An Oz For Us All

Theatre staff flock to your side immediately upon entering 3LD's glowing tube of a lobby for The Builders Association's production of Elements of Oz. They're not there to guide you to the house doors, but rather to help you download the performance app, which audience members are instructed to keep running for the duration of the performance. A smartphone charging station has replaced a lobby bar. Last-minute arrivers can even borrow portable chargers to take with them into the theatre. Rather than banishing personal smartphones (as theatregoers have become accustomed to), Builders asks us to incorporate smart devices into the technological mise-en-scèneof the production. Hold up your phone to see a twister ravaging Dorothy's farm in one moment, or pinwheels spinning brightly against Munchkinland in another. Listen, and you'll hear a cacophony of YouTubers belting out "Over the Rainbow" as performer Sean Donovan lip-synchs along to the iconic song. The images and sounds are carefully curated and coordinated, intricately crafted, and whimsical. Like the many meanings and interpretations of the Oz story, they're there should you choose to look, even if additive rather than essential to the production.

By placing one element of the production's technology into the palm of the spectator's hand, they strive to blur the boundaries between the mediatized and the live—the data bit and the heart beat—by combining a variety of media technologies into elaborately constructed theatrical productions. In previous works, this has been repeatedly achieved through the onstage use of screens to present multiple narrative strands, worlds, and themes in parallel—both real and virtual, in the here and the now of the theatre space. In this performance, spectators add their own screens to the mix to further break down the distinction between the mediated and the real in the theatrical experience.

Elements of Ozis centrally focused around the making of Victor Fleming's original film. The production's cast—consisting of Donovan, Moe Angelos, and Hannah Heller—and a movie crew reenact and film portions of its most famous scenes. Onstage technicians edit them almost instantaneously, after which they are played back in bits and pieces for the audience. Throughout the performance, Angelos provides "behind-the-scenes" tidbits as part of the narrative, offering an insight into the film's production process between film takes and playbacks. They also stream video of real people offering their own interpretations of The Wizard of Oz—everything from YouTubers explaining the film's queer resonances to Ted Cruz co-opting Dorothy's story on the Senate floor for his own political ends.

Three live scenes stand out in the production as particularly evocative: two scenes reenact interviews with Ayn Rand and Salman Rushdie, each evoking the film to elucidate their viewpoints on objectivism and human displacement, respectively. In a later scene, we see a middle-aged Judy Garland (Heller) in bed, tossing and turning, while voice over recordings of an imagined therapy session play over the speakers.

The splicing of these interacting storylines, intensified through use of numerous interactive technologies, encourages an interpretive bricolagereflective of Builders's postmodern style, folding seamlessly into their "medium as message" ethos, especially since the production seems to mostly be about the personally (and at times politically) charged power of interpretation. Audiences assess and reassess the memories, thoughts, feelings, and interpretations long associated with the ubiquitous film as we watch their reenactment. Delighted by the campiness and "stop-and-go" absurdity of film-making and the narrative anecdotes and personal interpretations, spectators are pushed to question personal and public mythologies which developed around the film, including allegiances to certain characters and assumptions about the film's place in our collective cultural consciousness.

As in all Builders shows, the technological apparatus central to the production design goes beyond serving as mere support of the storytelling. The LCD monitors, soundboards, Technicolor camera, stage floor...