interview with sally mckenzie

It’s the five o’clock rush hour and Danny’s hunkered down at the counter at Pellegrini’s feeling the ghost of Joanna Murray Smith breathing down his neck. Casting furtive, ‘I’m not sure I should be here’ glances at the door, waiting for writer/performer Sally McKenzie to arrive. All he knows is that she’s down from Queensland for the day to promote her fringe show, Episodes, and she has red hair.

She bursts through the door, orders a coffee and casts that ‘now, where’s this guy I’m meeting, I wish I’d asked what he looked like’ look around the café. She spots the mini-disk recorder and mic in front of me and makes her way over.

So, tell our readers about your show Sally…

‘It’s a multi media piece with lots of video queues and its set in the future. It makes a comment about technology and the effect that its having on both the way we communicate. It poses the question of what happens when everything we access is voice activated, prompt systems, what happens when the language breaks down. So I think its kind of a harrowing.’

Most people feel that way about their phone company’s IVR anyway. Episodes has been performed already at the Brisbane fringe. How’d it go?

‘The audience reaction we had in Brisbane seemed to be “it’s a very strong piece but it also has a lot of humour in it.” I think that needs to be said and its not obvious humour. It’s a dark comedy, and I think it’s pretty dark, but it has got a lot of sort of strong comedic elements to it.’

Sally developed Episodes with playwright Janis Balodnis as dramaturge. ‘So it’s gone through the usual developmental drafting process. Well, usual for some.’

‘It’s a one woman piece, but a lot of characters appear on video screens.’

At the narrative centre of the play is a domestic communication unit that receives all phone calls, all mobiles and all emails, and comes up via video.

‘It also has immersive virtual environments for when the character goes outside, so we’re asking the audience to take an imaginative leap, and then we’re back in her apartment again.”

“We find a woman in a very tense time of her life. She interacts with her lover and her daughter by the video communicator, the domestic communication unit, the DCU. The characters come in via screen and a series of prompts. So by virtue of the fact that you set up a dramatic situation like that, and then allow the audience into that world, you can make comparisons with or draw conclusions about how we are interacting with the rest of the world. How you can be intimately involved with someone in Oregon but not know your neighbours. Yes, that is the future and this is the global world that we live in.”

It occurs to Danny that he’s listening to Sally through a mic into the mini disk, planning to type it up and email it to his editor to be printed for you the reader. Mediated communication is already something we’re very familiar with.

‘Lets face it, it’s a great tool. So as far as it being a global world, I think it really is that, and as far as might be, being closer to someone that’s geographically thousands of miles away than next door, I guess that is the future. As long as we communicate through technology, it will continue to be so. I suppose with the advent of video phones, we might think we’re actually getting closer to people. It’ll be interesting to see what public face they’ve got and what series of layers that we’re going through, of filters, of communication.’