What happens when you forget how to empathize? That’s the question graduate student Amy Liou asks in her MFA production “To Be Determined,” a play that opened on Thursday, Oct. 2. It combines puppetry, live acting and projection to remind audiences what it is like to feel for fellow humans.
Staged at the Mobius Theatre, the production transformed the entire venue into a multi-level performance space. Puppets came alive on elevated platforms, while a woman played by Liou performs on the stage below and projections fill in the walls and surfaces that connect the two worlds.
“For me, theater is a space for people to think, discover, experiment, and experience,” said Liou. “I’ve had the experience, as an audience member, of entering a theater as one person and leaving as someone renewed — transformed.”
The story follows a boy and his doll, both represented by puppets, as they navigate a life suddenly torn apart by war. Their once-peaceful city comes under fire, upending their playful, carefree lives and entrapping them in a war zone. These sequences alternated with a woman on stage who reflects on the absurdity of it all while trying to make sense of it. She walks through debris, cooks with no food, and reads letters the puppet boy writes to his parents. The tragedy of the situation in both the puppets and woman’s world connects them thematically.
Projection played a key role in expanding the show’s language. Much of it comes from a live camera feed placed on stage. Midway through the performance, the woman uncovers the lens, revealing her own image as it is projected across three different surfaces on the stage’s walls. The moment feels like an invitation — or a challenge — for the audience to decide which version of her to empathize with, if they’ve already failed to connect with the real woman before them.
This device of multiplied projection appears as an invitation, and challenge, from the play: can you at least pick one of her projections to empathize with if you have already failed to empathize with the very real woman in front of you? The moment questions and reminds you of the desensitization that plagues us today. It questions the validity of our belief that lack of access to the truth is the enemy of empathy. What happens when the truth is streamed to you in four different shapes, forms, and mediums in real time? How do you deflect it then? Do you have the courage to see it, acknowledge it, and say it?
“This project grew out of how I feel about our current world, but once it’s out there, I think it speaks for itself,” said Liou. “There’s no right or wrong interpretation, because we all come from different backgrounds and bring our own associations to the objects, images, and the narrative. I hope it stirs something inside you or becomes a conversation starter between you and your friends and family.”
That’s why the show works so well. It does what any good piece of art is supposed to do: provoke thought and ask questions — and it does it with a variety of artistic mediums.
Sound design deepened the experience, repurposing familiar noises and reminding the audience of their often painful contexts. The visual power of the show, however, lies in its magnification. Though the puppets and the woman remained physically distant from the audience, Liou’s character eventually turned the camera toward the smaller world above her, capturing the puppets’ desperate attempt to survive and projecting it in a magnified form, in real time, onto the surrounding walls. This artistic choice of magnifying the show’s visual aspect results in effective immersion as well as the reassertion of the show’s central question: it’s simple and unequivocal, do you see it?
The play ended with a beautiful yet haunting image that is better experienced than described. To summarize it, the image pronounces the truth in its present and future form.
While “To Be Determined” allows flexibility in its structure and execution, it makes no concessions on communicating its key ideas. It’s a show worth watching for people who appreciate a critical reflection on the state of the world. It is for artists who aspire to mix different forms of media to express themselves. More importantly, it’s definitely a must for all those who see, acknowledge and speak the truth.
Hi there! It’s Amy Liou here. Thanks for including a photo of our show! However, I’d like to correct your photo caption as it is Harley Walker in the photo puppeteering (with Mel Carter who is hidden by the curtain but we see her right hand on the puppet!), not me. I would love it if you can correct it! And if you’d like a photo of me, please reach out. Thank you so much!