During a UW Theatre performance, a person on stage points at a large screen showing a virtual scene from The Nether, featuring human figures in a brightly colored, geometric environment as two others stand by mannequins or props.
During a UW Theatre performance, a person on stage points at a large screen showing a virtual scene from The Nether, featuring human figures in a brightly colored, geometric environment as two others stand by mannequins or props.
One of the freedoms of online platforms is being able to define who you are. People can choose their names, what they look like, how they talk to others, and which parts of their lives they want others to know about. But when does that freedom become dangerous? How much of ourselves do we put into pixels? And if we see harm committed in virtual spaces, how far does the accountability for said harm extend?
The theatre and performance program’s upcoming production, The Nether, revolves around these questions, focusing on the blurry and sometimes nonexistent line between our digital and physical realities. Originally scripted by American playwright Jennifer Haley in 2013, the play begins with Detective Morris separately interrogating two men, Sims and Doyle, about their activities in “The Hideaway,” a secret space located in the titular virtual environment. What unfolds in their conversations not only raises questions about the characters and their motives but also about accountability and identity in digital spaces.
“It’s a play that is incredibly challenging, both in terms of the themes that are in it and in the execution,“ said director Zachary McKendrick in an interview with Imprint. McKendrick is a Provost Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Scholar who was cross-appointed to UW’s computer science and communication arts departments in 2024. He discovered the play while completing his PhD at the University of Calgary. “A lot of what is presented, technically speaking, aligned quite well with where I was at in my own research journey and trajectory,” he noted. McKendrick’s doctoral dissertation explored the use of virtual reality (VR) in live performance, and has been expanded upon in his postdoctoral work at UW, specifically in studying how the physical body perceives its own movement in a virtual space.
“There was an opportunity to explore the relationship between live theatre performance and this virtual component in a medium that was originally designed for live theatre that I found really interesting,” he said. Previous productions of The Nether have used set and costume changes to differentiate between events occurring in the virtual and physical worlds. The show’s run at UW will be one of the first to take place in mixed reality, with performances happening live on stage, in VR, or both.
“Having both of those things at the same time … combines to create this incredible image,” said Christopher DeLenardo, a third-year student in theatre and performance. To support VR components and make them visible to audiences, DeLenardo and other crew members set up video relays of what actors see through their Meta Quest 3S headsets and built stage elements like shadow boxes, elevated platforms (“risers”), and flat scenery pieces (”flats”).
DeLenardo is also a member of the dramaturgy team, which researches and designs the overall presentation of the play. “What’s really cool about VR is that it is this science-y technology, but it has its roots in theatre to begin with,” he said. He cites that the first documented usage of the term “virtual reality” comes from the French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. In his series of essays Le Théâtre et son Double (”The Theatre and Its Double”), Artaud writes that, like how alchemical symbols are references to materials but are not materials themselves, the “virtual reality of the theatre” can be seen “as the expression of an identity” consisting of the people, places, and things present in a work.
That emphasis on reference and how it ties into identity is challenged in the play as conflicts between these two aspects manifest in the story. Third-year theatre and performance student Ethan Warren plays both Sims, a businessman, and Papa, his virtual avatar in the Nether and the owner of the Hideaway. Unlike other characters in the play who have different actors for their virtual and physical personas, Sims and Papa are represented by the same person. “He is such a complicated person in the way that he interacts with the world,” Warren said of the character. While Sims undergoes questioning by Morris in a stark, “authoritarian” interrogation room, Papa’s Hideaway is described in the script as a Gothic building with an opulent interior and a beautiful garden outside the building. This setting further contrasts with the dark implications of what actually occurs in “The Hideaway.” While not explicitly depicted, the script mentions or alludes to violence and sexual abuse. “It is an incredibly heavy play,” Warren said. “There are days when I rehearse, and I feel all this pent- up [energy] inside. A huge challenge is learning strategies for how to let the work go when I’m not in the work.”
