Love, Virtually by Chloë Whitehorn
A play about our storybook romance expectations and how real life struggles to live up to the fantasy lives we've created for ourselves. "It's like Shrodinger's cat: as long as you stick to online dating without really getting to know someone, you're perfect together without actually being in a relationship."
3F, 4M
In a virtual world where you can pretend to be...
A play about our storybook romance expectations and how real life struggles to live up to the fantasy lives we've created for ourselves. "It's like Shrodinger's cat: as long as you stick to online dating without really getting to know someone, you're perfect together without actually being in a relationship."
3F, 4M
In a virtual world where you can pretend to be anyone, how do you find someone who will love you for who you really are? Love, Virtually is set in present day, predominantly in a coffee shop, which is both the ideal location for a casual first date as well as the best place to gossip with your friends about those dates. Interspersed with glimpses of online dating personalities largely derived from interviews and real life profiles, it is the fictitious account of Laurel, a thirty year-old singer songwriter who, as the play opens, is being pushed to dive into the world of online dating both for new song material and to help her move past the loss of a former love.
Laurel’s agent and best friend Eden, a cougar in the making, believes Laurel should seek out a new romance to help her get out of her songwriting slump, and to help her do that, Eden has set up an online dating profile for Laurel. Laurel’s married friend Jennifer, a high school teacher and Eden’s diabolic opposite, agrees with the plan, if only so she can live vicariously through Laurel. And so the dating begins.
A range of dating options parade before us, among them: MrExtraordinary whose hobbies and interests include “wine tasting in Napa Valley, exotic car racing in Monte Carlo, learning to cook Thai food in Bangkok,”; Techie81 who speaks several languages including Klingon, Elvish, and binary; Big_Stick_Playa, a hockey loving guy whose pickup line is “let’s face off and see if we can score a goal together”; and former classmate Matt, whom Laurel never noticed in high school but who now offers a fresh perspective on her past.
Laurel believes Noah, the coffee barista who serves her biscotti to cheer her up, is perfect for her, and after watching them interact we also wonder “why aren’t they together?” In a series of repeated scenes reliving the few moments she had with Noah, the young man who might have been The One, we learn that he is perfect for her, except for one thing. He’s dead. That doesn’t seem to stop him from interfering with Matt’s plans to finally win the heart of the girl he’s loved since high school. Matt has a connection to Noah as well, they were best friends. The memory of Noah seems to haunt Matt as well as he tries to overcome Laurel’s reluctance to open up to the idea of loving anyone but Noah. Her quirky best friends tell her they think she’s keeping her heart in a box, shielding herself from both potential pain and love. "It's like Shrodinger's cat. As long as you stick to online dating without really getting to know someone, you're perfect together without actually being in a relationship."
All of Laurel’s relationships are challenged when Jennifer and Eden walk in to the coffee shop to find Laurel on a date with one of Jennifer’s high school students as a result of Jennifer using Laurel’s online profile as an example in her sociology class about the impact of internet communications on social interaction. Laurel is furious that Jennifer would invade her privacy like that and Jennifer is frustrated that Laurel has posted private, intimate details about herself online for anyone to see. Matt confronts Laurel with the news that the love song she based her love of Noah on was in fact written not by Noah but by him, and that she never really knew Noah at all. To which Laurel points out Matt also has been in love with Laurel without ever actually knowing her. Everyone has storybook romance expectations and real life struggles to live up to the fantasy lives they create for themselves.
Chosen as Toronto Best of Fringe 2011, Love, Virtually is a love story, a comedy, and a glimpse into the lives of people ironically seeking intimacy through the most impersonal and detached way, the internet.