Moderation

What is exciting about Kevin Kautzman’s play Moderation is the premise that there are social media content moderators that are forced to watch the darkest disturbing matter and decide whether to remove, suspend or report them. And how these moderators become more and more disturbed by the content they are subjected to do daily, with only short comfort breaks for release.

Here we met ‘He’ a long-term moderator desperate to move from his freelance status to a fill-time company person and ‘She’ a newly appointed moderator experiencing the sheer horror of some of the content for the first time. This should allow for a clear narrative that deals with a very real concern for many people today. That of how to monitor what we see and what is actually true or fake in an ever more complex connection with global news. However, this plot line gets too muddled with other issues that draw us away from the really important message it could have.

Both actors, Robbie Curran and Alice Victoria Winslow are totally committed to their roles of cat and mouse and the power switches that occur when both He and She struggle in their own ways to survive. There is a really nice mix of humour leading to more tragic consequences when He tries to get too close to She, and is thwarted in his rise to become a company man.

It is striking that they use some visual imagery to set the scenario but then the truly disturbing matter is viewed ‘out front’ so we as the audience are asked to imagine what that content could be. When this includes a video concerning goldfish, and apparently one of the most disturbing, this is left unresolved and feels a somewhat wasted moment. In fact, the balance between their down-time and on-line activity swerves to far into the personal chit-chat and we lose some of the impact of the overarching premise.

Director Lydia Parker does well with the overly verbose script to draw as much tension as she can. But with so much content it never quite reaches its potential.


Photo credit: Suzette Coon