VRTU-L

For the modern warrior it can be hard to distinguish between a video game, an AI weapon, a VR training camp populated with real Hollywood actors, a therapeutic reenactment and reality itself; it’s harder still to recover. Set during his intensive period of deprogramming, Joe toggles between quixotic and disorienting memory flashes of his deployment, which are prone to shifting rules, pixelation and buffering. As he criss-crosses the strange, confusing, and at times absurd terrain of ‘militainment’ (the pervasive use of gaming and psychology to recruit, reprogram, train and deprogram contemporary military personnel), his grasp on what is real and what is virtual skews just beyond reach.

Director: Erik Pearson

Dramaturg: Alex Mallory

Producers: Dr. Wendy Buffett and Dr. Joel Kreisberg

T.D. Mitchell

T.D. Mitchell’s previous plays include A Gray Matter, In Dog Years, Madame Red, The Crowd, Beyond the 17th Parallel and Queens For A Year. Her work has appeared at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Wet Ink Festival, Pacific Rep, EST’s Octoberfest, and Estrogenius, among others.

Seattle A.C.T. received an NEA Artistic Excellent Grant for Beyond the 17th Parallel, which is also being adapted for film. Queens For A Year, which premiered at Hartford Stage, was named “One of the 50 Notable Productions of 2016” (The Stage Review) and was nominated for the Pulitzer. In TV, she is a writer for ABC’s “Army Wives,” and won a 2010 Norman Lear Sentinel Award for Primetime Drama.

Other honors include: 2015-16 Women in Arts and Media Collaboration, Nathan Miller History, and Reverie Next Generation Playwriting awards. Semi-finalist or runner-up: Princess Grace, New Dramatists, Blue Ink, Jane Chambers, Nicholl Screenwriting, others. Mitchell recently completed artist residencies at both Yaddo and Marble House Project, where she started a new play The Double. She also contributed a short play to Imagine: Yemen, which premiered at Signature Theatre in New York in June. Her essays for Verbal Supply Company, speech-writing for international philanthropic organizations, and magazine articles exemplify her multi-format, cross-genre work.

“A stylistic departure from my other writing anchored in dramatic realism, the projection and multimedia elements are integral to VRTU-L and its reality-bending narrative; the technology and games portrayed are, for good or ill, disruptors of human behavior just as I hope they disrupt our accustomed definitions of “theatre”. It seems appropriate in telling Joe, Echo and Dr. Sam’s stories through the games they’re knowingly or unwittingly playing, to play with the literary “play” form. As screen addiction alters culture, why not explore that constant distraction by putting screens on stage?”
– T.D.Mitchell