The constant pressure to perform perfectly, the toll of unrealistic expectations, the strain of constant interviews and interactions – it can all add up.
Luciann Lajoie knows these stresses all too well, and not only from her role as a professional actress, performer and playwright. For Lajoie, the kind of high-stakes pressure that’s a common feature in any audition or job interview feels a lot like the aggravation, irritation and agony that comes in trying to find a romantic partner.
Those feelings can become even more pointed in the tangled world of online dating.
“There is true vulnerability in the entire online dating experience,” said Lajoie, who explores these themes in her show “Date,” a multi-media performance piece that’s set to debut at the Jones Theatre in Denver on April 20. “How do you keep in your mind and in your heart that even though it is important to you to share your life with someone, it’s important to not get lost in that search? To me, that’s the real question. That’s what I believe is what needs to be explored.”
As part of the Off-Center series of shows at the Jones Theater at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, “Date” tackles such questions through a combination of artistry, anthropology and multi-media presentations. Working with creative collaborators Allison Horsley, Ashlee Temple and Richard Thieriot, Lajoie wrote the show as a kind of sociological and dramatic experiment, combining her own experiences with online dating with input from hundreds of interview subjects.
“When I came back to Denver from London in 2007, I started online dating. I hadn’t lived here for six years. Most of my friends were either gone or married or living in Highlands Ranch. After about a year of doing this off and on, I (started to) see a play,” Lajoie said. “I bought a Sony tape recorder and I started calling people who I knew.”
Those people included close friends, fellow actors and other performers, as well as accomplished anthropologists and successful entrepreneurs who’d started online dating sites. From the hundreds of stories and anecdotes, Lajoie and creative partners like curators Charlie Miller and Emily Tarquin started whittling away at the material to create a linear narrative appropriate for the stage. By combining prerecorded performances from nearly 100 actors with her own monologues, Lajoie said the show seeks to tell these stories in a comprehensive and compelling way.
“I am the only live actor. We have 95 actors that we filmed locally giving monologues and scenes that we shaped from all of these interviews,” Lajoie said. “The clips are projected against a very sparse, white-on-white set. You see the sites, profiles, spreadsheets, passwords. We really wanted to push the envelope on integrating technology into a live experience.”
What’s more, Lajoie and the production crew enlisted local bandleader and cellist Ian Cooke to provide the soundtrack, a touch that Lajoie hopes will draw a new audience to the Denver Center complex. Indeed, that push is one of the central creative tenets behind the entire Off-Center series.
“The audience base is aging and tends to be upper middle class and white. That’s a big problem, not only from a business perspective. We believe in live theater, especially in the age of computers and YouTube,” Lajoie said. “I am really striving to cross-market, cross-pollinate the performing arts genres here.”
At the heart of the multi-media approach is a simple and straightforward message, Lajoie insists. From stories about horrific first dates and online scams to heartening tales of true love found later in life, the show seeks to present a broad spectrum of experiences from the world of online romance.
“In a way, it’s such an inhuman experience to go online but it’s tempered with so much humanity. Online dating is probably the most human experience there is — the vulnerability, the highs, the lows,” she said. “One of the points of the whole play is that there is a lot of power in listening to other people’s stories, in sharing your own story in a non-judgmental environment.”
If you go…
“Date: Interviews with Real People About Internet Dating”
Through May 12
The Jones at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Tickets start at $16
Information: 303-893-4100; denveroffcenter.org