Lester Trips wants Toronto theatre creators to ‘make it nasty’

iPhoto caption: Lester Trips duo headshot Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton. Photo by Helen Yung.

Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping Canadian theatre today. The column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.

Once, during a layover at a Mexican airport, I found myself unable to pay for my lunch. After trying two different card readers and apologizing to three different waiters, I phoned my bank. The customer service rep told me that although I’d given notice of my final destination, I hadn’t mentioned this brief stop in Mexico, and so their fraud department had disabled my cards. According to her, I could still tap — but the restaurant’s terminals didn’t seem to be compatible.

I phoned my bank’s fraud department. The call dropped. A whole new fleet of waiters began their shifts. “This fucking guy,” their eyes said. Finally, one patient waiter let me transfer funds directly to her account. I barely caught my flight.

I wonder how theatre collective Lester Trips might interpret this scenario onstage — and to what extreme they might take it. Since their first production at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse in 2014, artistic directors Alaine Hutton and Lauren Gillis have reveled in exploring how themes of cringe, shame, and humiliation collide with technology.

The creator-performers’ most recent works, Honey I’m Home and Public Consumption — parts one and two of a trilogy, both presented by Factory Theatre — zeroed in on the internet’s capacity to amplify sadism, and to rob us of embodiment and agency.

I spoke with Hutton and Gillis at Factory, on a freezing Tuesday afternoon. We were all getting over colds and feeling, well, a little cringey: in this context, a perfect conversation starter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lauren, how would you introduce Alaine to someone who’s never met her before?

Lauren Gillis (LG): Alaine is a freakishly intense, extremely persistent, sharp, exquisitely funny, nasty person.

Alaine, how would you introduce Lauren?

Alaine Hutton (AH): Lauren’s critical eye — stripping every idea down to its essence — is absolutely fantastic. She’s so smart, to the point of brilliance. I’ve never met anyone in my life that’s so funny, and whose peculiar sensibilities make her so unique.

How did your collaboration begin?

AH: We went to school together, in the University of Toronto’s [drama, theatre, and performance studies program]. In our second month of school, I was watching Lauren perform in class, and I thought, ‘That’s the smartest, weirdest person I’ve ever seen in my life.’

LG: Typically, I’m the last person to get the newest phone. Alaine was the first human on the planet to ever send me a text message.

AH: And I’ll probably be the last one, too.

LG: I had a flip phone, with T9 texting. I got my first-ever text message from Alaine, and I thought, ‘What is this?’ That was 2008. I didn’t realize that you’re socially obligated to respond to a text message, so it took us a bit of time to come together socially. But I knew Alaine as the person standing at the back of the classroom watching people do mime improv, and who’d be shaking because the miming wasn’t up to snuff.

AH: I literally would have to leave the room.

LG: So I knew there was something special about her.

AH: And I, with my persistence, could overcome Lauren’s social inability to respond to a text in a timely manner.

How did you come to form Lester Trips?

AH: When we graduated, we started our company with three other people from our school: Justin Miller, Joy Lee-Ryan, and Samya Kullab. Our goal was to train together in physical theatre. We lost [those] three members pretty quickly. Justin Miller went on to do solo performance. Samya became a war reporter. Joy-Lee moved to the U.S. and is now a teacher. Lauren asked, ‘Do you want to keep doing this?’ I was like, ‘Hell yeah, buddy.’

On your website, there’s a cartoon of a robot named Lester, ‘the most advanced bipedal humanoid robot on earth,’ who trips and falls.

AH: Lauren drew that.

Why did you choose Lester Trips as the name of your company?

LG: At the time, the most advanced bipedal humanoid robot on Earth was named ASIMO. At a robotics convention in 2006, his makers sent him to walk up just three stairs — just three stairs! — on his own, without remote control. You can watch footage of it online. ASIMO turns to look at the audience, because that’s supposed to be charming. Then he just wipes out. The technicians run onstage with these shame screens to hide the situation. In this ancient YouTube video, you can hear people wanting to laugh, and some people do. It’s awkward!

