Stepping into the Frederic Wood Theatre on Pyper’s opening night was like walking into another world. Littered with flashy balloons, the stage featured only one central set piece — a three-stepped structure curved towards the audience. Hanging almost ominously above the structure were ten microphones on brightly coloured wires. Beyond them, the theatre’s backstage was openly visible; scaffolding, shelves, wires and theatre equipment all laid bare for the audience to see.
With a brief yet intriguing plot description — “ten AI-Cyborg teens make a time capsule to prove their existence” — Pyper is the UBC Department of Theatre and Film’s latest production, directed by UBC Assistant Professor Leora Morris. The script is by Susanna Fournier, who won the Playwright’s Guild of Canada’s Tom Hendry Award for it in 2025. Morris said the core values of the piece were “delight, boldness, fluidity or flexibility and authentic presence.” Throughout the production’s jumps in tone, their continued attention laid in emphasizing and linking each of their choices back to the identified main values.
Pyper presented an intense but honest reflection on modern-day anxieties, frequently combining elements of absurdity with drama and emotion. The play’s cast of ten were the “Real Kids,” cyborgs attempting to create a time capsule to memorialize their own existence before being “retired.”
The cast worked remarkably well to capture the intensity and emotion of the storylines while remaining punchy, cohesive and engaging despite tonal swings. Scenes like Rachele Rutherford’s tear-wrenching portrayal of the mayor’s existential crisis showed how easily the cast managed to switch between lively scenes — that almost purposefully emphasized a lighter, gimmicky feel — and the deep, emotional messages that they easily brought from under the surface.
It would be hard to distinguish between the performances of each individual actor because so much of the cast’s strength lay in their collective interaction and chemistry. Each actor embodied a particular personality which shone through consistently. According to Morris, it was mostly left to the actors to figure out the particulars of their own characters. Each night, they performed a new version of the cleanup scene, in which the Real Kids tidied away the balloons as they neared the end of their story, without any blocking by the director beyond a list of tasks they had to accomplish.
Pyper managed to take the audience on an information-packed journey that made each theme resonant and profound. Themes included artificial intelligence, data collection and surveillance, relationships with parents and anxiety — but also delved into school shooting trauma, trans rights and queer acceptance. In this regard, the plot felt complex and overwhelming at times, but it slowly came together as each smaller story found its place in the overarching narrative.
Morris said Fournier told her the script was inspired by “the energy of scrolling” between reels, which Morris used as “a guiding inspiration for the kind of jerky ways that [the play] jumps from scene to scene.” This echoes the energy of moving through the digital age while getting hit with different stimuli.
Another fascinating element of Pyper’s direction was the way it blurred the lines between the actors and audience, which went further than your typical fourth wall breaks. Throughout the show, the audience itself became part of a theatrical device, as the recipients of the time capsule and the last victim of the Pyper, the enigmatic monster that emerged from the Pied Piper narrative.
One highlight was when Mia Shanks’ character — after a monologue about her fixation on sound — invited the entire audience to participate in the play in one collective moment, where both actors and viewers sat in silence, hands covering their ears to listen to their own bodies. Morris explained that she wanted the audience to “have an experience of the theatre where they are asked to be attentive to their own presence in the collaborative environment with the actors.”
The play’s set design by Sonia Nosrati heightened the immersion and dramatic tensions of the play. The actors used the balloons and the coloured microphones throughout the play to convey new settings, create new voices and characters and provide a visual reminder of the play’s emphasis on technology. Morris said the creative team’s original workshops included ideas like a giant Aztec pyramid with a ball pit on top, which the actors would play in for the whole show. The final version — the uncovered Frederic Wood stage as a void inhabited by the balloons and central structure — was a little more meta. The play took place in a theatre, both in real life and within the story.
“[Fournier] says that the play is happening wherever the play is actually happening,” said Morris. This meant that every element included in the play directly reflected this. The plank of wood used in Pinocchio's tale or the blond braids of the German family — made of theatrical cabling — were all made out to be objects the Real Kids would have found in the theatre where they filmed the capsule.
The sound design by Emma Hamilton and lighting by Eric Chad were an essential part of the show’s more eerie and haunting moments. The character of the Pyper — played collectively by the main cast decked out in a suit of balloons — transforming the actors’ voices through the microphones made it much stronger, and the sounds that accompanied the Pyper’s movement — an amalgamation of swooshes, buzzes and other sound effects — were intentionally non-musical.
As a frequent overintellectualizing/overthinking theatregoer — an accusation I get from most of my friends who come with me to pieces that I’m reviewing — Pyper was amazing food for thought. While I had 40 minutes to explore my curiosity with Morris, I remembered wishing during the opening that I had come back a second time with a more rested brain to be able to better appreciate its nuances and complexities.
Brain-scratching and question-inducing, Pyper was unequivocally profound and successfully made the audience feel everything it throws at them, which is a testament to this specific production beyond a timely and relevant text for young people of our generation.
