The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes is a scary (and amusing) view of the AI future

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• Title: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes
• Created by: Michael Chan, Mark Deans, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price and Sonia Teuben
• Director: Bruce Gladwin
• Actors: Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price
• Company: Back to Back Theatre presented by Canadian Stage and PuSh Festival
• Venue: Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto; the York Theatre in Vancouver; online through pushfestival.ca.
• Year: To Jan. 28, 2024 in Toronto; Feb. 1 to 4 in Vancouver and online

Critic’s Pick

The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, now on stage at Canadian Stage in Toronto and soon to be both on stage and live-streamed from the PuSh Festival in Vancouver, is here to deliver a warning about artificial intelligence.

Simon, Sarah and Scott have called a community meeting to talk about what all humans might expect as AI expands. (These characters’ first names are same as the actors, who are also among the show’s co-creators: Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, and Scott Price.)

If we don’t watch out, this trio tells us, the future could be a lot like the past – and the present in some places – for those with intellectual disabilities like them: Exploitation, abuse, enslavement.

Shadow, then, is a frightening caution about what might happen that, as in most dystopian storytelling, makes its points through shameful reminders of what has happened. But this savvy show from Australia’s Back to Back Theatre is also funny and surprising, its simple presentation always pulses with a messy and real love of humanity. Get on its wavelength and it’s not only a rewarding, but an entertaining night for spectators who like to hunt the avant-garde.

The audience is called upon to play a role as well in this show that lies somewhere on the spectrum between performance art and a play: A caption seen on an above-stage screen does not situate us at the Berkley Street Theatre in Toronto (where I saw it), but at a community hall in Geelong, Australia.

So, too, does a land acknowledgment delivered by Simon, while he is heckled by Scott, that brilliantly gets at both the absurd and sincere sides of that practice.

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As Shadow progresses, it is revealed that the screen is transcribing every line spoken by the performers as they say it. Indeed, the characters start to talk about it – and it becomes a kind of fourth character in director Bruce Gladwin’s production.

We are told that the screen works through voice recognition and has learned to understand Simon, Sarah and Scott’s unique ways of speaking English.

Scott, a burly man with a big beard in an Autism Pride shirt, is thankful for this technology allowing the audience to understand him through what he calls his thick autistic and Australian accent.

But Sarah, a short-haired and sharp, staccato presence on stage, feels it is insulting – and that the audience should be doing the work of understanding her, not staring at a screen instead of her. (Her irritation is highly relatable.)

Shadow, which first toured through Canada last year to Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques and the Carrefour international de théâtre in Quebec, was originally created in 2020 – and so it’s not necessarily on the bleeding edge of discussions about AI. But that makes it seem less trendy than thoughtful.

Plus it’s not only the use of technology that the three holding this community meeting disagree on – but the way humans constantly download language updates, too. Sarah, for instance, does not feel the term “intellectual disability” applies to her and does not seem that fond of “neurodiverse” either. She has a head injury, she says bluntly, cutting through the euphemisms of her more expressive onstage partners.

The extent to which the actors are performing their characters’ neurodiversity, as opposed to showing their own, is as unclear to the audience as the question of how much they are performing or revealing any other aspect of themselves.

Back to Back Theatre, popular on the global theatre festival circuit since 2007, recently won the International Ibsen Prize. The company’s rise is part of a larger artistic movement over the past two decades – seen in Canada as well – towards the inclusion and sometimes absorption of disability arts into the larger performing arts ecosystem.

That has perhaps reached its apogee with How to Dance in Ohio, a new musical about a mental health centre for autistic people, currently playing on Broadway with most of its characters played by autistic performers.

But accompanying this mainstreaming has been a sometimes worrying commodification of the aesthetic of inclusion which, in some cases, can end up putting the spotlight mainly on neurodiverse artists who are the most “high functioning.”

What stands out to me about Shadow is how thoroughly form and content are connected – and how that allows for true neurodiversity to exist and be performed and be valuable in and of itself on stage. There’s also no sense of self-congratulatory novelty – this is the “first” X, Y or Z! – about what Back to Back does at this point. Laherty has been working with the company since 1999 and joined the ensemble in 2003; Mainwaring and Price have been a part of the ensemble since 2007. So, Shadow is a warning about AI, the Australian company behind it models hope for a future where all intelligences can work together and create great things over the long term.