Hooligan Theatre Company takes on gaming addiction “In Real Life”
By Coleton Schmitto
May 26, 2011 12:00 a.m.
In 2005, a 28-year-old South Korean man died from heart failure after playing a computer game for 50 consecutive hours. Fascinated by the obsessive nature of many online gamers, UCLA alumnus Alexandar Castaneda was inspired to write the premise of a new musical.
Today, Hooligan Theatre Company will give a debut performance of the musical “irl (In Real Life),” at 8 p.m. in the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center Amphitheater.
“irl (In Real Life)” centers on August, an ex-gamer whose type A personality girlfriend, Molly, gets him back on his feet after he is evicted from his apartment. However, August soon relapses when he secretly attends a sci-fi gaming convention without his girlfriend’s knowledge. For the first time, August comes face-to-face with his closest online friends in person, including a former romance. In this encounter, August comes to the struggle of whether he and Molly share the same longing for a conventional lifestyle.
Castaneda, who wrote the script, said that the main message he wanted to communicate was to do what you care about, regardless of societal pressures.
“In college, it feels very much like you are set on a life path, jumping from stone to stone. … It may feel like if you don’t follow the path, you’ll fall off and end up bereft, but really, the only path to follow in life is the one that you make for yourself,” Castaneda said.
According to Lyle Barrere, a recent alumnus and founding artistic director of Hooligan Theatre Company, they have planned on performing this musical for past two years.
After playing guitar in the orchestra for Hooligan’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” Mark Popeney went to Barrere with the idea for the show. Barrere said that the musical isn’t only meant for hard-core gamers.
“Whether a sci-fi nerd or a music geek, everyone is geeky in something, and this musical is about finding the person whose geek goes with yours,” Barrere said.
This theme is particularly celebrated in the song “Nerds Will Rise,” a comical number that fourth-year Central and Eastern European languages and cultures student Ariella Roughton described as the anthem of the show. Roughton plays the role of Molly, a character who represents the perspective of audience members who may find themselves puzzled by the Internet memes that are frequently referenced throughout the performance. However, Roughton assured that this musical is targeted toward everyone.
“If you may not understand a certain joke fully, you’ll still find the situations funny,” Roughton said. “I think Molly is a really relatable character because she doesn’t always have a clue to what’s going on around her.”
Popeney, who wrote and composed the music for the show, said he was heavily influenced by retro video games, incorporating the sounds of 8-bit synthesizers, ’80s pop and rock music. His priority was to write a multifaceted score in which every song would sound as though it could be played on the radio. One key source of inspiration for Popeney was the music of the late Michael Jackson.
“Michael Jackson died when I was writing a few of these songs, so there’s a big dance groove through a lot of the music that you wouldn’t necessarily expect for this kind of rock. I would go running and would listen to songs like “˜Off the Wall’ and “˜Rock With You’ over and over again,” Popeney said.
“I personally believe that if you’re not feeling nervous during a time that something of yours goes up, or if you’re about to go onstage and you don’t have butterflies, you don’t truly care about what you’re doing,” Castaneda said.
