Eight months ago, venues across America closed their doors to all live performances, causing thousands of theatre workers to immediately lose their sources of income. Seemingly overnight, theatre professionals began working from home like the rest of us, wondering how they could possibly keep the industry afloat. Now that the world relies on digital communication more than ever, the Internet has become the newest medium for theatre, allowing theatre lovers — myself included — to get their fix of entertainment from the safety of their own homes. When I first heard about Temporary Occupancy, a virtual theatre experience created by FringeArts, I wondered how I would be able to connect with this piece of art, which navigates a realm somewhere between theatre and film. Temporary Occupancy was designed with the pandemic in mind, providing an opportunity to embark on a digital escape from reality where, frankly, the participant has no idea what to expect. Despite my reservations, I had hoped that this experience would fill the void of theatre in my life. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations.

        For the past 23 years, FringeArts, a Philadelphia-based theatre company, has aimed to present “world-class, contemporary performing arts that challenge convention and inspire new ways of thinking.” In other words, when watching a FringeArts production, audience members should always expect the unexpected. Fringe theatre breaks the expectations set by mainstream theatre, allowing artists the freedom to be as experimental as they wish. While the concept of Temporary Occupancy was certainly original, this show was not the escape from reality that I had hoped it would be. This experience was avant-garde to the extreme: all confusion and no satisfaction.

        The experience appeared harmless enough. Upon clicking the link on my virtual ticket, I found myself on the website for “Vicurious,” establishing that I was in the waiting room of a virtual hotel. I connected with someone at the front desk — a chat simulator, not a live actor — who led me through a series of questions that would help the staff at Vicurious to personalize my booking experience. The chat then directed me to peruse the videos on the website, which showed different rooms within the virtual hotel. These videos were uncomfortable, to say the very least, each one more unnerving than the last. The experience was only slightly more bearable knowing that the videos were fictional and not actual footage of hotel visitors.

        It would be remiss to ignore the brilliant performances delivered by the performers. The actors heightened the sense of uncertainty throughout the Vicurious experience through several disturbing performances, all executed with ease. I commend the company for fully embracing the discomfort of Vicurious; however, these performances did not resonate with me because I did not know why I was watching them. The concluding performance attempts to thread each of the previous videos together into a web of spirituality and self-determination, but this web falls flat because its strings have no substance. The dialogue, song and dance elements, spiritual encounters, and Beatles references (many, many Beatles references) may have been an attempt to make me reconsider my view of the world, but none of these factors proved developed enough to find a landing place.

        When I reached the final page of the Vicurious website, I felt that I was missing something. Looking back, I realized I was missing satisfaction. Temporary Occupancy succeeded in making me uncomfortable and causing me to question the world we live in, but I left questioning why the experience was so confusing. The dialogue throughout all of the videos felt like meaningless babble; in fact, I could hardly remember what I had just watched. In this regard, Temporary Occupancy lives up to its name. The characters, circumstances, and dialogue are all temporary. They do not matter. The feelings that lasted long after I closed my laptop really mattered: the sensations of confusion, discomfort, and wondering why.

        Temporary Occupancy succeeds at raising questions for the audience to consider, but the piece is so disjointed that I was incapable of finding the meaning at the complicated center. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a better example of what makes a successful piece of avant-garde theatre. The play is a tragicomedy featuring two men, Vladimir and Estragon, who stand on a deserted road and wait for a man named Godot to arrive. The play consists of seemingly meaningless dialogue between the two characters, but Beckett allows the audience to glean small pearls of wisdom out of the babble between the two characters, revealing that the dialogue is not so meaningless after all. In contrast, Temporary Occupancy contains only babble, making it extremely difficult to find the pearls that were quite possibly buried within the story. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon never travel down the road they stand on, but the playwright has given the audience the ability to navigate the space surrounding the context of the play. Temporary Occupancy preaches that humans have the freedom to decide their own path, yet the path that this theatrical experience takes is so cluttered with aimless dialogue and strange references that I was never able to figure out which direction the path was headed.

        As the pandemic continues to affect theatrical endeavors throughout the world, Philadelphia is no exception to the challenges that the theatre industry has faced over the past several months. The decision to try out a style of online, asynchronous theatre is something that I commend Philly FringeArts for implementing. This theatre experience, however, did not feel like a finished piece of work, but rather like a group project hastily constructed the night before the deadline. Each participant did their part well, but the final product did not reflect the themes of escape and self-determination like it seemingly intended. As for my worries about not being able to engage with the performance, I was surprised by how well I felt the actors’ emotions throughout the videos, and for this reason I look forward to FringeArts’ future online productions. Right now, however, I am left feeling like the only thing I gained from Temporary Occupancy was a lasting sense of confusion. If at one point I thought I was about to understand what was unfolding on my computer screen, that feeling was only temporary.