AH: The original video was named ‘ASIMO trips.’

LG: That’s such a small thing, to walk up three stairs. But it’s a big thing for a robot on their own, right? At the time, we didn’t know the whole world would subsequently become a series of bot fails. But we were drawn to that teetering feeling of not knowing whether something uncomfortable is to be laughed at. We were into cringe from the start, I suppose.

AH: That video captured what we wanted to be about as a company, but we couldn’t use ASIMO’s name.

LG: We thought, if there was an exquisitely nerdy child who hopes to be great and fails miserably, what would their name be? Lester.

What was your company’s first production?

LG: We adapted a play by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus called The Misunderstanding. It’s sort of a dreary and puzzling Oresteia. We didn’t know how to write a story properly at the time, so we decided to adapt. Alaine and I have a shared love of slashing text.

Tell me more about this.

LG: Words are not important to us.

AH: They’re on the same level as any other individual element. If a big hat can do it, I don’t have to be like, ‘I’m a nun!’

LG: We’ve all had the experience of being in the theatre, and a performer’s presence, or a beautiful lighting look, or an interesting premise draws you in. Then a monologue starts up, and it goes… and goes… and goes. In that first piece, we thought, ‘Camus, we love you, but you’re so long-winded!’

AH: We’re a physical- and design-forward company. I’d rather follow how an actor’s body tells me a story, than hear a monologue about a character’s big hard journey.

The Misunderstanding premiered in 2014.

AH: Lauren directed that piece, and we did it as part of an alumni showcase at the University of Toronto. We worked with voice teacher Fides Krucker and dance artist Denise Fujiwara, who remain our mentors. We started to figure out our aesthetic.

I want to return to your flip phone, Lauren. It seems like there’s always been an interrogation — and distrust — of technology in Lester Trips’ work. How did that become a shared fascination?

LG: I’ve always loved the hugeness of Greek tragedy: gods and people having parallel conflicts in the same piece. To me, putting bots and humans onstage is similar. Bots exemplify our failures and our cringe.

AH: We’ve always been interested in how human beings socialize with each other, and the missteps in that. As time went on, and more of our lives started happening online, it influenced the questions we already had about human connection.

LG: We didn’t set out to only make shows about bots, but looking back, almost every single one of our shows, including The Misunderstanding, has had a bot of some kind. There was a robot hotel clerk in what would otherwise have been a mid-20th-century three-hander.

In Honey I’m Home and Public Consumption, there’s a recurring theme of the internet making characters’ lives so much harder, when it’s supposed to make them easier.

LG: I see and experience a lot of bureaucratic sadism. For instance, how many forms does a person with a disability have to fill out to complete one basic human task? What if you have a smart dishwasher, and you can’t run the rinse cycle without connecting to Bluetooth, but the Wi-Fi’s down? Everything from the banal to the essential is being infected.

Part of me expects theatre about cyberspace to be fast and zippy. Honey I’m Home and Public Consumption are one-acts, so their overall length is relatively brief. But within each play, I saw you testing just how long you could stay in a particular beat or emotional state.

AH: To present the digital world onstage in the way we already experience it would be too similar. We made a digital series, Content Farm, that shares themes with those two shows, and it’s a lot faster. Onstage, we want to make audiences sit in their nervous systems in a different way, that justifies the liveness of the event.

Is the pacing of your work informed by your ongoing training in butoh, a movement practice originating in post-World War II Japan, with Denise Fujiwara?

LG: What’s been so influential in our studies with Denise is how butoh can change the viewer’s perception of time, using just the body. In this trilogy, it’s the time you spend at work. How can we put into someone else’s body and mind, in 30 seconds, what it feels like to work three extra hours? Can we give them the essential oil of pure, awful boredom?

AH: And the digital does play with your sense of time. You’re scrolling, and suddenly 45 minutes are gone.