That sentiment is shared by other cast members. “Even [with] not having any personal experience with anything in this show, it is still definitely difficult to not carry the text with you,” says third year theatre and performance student Brooke Daher. Her role as Morris is a stark contrast to her previous work in comedies or more lighthearted shows. To create boundaries around their performances in The Nether, Daher “taps-in” and “taps-out” with her scene partners. “Me and my one scene partner [Warren], we do a high five as a tap-in, so we get into character. And then to make sure we leave it all on the stage, we do a high five and then a chest bump,” Daher explained. “It kind of just gets us giggling again and just lightens the mood after a couple hours of intense rehearsal.”
That being said, tackling difficult material and the challenges of presenting it has been deeply rewarding for cast and crew. DeLenardo recounts holding initial reservations the first time he heard about the play. “[I remember] just thinking, ‘why are we doing that production?’ But when I really got to look into it and spent time with it and actually seeing it performed, I saw the value in it,” he said.
Warren notes the unique challenge of getting into the proper headspace for Sims and Papa. “How do I get myself to a place where I can empathize with someone who I disagree with on almost everything?’ I was really excited by this,” he says. “Everybody who has worked on this play to some extent has been excited by the challenge that this text presents us.”
Ultimately, members of the production say that the point of the play is not to make the audience take a stance. Instead, it is to spark reflection about technology’s hold in (or over) our lives. “There’s so many questions, and purposefully, [the play] does not provide the answers,” says DeLenardo. With widely varying levels of regulation and enforcement in online spaces today, Warren says, “what responsibilities do we have today to people 20 years or 100 years down the line, to the technology that we’re producing [and] exploiting? … There’s a Hippocratic Oath for doctors. Should we have something like that for science?”
In the spirit of fostering conversation, McKendrick has reached out to artists and experts in and outside UW to enhance the production. “We are trying to be as interdisciplinary as possible, and that means [both in] the scope of what we’re doing, and [in] our collaborators and our partners.” Senior lecturer Owen Brierley from Kingston University London in the UK helped with VR scenography. At UW, associate professor Jay Havens is working on set and costume design, while fellow associate professor Paul Cegys is overseeing lighting and video elements. UW theatre and performance alum Brooke Barnes from the KW arts incubator WOOM Collaborative is supervising dramaturgy work.
That intentional connection will also extend to viewers, who will have an opportunity to express their thoughts directly to the creative team. After the show, audience members will be invited back into the theatre for a symposium, where they can discuss the play with faculty members and other academics across relevant disciplines, such as digital ethics and human-computer interaction (HCI). Cast and crew members will also join the symposium to talk with audiences after the last showing.
More than anything, the team behind The Nether hope that spectators will walk away from performances willing to confront the moral dilemmas and heavy “what-ifs” presented in the work. “Dangerous things should be talked about and challenged through art, because I feel like people are most receptive seeing it through an art form,” says Daher. “I want the audience to leave talking and thinking about it, not to the point where they’re holding the heaviness of the content with them, but [that it] just keeps them talking.”
DeLenardo hopes that the interdisciplinary connections on- and off-stage transcend the performance to reach viewers, especially in a university known primarily for its STEM programs. “Going to a university that’s so engineering-heavy … A lot of people don’t know about the Theatre and Performance program [or] that we do a production every Fall and Winter term,” he stated. “I hope that with this [production] having so much of its roots in sci-fi, we can get students from these STEM programs to come check it out.” On the flip side, he also hopes that the combination of VR components will enhance the audience’s understanding of the play’s message.
McKendrick encourages anyone with even a minute interest in theatre to get involved — not only by taking a course, but after taking said course, to “write to department heads; write to the provost; send emails. Let people know that these are valuable experiences for you, and come and join the conversation.”
And last but not least, Warren puts out a call to readers to engage with theatre: “Come out, support it, because we need more of it in the world … there’s something hopeful about coming into this connection; this spirituality of being with other people.”
