Projections the highlight of ‘Solo Date’
If you were to imagine a narrative about using artificial intelligence to create a simulacrum of a dead lover, “Solo Date” probably hits all the broad plot points that you, in your casual speculation, might also dream up.
Anxiety about our over reliance on machines and failure to connect with other humans? Check. Tension over machines’ inability to perfectly reproduce a human personality? Check. How about some questions about what it is that defines human consciousness, whether machines can love and how much we really know about our loved ones (and whether it’s a good idea to learn more)? Check, check and check.
To all this, the Tainaner Ensemble one-man show, visiting from Taiwan as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, adds melodrama’s pieces of flair. There are dirty, compromising secrets and redeeming, he-was-actually-a-better-person-all-along secrets. Creator and performer Pao-Chang Tsai amplifies all these revelations with heartstring-tugging minor chords. (It’s performed in a mix of English, French and Taiwanese, with supertitles.)
Yet in one crucial respect, the show, whose three-day U.S. premiere opened Thursday, May 31, transcends default, which is in its use of projections. If you’re of the mind that theater is supposed to be live, that if you wanted to look at pixels you’d stay at home and stare at your phone some more, “Solo Date” might be that rare exception that doesn’t employ projections to seem hip or as a crutch but as an essential tool in its world-building and storytelling.
Tsai performs the whole show from within a cube the size of a very small room. Projections appear on its sheer front and rear walls, so that Tsai, as the needy, controlling Ho-Nien, can interact with them. At times, when an image gets echoed both in front of and behind the live performer, it’s difficult to tell who’s fleshand-blood and who’s made only of light. If everyone looks like a ghost, maybe it’s not so easy to say what makes a human after all.
Holograms — of Ho-Nien’s assistant, Angela, and of the facsimile of his dead lover, Alain — frequently distort and dissolve. In one grotesque instance, Alain’s image starts to melt into wavy lines, as if what lies beneath the points of light presenting a familiar, encouraging face isn’t emptiness or digital technology but the bottomless terror of an Edvard Munch painting. In another gorgeous instance, the video display does the opposite of melting, when dancing, peachy blobs reach toward each other and then materialize into a pair of giant hands. As Ho-Nien stands in the middle, it’s like his whole body is cocooned in those palms. This is, ultimately, what he needs — the solace of touch, the comfort of flesh, that precious feeling of being surrounded and protected by something that’s bigger and stronger than you.
These pleasures often make up for the show’s broad storytelling strokes, and with a run time of just 55 minutes, slim plot and characterization are more forgivable. “Solo Date” is the sole international theater act in the whole San Francisco International Arts Festival, and by that metric alone, it’s worthy of our consideration and support.