Toronto Online Review: 'Right Here, Write Now' Festival at Young People's Theatre - 'hey you'
Aaron Kropf, Associate Toronto Critic
hey you was the final performance of Young People’s Theatre (YPT) Right Here, Write Now Festival. This celebration presented three different productions written specifically to be performed online. With hey you, playwright Christine Quintana looks at the effects isolation has on mental health and the feelings of loneliness within.
Frankie (astutely played by Rhiannon Collett) shares her internal struggle of being alone, and the start of a potential romantic relationships with a fictional YouTube audience. We meet Frankie as she creates her video, unsure of who might be seeing this, and as she questions why she is making this video in the first place. Frankie is a teenager, an introvert, and shy (which came across to me as deep-seated anxieties about life). For nearly 20 minutes we are watching Frankie go on about her life, her relationship with Noah, and her love of The Lord of the Rings. During this time, I kept wondering what is the point of all this? And I think after it was all over that this might exactly be the point of this show, questioning what is this all about?
In this show, the audience watches someone who strives to find her purpose during quarantine. At one point, Frankie is asked to go for a walk from an invitation by a boy in whom she is interested. She begins to fixate on why he has asked her for this walk. Frankie’s zealous over analysis of this invitation became distracting for me, yet the entire production of hey you is an interesting exploration of the human condition during a global pandemic, and the style in which it was written would probably only work in an online format.
The scope of the show touched on so many issues that it was difficult to follow Frankie all the time. This script could benefit by narrowing its focus. On the flip side, Rhiannon Collett took the material and ran with it, imbuing Franking with warmth, while director Stephen Colella found ways to deal with some of the hurdles in the script.
The challenge of presenting a work of theatre online is the fact various mediums available to present the show have their limitations. These mediums do not bring viewers together quite like a theatre does. Therefore a few other things need to be taken into consideration. For example, framing can be difficult when using a laptop camera, but a small thing like having the top of someone’s head outside of the frame can be a distraction to the viewer.
I believe hey you has something to offer for the right audience, I’m just unsure of who this audience is, but I do know that I don’t think I’m that audience. If the comments following the presentation are any indication, others enjoyed the show. Many viewers were able to take something away from what the writer, director, and performer gave them in hey you.
hey you, as well as ‘The Girl, her Mum and the Raccoon with No Name’ and ‘Flower Girl’ were part of the Right Here, Write Now Festival now available on the YPT YouTube channel through the end of June. The festival had some wonderful stories to tell and explored what theatre could be in a time where we cannot gather in one place as a live community.