Photog: An Imaginary Look at the Uncompromising Life of Thomas Smith

Photog: An Imaginary Look at the Uncompromising Life of Thomas Smith is an ambitious, experimental work combining video, verbatim text and physical theatre to tell the story of a life in conflict photography. The script is developed from a number of verbatim interviews with award-winning war photographers and journalists, and incorporates images from their work.

Written and performed by Jay Dodge with the help of a large technical team Photog is an interesting piece. It is well-written (if that term can apply to verbatim theatre?) and technically slick. I don't know how much editing was involved in weaving the verbatim interviews into once voice, but I feel it could have been a bit more cohesive. Or more fragmented. I feel that with the characterization and with this stylization of this piece I was left somewhere in the middle. It was either too much or not enough, but I cannot decide which.

The atrocities of human nature, the images of war and the impact that exposure to that world can have on an individual are tough subjects to tackle. It must be almost impossible to effectively convey the depth of such experiences to an audience sitting in a black box space and I really admire what Boca del Lupo have done in an attempt to bring that world to us.

With heavy subject matter like this, there is a lot of pressure to do the story justice. It is so easy to overdo it and to strangle the very message you are striving so hard to convey. Everything: every word, every breath, every movement, every technical effect must serve the story and because the story is so big it is tempting to go big with everything else as well.

This was a very impressive production; every moment was choreographed, and every gesture deliberated. I liked that the production took the idea of media and played with it, creating a video-game-like reality. However, I feel that the use of that media also contributed to distancing the audience from the story. We are accustomed to violence in media and video games and while the theme of disconnectedness is appropriate in it's own way, it doesn't bring the immediacy of war home to confront the viewer as the photographer intended.

There was a lot going on in this production: flashbacks, physical theatre, a frame story and video montages. I wonder if, in an effort to encompass the fullness of this experience, the message was compromised. I would like to see this project presented in two parts: one immersive piece of physical theatre, special effects and imagery that can shower the audience in sound and motion and the other a quiet portrait of a simple, troubled soul in a lonely apartment who has seen more than he could ever describe.

Dodge's performance, although charming and well-timed, felt more like a narration than anything else; commenting on the action, one step removed, even though the text was in first person. His acting, although strong, felt heavy handed in contrast to the understated words of the quiet and humble character he was portraying. There was one beautiful moment when Dodge had just fallen to the floor and without “engaging the audience”, without doing anything, he simply said “I don't sleep well” and went on to describe his dream. For those few sentences the narrator fell away and I was touched, confronted with the honesty and rawness of this conflicted human being.

As an exploration of the impact of images and media on the human being as well as the sense of surrealism and detachment that prolonged trauma can induce, Photog was a striking and effective production. It was a interesting and creative intellectual exercise, but I left unmoved and unsatisfied.