Blind Date

The premise of Blind Date is that Mimi, a thirty-something year old French woman recently arrived in town, has been stood up at a bar. She therefore invites a member of the audience to take on the role of her date for the ninety minutes that follow: at the bar, in a car back to her place, at her apartment, and then (if the rest of the audience decides that this is what they want to see) wherever the two of them end up five years later. Last Thursday, at the Vancouver ArtsClub, I was that audience member brought up on stage.

This was not entirely a surprise. I was aware of the general concept in advance, and open to the possibility of taking part. Before the show was due to begin, the actors (as well as Mimi and her date, there are a couple of other roles to play) circulated through the lobby, chatting to audience members and asking them, and whoever they came with–their “real” dates–whether they were willing to be “maybes” for the evening’s performance. Tess Degenstein, the (magnificent) actress playing Mimi, was already in character, trading smalltalk and probing consent. But it was only after we had taken our seats, and the show had started, that the night’s blind date was called upon.

The essence of the show is improvisation, and the recognition that first dates are always a matter of performance: reacting and responding to the person you are meeting; shaping what is hopefully an attractive image of yourself for them; but also (if things go well) helping them to perform well for you. A date is a joint production, and if it goes well it is because both parties have helped that to happen, and helped the other to make it happen, too. A date is successful if you manage to come close to being the best “you” you can be; but also if you allow the other person to be the best “them.” Here, in the theatre, though, the stakes were doubled: I was not only to perform for Mimi; the two of us were also performing for an audience of which I had been, until very recently, a part. But the part that I was now playing distanced me from them, and I felt a responsibility to put on a good enough show, not least for my (real) date, Fiona. If anything, the stakes were tripled, in that I was of course aware that my partner on stage was also acting, and that I should perform for her by picking up on her cues, as we both (presumably) set out in some way to entertain. Was my performance up to the occasion?

The set-up dealt with the split between the actor and their role by establishing that either of us could call a “time out,” and we would step out of our roles and move to a space to the side of the stage, where we could discuss the ground rules and check in with each other (or the audience). But at the same time, one of the principles of the production was that I should “be myself,” with the one proviso that I should pretend that I was single. Similarly, Degenstein afterwards told me that everything she had revealed about herself during the show was true, with the one exception that she is not, in fact, French. We were both, then, playing ourselves; or rather, our selves at but one remove. But isn’t that always the case on a date, for which one of the most important roles we play is authenticity and honesty, but in which we try to be authentic to the person that we would like to be, or like to be seen as being? And what or who that person is depends often on the feedback provided by our partner, who is playing precisely the same game of aspiring to be true to the person that we would want them to be.

A date then fails not so much because we are not who our partner wants us to be (or vice versa), but when we decide that we do not want to be that person. It fails when we are no longer “maybes,” when we no longer want to perform, and substitute being for becoming.

Again, on stage all this was complicated by an uncertainty about who I was performing to: the character (Mimi); the actress (Tess); or the audience. There were plenty of misfires as the two of us tried to establish a rhythm, to figure out where the other wanted to take things, or where they wanted to be taken.

Like a “real” date, the performance is structured by a tension between spontaneity and habit. On the one hand, the show can go anywhere: every night is different; it stretches the practice of improvisation as each time one of the principal characters is taking part for one performance only; we could take the conversation and the outcome (not least in the coda five years into the future) in almost any direction. On the other hand, that “almost” is important: the show is clearly divided into pre-established scenes and set pieces; characters and situations were introduced to which we had to react, from deciding who would pay the bar bill to who would sit where in Mimi’s apartment; there were pathways to choose between rather than complete freedom of choice. In short, the creativity and innovation of improvisation are constrained not only by your partner or audience, but also by the way-stations and routines that help you manage what would otherwise be an abyss of unlimited possibility. Such habits help to manage uncertainty, in life as much as on stage: there will be a bill; the decision to go home or not; to end the night chastely or otherwise. Customs and conventions circumscribe and help to determine all these decision points. Ultimately, every date (every play) comes to one of a limited set of dénouements: tragedy or comedy; satire or farce.

A few days after going to Blind Date, I watched “Bandersnatch” which, with its “Choose Your Own Adventure” format, also encourages audience participation, giving us all a series of choices to exercise, moments of improvisation and creativity, if along pre-determined pathways. Similarly, the Black Mirror episode is different each time; every viewer has the chance to see or experience something that nobody else experiences. But with the TV show, if you don’t like an outcome you can always go back and try again. Not so with the live performance (and not always so with a date!). I admit that over the past few days I have been repeatedly struck with l’esprit d’escalier: things that I might have said or done that could have been better, wittier, more entertaining, or whatever it was that I was searching to be.

At one point in our onstage conversation, while we were still struggling to find common ground, Mimi (or Tess) said that she enjoyed reading. Still unsure about the distance between character and actor, I expected her to mention something French, but she said that one of her favourites was TS Eliot, specifically The Wasteland. You might think this an admission to kill just about any date, but she went on to explain why: that she liked the poem’s multiplicity of voices, even if she didn’t feel she understood the whole thing. I could have said then (but didn’t; I let the cue drop and, I think, mumbled something indistinct) that Eliot’s working title for the work was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. Which is in turn one of Eliot’s many allusions and references, in this case to Dickens and Our Mutual Friend, to a performance conjured up by one of that novel’s characters from the most mundane and routine of occasions: reading the newspaper; “And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” With these voices or voicings, as well as with all the other citations and references that pepper Eliot’s poem and make it, indeed, so intimidating and difficult, is an attempt to give a sense of life and wonder to the everyday, to keep us on our toes and think critically about the roles we are constantly performing so that they are not completely overtaken by habit.

Blind Date is not The Wasteland. Far from it, and that is no doubt a good thing, too. But I liked the way in which playful improvisation and high modernism briefly and unexpectedly met in that moment, in a space of equally unlikely and apparently contradictory encounters: between performance and authenticity, innovation and habit. Because in the end that is what we want from a date: a flicker of improbable and eye-opening connection; a surprise or two, just as Mimi (and perhaps Tess), and the audience (and definitely I), had no idea what we were getting into.