Love and Information promises to be fast, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore.
Notable playwright Caryl Churchill’s career-defining Love and Information is this year’s pick for the DAN School Winter Major, a play directed by faculty and students. This year’s show, directed by Assistant Professor Michael Wheeler, is a unique interpretation of Churchill’s 2012 script, expanding on the role of the internet in shaping the audience experience of the play, and the world. Running from March 5 to 16 at the Power Corporation of Canada Studio Theatre, Love and Information offers a thought-provoking look at the internet and its influence on modern culture.
The play includes important aspects of the internet today, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Set designer Brian Frommer, ArtSci ’99, consulted AI in the creation of the set, hoping to include input from the subject he was trying to reflect.
“Usually in my design process, I always start with a paper and pencil and just kind of let my hand flow, let my brain flow, but in this case, I thought, well, why not start with AI?” Frommer said in an interview with The Journal.
The play is intended to highlight the impact of the internet on the way we communicate and process information. When the audience buys a ticket, they’re prompted by a virtual host to answer a few questions
that determine the order of the scenes, emphasizing the participatory nature of the internet, and the
personalization of a social media algorithm. The host resurfaces in the show as one of the guiding forces of the play.
“The idea of it being a different order, each performance that’s decided by the audience is an entirely new concept,” Naomi Koven, ArtSci ’25, assistant set designer, said.
Each scene in the play is short, and completely unconnected from the one before, designed to reflect the rapidly changing social media landscape.“The 52 scenes just fly by, you feel like you’re scrolling through an algorithmic social media and so the theatre has become like social media or social media is being reflected in the theatre,” Assistant Director Iulia Rus, ConEd ’25, said.
Told in the centre of the theatre, as opposed to a traditional forward orientation, the innovative set design is intended to have audiences feeling like they’re inside a computer.
“I want the audience to walk into the room and feel like they just stepped into the inside of the computer, but I don’t mean the screen of the computer, I mean like the brain of the computer. Like they stepped into this hub of information that just surrounds them on all sides, and sort of feel that in their senses,” Koven said.
By catering to the brief attention spans of an audience in the digital age, each scene is only 50 seconds to three minutes. The team behind Love and Information hopes to inspire questions about the impact of the internet long after the final curtain has been drawn.
“It’s coming at you fast and furious, and you can’t really catch up until you’ve had some time to walk away and think about it, and I think that’s really the ultimate thing is that we want this to linger,” Frommer shared
The show hopes to convey that society doesn’t know if the internet is good or bad, but we must accept the natural evolution of technology. The internet is rapidly advancing, irrespective of if social attitudes have caught up.
“There’s not really anything we can do to stop it, so we might as well find a way to deal because there’s no real alternative,” Frommer said.
By embracing the evolution of the internet, Love and Information takes the notion of rapid change and evolution head-on. The unique and innovative approach taken sets this year’s Winter Major apart from previous shows, and traditional theatre more broadly.
“It’s a very unique technical challenge that we’re doing, and I think at the end of the day it’s going to be very enjoyable,” Rus said.
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