LG: We were both just really sick. I scrolled for 10 days!

You’re not the first dynamic duo I’ve spoken to with an ongoing commitment to technique and training — a commitment reflected in the calibre of your work. Can you tell me more about your vocal training with Toronto-based artist Fides Krucker?

LG: Her practice is called emotionally integrated voice. It’s her own pedagogy that comes from two streams of practice: one through actor Roy Hart and teacher Richard Armstrong, and one through traditional bel canto operatic technique. Fides has fused them into an approach that can be extreme, but also sustainable for the body.

AH: We’re actually doing Fides’ teacher training: learning her pedagogy from the ground up while putting it into practice in our shows.

You end the first two plays in your trilogy by singing excerpts from two well-known classical pieces: Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor in Honey I’m Home, and Léo Delibes’ Flower Duet in Public Consumption. Why those arias in particular?

LG: There’s something fundamental as well as funny to me about them. It doesn’t matter how many reels of a hamster falling out of its cage set to the Requiem I see: The music still hits. We joke that the logline for Honey I’m Home is ‘normie drone has menty-b from VR Zoom with her own living room.’ How else do you end that but with something as big as the Requiem?

When you start to develop a new piece, what does your process look like?

LG: We sit and chat for many hours. One of us will have an interpersonal issue that’s riling them up; the other one will have just listened to 50 hours of YouTube essays about a niche internet subject.

AH: Can you guess which one’s which?

LG: A lot of shows come from a joke or provocation: ‘I would hate it so much if this happened. This would be the worst.’ Then we go, ‘Okay, but who would react the worst if they were in that situation? Oh, this guy. Oh, that lady. Okay. Put them there.’ At the same time, we’re gathering images, songs, quotes, ideas, and they’ll become sticky notes on a board.

AH: We don’t know where all the pieces go, but we’ll know, ‘Flower Duet is in there.’ We started working on Flower Duet well before we finished writing Public Consumption. Often, the sticky notes will move from show to show.

LG: That’s what’s great about a trilogy. You have 17 ideas. A show can handle three to five.

AH: So then we have stuff for the next show. But in that show, 17 more ideas fly in. We’ve got IP for days!

Responses can vary wildly to your work, even within the same audience. How do you welcome such a wide range of reactions?

AH: The audience can tell there’s permission. We’re going to do what we came to do. Laugh, don’t laugh, hate it, love it — it’s really fine. Again, why theatre? If we all laugh at the same time, you might as well just watch by yourself. You’re not getting new information. But what if you’re shocked while another person’s having a laugh riot? At a performance of Public Consumption, a single person laughed so hard at one of the darkest moments in the show. Everyone had to feel that.

What’s one thing you would change about Toronto theatre?

AH: More money and more time! We’re so lucky that Mel Hague, outgoing artistic director of Factory Theatre and dramaturg of this trilogy, gave us the time, resources, and support to make this trilogy. Our nervous systems are not for this digital age, or this world. We asked Mel, ‘Over three months, can we work 16 days?’ Who lets anybody work like that? But Mel said, ‘Let’s make it happen.’

LG: I wish for so many things, but in the meantime — make it nasty. Go for it. It could be bad. Fail as big as you can, within the meager means that you have.

The final show in your trilogy is scheduled to premiere in fall 2026. Can you share anything about the premise?

LG: It’s called — we think — Provisions. The protagonist has to go to a failed human settlement in space and bring as many losers back as she can. The problem is, the settlement has become a massive gooning cave.

When you say gooning —

LG: I mean a once-niche masturbatory practice of surrounding oneself with overwhelming amounts of rapidly edited hardcore pornography, and edging oneself into a mindless state of blissful oblivion.

And this has spread to the whole of society?

LG: But with VR now.

AH: But it’s a Lester Trips show, so it’ll be funny!

LG: Currently, there’s also a secret VR romance.

AH: Which we’re all having — whether we know it or not.