Can we talk about theatre without talking about the medium itself?

When we speak of film and literature, those works and their respective media are taken at face value. But theatre of the 2020s seems to embody Marshall McLuhan’s most famous line that the storytelling vehicle, the medium, is its own message.

The medium of theatre can emphasize or subvert the message of the text in a way that audiences can feel in real-time, which is always exhilarating when well executed.

How to Survive in the Wild at the Segal Centre Studio is about friends and their petty professional and personal betrayals as byproducts of the cutthroat tech startup scene, told through a TEDX talk-style presentation by our main antihero, Kevin, who the actor Jonathan Silver portrays. This format exemplifies the time-honored tradition of one-man theatre that the real-life tech world draws upon to harness the power of individual stories. How to Survive in the Wild doubly enfolds that tech industry theatrical device within the black-box theatre.

Persephone Productions’ artistic director Rebecca Gibian translated the play’s text from its original French presentation, which was performed to wide acclaim at Théâtre Duceppe in 2021.

Every act of translation is an act of betrayal. But this breezy English-language version of Manuel de la vie sauvage by Quebecois actor and playwright Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard wears its linguistic sources honestly.

English and French in this city’s contemporary theatre scenes bear their familial resemblances in shared casts, writers, and directors. How to Survive in the Wild brings this to the fore with a mix of anglophone and francophone actors and a medley of accents ringing true to Montrealers in the audience.

The most visually striking elements of the show are also its most technical. When Persephone Productions previously brought Pool, No Water to the same Segal Centre stage, its lighting effects and state-of-the-art, hyperreal technical flourishes were a delight.

Similarly, How to Survive in the Wild employs vertical screens which convincingly approximate the aesthetic of FaceTime calls. Just this simple use of projections in a highly contemporary and technologically implicated story works its own kind of magic, and video and lighting designer Chris Wardell, assisted by Zachary Weibel, are a credit to what audiences have come to expect from this youthful team.

Persephone Productions was historically a company charged with giving voice to young and emerging theatre artists. But under the stewardship of Gibian and her new hires, we have seen an inclusion of not only emerging artists but also the seasoned and experienced, while turning toward more of-the-moment theatrical works.

Veteran actor Brian Dooley enters and exits as various Old White Guy clichés that wield arbitrary financial kill-switch power over the upstart founders, but allows them playful distinctions. Stories of frightening technological advancements are best told within multiple demographics.

The text gives this cast a plethora of pithy and well-written lines, which nonetheless affords the gravitas necessary for the third act’s tragic turning point. The theme of a plausible technology that could allow the living to stay connected to the departed is within Chekhov’s purview, and the conclusion’s payoff is as satisfying to see as its consequences are unsettling. Nothing in this story is too strange to stay science-fiction for long.

Following the performance, Geordie Theatre Company Artistic Director Jimmy Blais posted another McLuhanian line on social media:

“Man becomes as it were the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”

I can only speculate that this post was inspired by viewing How to Survive in the Wild on its opening weekend. The audience in attendance is confronted with the show’s fatalistic message of our universal mortality, the crude facsimiles of humanity that A.I. churns out at an alarming rate, and the ever-present sense of theatre’s precarity as an artistic medium.

But a good story about the dark facets of technology shows that man’s love for the machine world is a fickle one, and if we are ofttimes the sex organs of the machine, our progeny persists where we planted love onstage millennia ago.

Nothing flies in the face of dreadful fatalism like the spirit of youth.◼︎

_{Cover photo: Emilia Hellman for Persephone Productions}