Sweet, salty advice and plenty of drama

As today’s internet burns, with the American president typing out annihilative intentions into a propagandist app he’s dubbed the Truth, it’s easy to feel like a helpless fruit fly caught in a world wide web of lies. We consume alternating doses of negative reality and “harmless” gobbledegook to placate our worst fears.

Strapped onto this hellish seesaw, our friends and neighbours acknowledge that they could use a bit of helpful advice and support, with an estimated 20 per cent of Canadians experiencing mental health or substance use issues in a given year.

Under these circumstances, millions have begun to seek help by explaining their predicaments to large language model chatbots, a growing trend that’s led to discomfort, fear and stress amongst AI skeptics and clinicians alike.

Playwright Nia Vardalos’s Tiny Beautiful Things dials back the doomsday clock, focusing on an online advice columnist’s rise to prominence at the tail-end of an epoch of internet exploration known as the blog era, a period when the URL ruled and websites such as The Rumpus healthily covered the digital terrain.

Staged for the first time in 2017, since then licensed over 250 times worldwide, this latest version of the epistolary production, directed by Prairie Theatre Exchange artistic director Ann Hodges, is marked by its characters’ existence in ecosystems that have been altered beyond repair.

Like Eppie Lederer, the real woman behind the Ann Landers byline, The Rumpus’s advice-columnist mantle is bestowed upon a struggling writer (Laura Olafson, in an excellent, patient, deeply felt performance) who is granted the boundless freedom, and the unique pressure, of anonymity.

A few months before the changing of the guard, the Dear Sugar column was penned by a writer who lacked the heart to keep going. He calls Olafson’s Cheryl Strayed with what hardly seems like a dream offer: it’s anonymous, there’s no credit, and as a bonus, it doesn’t pay.

Within seconds of accepting the responsibility, the new Sugar’s inbox is saturated with notes about cliquey teenagers, marital strife, sexual health, motherhood, grief and other problems.

Each email anxiously pings like a front desk bell, and Sugar — a married mother of two who writes in solitude — does her best to keep up with the inquiries from her devoted correspondents (Gislina Patterson, Arne MacPherson, Honey Pham, who as a group skilfully portray characters at both ends of the dramedy spectrum).

When some inbox regulars are slow to trust their new listening ear, Sugar shares some of her salt — a divorce, heroin use, an abortion, the death of her mother when Sugar was 22. Soon, the emails resume, arriving in a crush.

Like the rogue therapist Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) in Apple TV’s Shrinking, Sugar plays by her own rules, allowing her audience to get a clean glimpse at what some might refer to as dirty laundry.

In Hodges’ interpretation of Vardalos’s script, Sugar first walks onto the set carrying a laundry basket. Placed on the soft blue carpet, it evokes buoyancy — like the readers to whom she replies, Sugar is doing her best to stave off being swallowed up by the tide of domestic responsibility, self-care and healing.

At one point, when Sugar is explaining the backstory of a red dress bought by her mother, one of the letter writers literally begins sorting out the darks, whites and colours of Cheryl’s sartorial armour. With Sugar, the lesson runs in a feedback loop with the recipients.

Designer Anahita Dehbonehie’s set recalls both a mid-century conversational pit and a natural basin, with Sugar’s sofa and desk standing as islands in the blue.

The 90-minute (no intermission) production takes place in a public digital square where Sugar helps her readers make forward progress. (This square motif is echoed by a lit-up window upstage right whose purpose seems open-ended: might the empty shape represent a space held for audience members to look at their own lives? Is it meant as a lens through which the world sees an ever-widening portrait of Cheryl? Is it just an underbaked distraction?)

Olafson has, in recent years, mostly acted in musical theatre, a field in which the powerful, emotive singer excels, but here she reminds audiences of both the softness and the hard edge that help define her skill as a sui generis performer and the fictional Strayed’s as a volunteer helper.

With Olafson, as with Sugar, one can be certain of an authentic connection along with a transcendent, empathic reach — an approach that makes the Winnipeg performer perfectly cast in the Prairie Theatre Exchange season finale.

Can a computer ever care as much or as well as a living, breathing human?

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman