminded me of another excellent Theatre Works show, Day After Terrible Day - but maybe that’s the zeitgeist.)  

MOTHERLOD_^E does go on longer than it needs to (we’ve got it, or we haven’t) and not all of it quite makes sense.  Why, for instance, does The Grim Reaper - who is not at all skeletal, in fact rather beautiful - have agency when no other SIM does?  Is The Grim Reaper a SIM anyway when she speaks direct to the audience and, advises that she can do more than kill among other things, spruiking that she does children’s parties too?  But these are minor quibbles. 

The revelation of a whole troop of talented performers - ten on stage - and the quality of their work, the originality of the concept and its skilled realisation all make MOTHERLOD_^E vastly entertaining and a must see.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Daniel Rabin