Time Limits Dropped on Easter Sunday dazzles with digital brilliance at the 2021 Toronto Fringe Festival

Time Limits Dropped on Easter Sunday, now streaming at the 2021 Digital Toronto Fringe Festival, until July 31, is an ambitious and satisfying one-hour show that is perfectly calibrated for watching right on the work computer where you Zoom . . . or projecting onto the TV screen where you watch for pleasure.

Skillfully directed by Meg Gibson, this Wonder Jones Production depicts a mid-pandemic Zoom call shared by 4 members of a bereavement group: Christine (the show’s writer Erin Jones) and Diana (Olivia Jon), who each recently lost their mothers; Trevor (Twaine Ward), who recently lost his wife; and Saska (Cate McKim), who is mourning the loss of her baby. The group lament the pandemic-induced interruption of their in-person meetings, but they have been doing their best to continue with regular Zoom calls. As the show opens, Christine has an idea: they can try a new AI-powered technology called “EverGenes” to upload and animate photos of their lost ones – an experience that other mourners have described as comforting and deeply meaningful.

Somehow, ensuing events move past video animation right to seeming reanimation. What ensues is a meaty meditation on culture, society, race, family and relationships: who we each are, the forces that shape us, and where our agency, identity and truths come from.

This is an engrossing and surprising show whose brilliance begins with its fundamental design. Time Limits Lifted makes masterful use of all of the familiar affordances of a Zoom meeting: a moderator, private breakout rooms, the Mute button, file uploads . . . and glitches. And Jones and director Gibson agreed from the start that they  “would honour the stage and not try to make a film, but rather a hybrid of theatre and film.” So most of the special effects are done by the actors themselves and not in post-production, as a way both “to honour theatre with practical effects and to save time in editing.” 

On one level, the end result feels like the too-recognizable, too-often virtual experience we have all had during the pandemic. But this recognizable chassis is powered by the unfolding strangeness of four engrossing, character-driven time travel stories.

The diverse ensemble cast, which also includes Dayjan Lesmond, Jamie Joong Watts, Paula Wilkie and Georgia Grant; is uniformly excellent. Never physically together, they appear individually in Zoom-like galleries of 2 to 7 frames at a time, from which they skilfully conjure each character’s unique physical and psychic space.

Like the best time travel narratives, the surprising end of these stories creates both an elegant symmetry and several lingering questions. Life, the show asserts, is a collection of photographs: each represents an instant in time that can catalyze forward momentum and backward meaning-making. Our challenge? Drop our own limits – without the benefit of AI-powered technology — and strive to see clearly in both directions.

© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2021