‘Return the Moon’ Shoots for the Stars (The NoPro Review)
Third Rail Projects presents its first online immersive theatre show
Third Rail Projects have been creating site-specific, immersive, and experiential performance works for over 20 years all around the world; some of my most cherished memories involve my own experiences with their in-person shows like Then She Fell and Ghost Light and Behind the City. (Hell, No Proscenium might not even exist if not for the creative endeavors of this specific company, that’s the size of their impact.) So it was some curiosity and a tiny bit of trepidation that I approached Return the Moon, the organization’s first foray into presenting work in the digital theatre realm. Would their sense of intimacy and shared space translate over Zoom? Would it still feel like a Third Rail Projects show? But, still I was hopeful, and not entirely unsurprised at what I found, online, through a dimly lit screen.
[Ed. note: while the production features many TRP collaborators, the company makes a point that this is work presented by the company and not a “mainline” TRP project.]
After a charming onboard sequence disguised as a stage manager-type person typing instructions into a faux chat window on screen, the audience of up to 60 people are thrown into four separate breakout rooms. Eventually it becomes clear we’re meant to go through a series of exercises with our single performer. We are also encouraged to turn our cameras on if we wish. Only four in the crowd do; the rest of us disappear in the user interface. I inhale and hold my breath a little during this passage, as it’s all a bit awkward to see some but not all of my fellow audience members in that oh-so-familiar Zoom grid. But I clutch my beverage and lower the window shades as instructed, to create the intended mood.
The artifice of a live Zoom show is also directly acknowledged as part of the show. Our performer (Joshua Gonzales) addresses us specifically from the perspective as a person performing in a show, not any sort of fictional character, discussing among other things the shocking intimacy of letting the audience into his living space. But I’m not exactly sure who I am to Joshua and who Joshua is to me. We’re collectively asked some questions about our current locations, such as what exactly we see out our windows at this very moment: it’s essentially icebreaker material that we’re asked to respond to by typing in the chat.
More than a few times there’s a long pause after Joshua asks a question and before someone volunteers an answer. I sense a sort of timidness in the audience, or, hesitancy to be the first to hit enter. It’s not easy to predict where Return the Moon is intending to go from this point; the performer’s narration shifts to responding to the contents of the chat and then eventually moves onto a fictional world-building exercise, asking us to respond as quickly as we can to various prompts.
(Spoilers follow.)
Even after several minutes, I’m a bit wary of typing some possibly identifying information into the chat. And it’s not until we’re all asked to rename ourselves to the same name in Zoom (the same letter of the alphabet) and turn off all our webcams (leaving only the performer visible) that I breathe a sigh of relief. The questions from Joshua become more personal, more intimate, and a bit dream-like as our performer weaves a tale of a village under a moonlit sky. All the while, Joshua is constructing said village on camera, creating it wholesale from light and shadow and paper buildings. And soon enough, I find that I’m far more comfortable anonymously sharing what I envision in my mind’s eye with strangers on the Internet.
We all soon return to the main Zoom room for the second act which tells us of how the moon protecting the village was lost and how each person tried to bring it back, doing their own rituals, desperate to be held again in lunar embrace. I have to say that the writing in this act is exquisite. I can feel my heart rate slowing down as I unfocus my eyes and take it all in, line by line. Each languid word and phrase builds the world, road by road, house by house. To me, it all reads like an elegant folk tale. And the story has more than a slight resemblance to a similar framing used in Odyssey Works’ The Book of Distance (what can we say, great minds think alike?): a great loss in an idyllic fairy tale world used as a metaphor for lockdown and isolation.
Return the Moon claims to be the “one part toast, one part ritual, and one part retelling of a very old story of how the moon was lost and found again.” However, while I found myself entranced by the retelling itself, the resolution of the narrative feels incomplete. How are the collective actions of our villagers going to bring the moon back? What method will actually work? Has the moon finally returned? If you’ve got an activist’s heart, it’s difficult not to make the obvious comparison to the fight of the individual versus a governmental system or a single protester against The Machine. And against the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic, it’s clear to me that our collective story isn’t yet done; no, no, not yet. Asking what a single person can do against the will of the world often feels futile when considering the scale of the fight. So how can we possibly imagine the inevitable ending or preemptively write down its resolution? Maybe our moon will return. Maybe it won’t. Maybe we just need to learn how to live with the uncomfortable uncertainty, spending perpetuity in limbo.
Then, the exceedingly poetic and elegant third act of Return The Moon slides in before I even realize it. Here, the choreography that is the bedrock of Third Rail Projects’ work comes to light. Literally. We are treated to dramatically lit torsos, arms, and hands over a webcam, as the performers repeat back to us the phrases we offered up in the first act’s chat logs. These visions become integrated into an extended toast enumerating the things we care most about, the things we long for, and the collected parts of our collective dreams. Fingertips dance before us on screen then disappear. The company makes remarkable use of silhouette and shadow; they demonstrate a mastery of composition and timing, using what is often a clumsy medium in less deft hands. Striking images appear, are held for a second or two or three, and then blink out of existence, to be replaced by others.
And this is all achieved through the simple moving of props, lights, and bodies. So if there was an award for “best practical Zoom special effects,” Return the Moon would certainly be in the running, if not the outright champion. The effect is hypnotic; it all feels like a live edit of a movie as each of the four Zoom squares show us related vignettes in succession. And though the mechanisms being used are similar to film, the whole thing still maintains a homegrown, DIY feel with its candles and shadow play and origami homes.
However, it’s a very, very long build up to that third act, as gorgeous as it is. There’s a tension between the work’s strength as a series of moving images set to spoken word versus the not-exactly-finished narrative it’s trying to tell. The company may in fact have “leaned in” too much into awareness that yes, we’re all on Zoom, together, but separated by distance. The performance seems to work best when it isn’t emphasizing its remote nature, though I appreciate the effort at meeting the audience where they are, both mentally and emotionally.
All that said, Return the Moon ends on a stunning note of movement, light, and music. The show — particularly the final act — does a great job of bringing some of Third Rail Project’s magic into our living rooms, perhaps when we need it most: on these dark, lonely nights, uncertain of our place in the cosmos and waiting for the moon to return.
Return the Moon runs through September 30. Three ticket tiers are available: General admission at $42, Pay-it-Forward at $67, Subsidized at $15.
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