The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes: Becomes Luminescent

This review of The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes won’t take up too much space—not because it doesn’t deserve copious column inches but because it’s a piece of unexpectedly brilliant theater about which giving too much away would undermine its maximum effect.

And don’t let the initially pretentious-sounding title put you off. By the time the 65-minute Under the Radar import from Australia finishes, its meaning is all too clear and gorgeously pertinent and pungent.

At the outset four players appear, one by one—Scott Price, then Sarah Mainwaring, then Michael Chan, then Simon Laherty. Each is also involved in the writing, as are Michael Deans, Sonia Teuben, and Bruce Baldwin. Baldwin directs.

Moreover, each is either—in the current politically correct vernacular—physically or mentally challenged. Scott, making sure the point isn’t missed, wears a T-shirt on which someone (Price himself?) has written “Autistic Pride.” Sarah’s condition appears to be cerebral palsy. Simon walks with a shuffle. (The actors use their first names throughout.)

Scott, more than the others, has a speech impediment, which is one reason why everything he and his colleagues say is repeated in surtitles projected on a back wall. Scott even makes a joke about not being consistently understood. It’s a joke at which the audience laughs—with him, not at him.

And the audience isn’t merely being polite.  Much more than that: It’s a response that has nothing to do with the thought that Scott, Sarah, Michael and Simon are being brave—are being courageous—in performing despite their limitations.

Not a bit of it. The collective audience response has everything to do with what the four have to say to each other. It also has to do with a few tasks involving shifting chairs and a large white cube. Even more importantly, the response relates to what they convey to the audience about not only the disabilities they have—there’s a moment when Sarah is meant to speak but forgets what she’s supposed to say—but also about the less visible disabilities that might be regularly experienced by a wider swath of the population.

In the Under the Radar program, a description of The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes notes that what’s in store is “discussion of mass food production, human rights, the social impact of automation, and the projected dominance of artificial intelligence in the world.”

Everything but the kitchen sink. They get around to much of it—but not before Scott opens with a series of explanations and advice to Sarah about proper and improper places for certain sexual behaviors, e.g., when and where to masturbate. The exchange is genuinely funny, perhaps funniest when Scott tells Sarah to avoid pedophiles, and she reminds him she’s 36.

The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes is framed as a meeting that Scott, Sarah, Michael and Simon are leading for the audience. They’re intent on imparting instructions, insights and warnings to the unenlightened. They’re passing along pressing information, though at times they indicate they’re not convinced that those attending their urgent meeting (us) are as yet absorbing their message about human limitations in a broader sense.

Saying anything more detailed than artificial intelligence and its eventual widespread ramifications is a strong focus risks giving away the solar-plexus wallop that The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes delivers. So no more will be said, other than TSWPTHB is an indisputable must-see.

Reporting that Price, Mainwaring, Chan and Laherty are crackerjack at what they do is flat-out understatement. They’re obviously not playing themselves. They’re being themselves.  They’re being themselves in a successful mission to inform as many audiences as they can that limitations are not an absolute situation but are relative to the individual. Theirs is an insightful pronouncement worthy of the kind of standing ovation that nowadays has become ho-hum elsewhere.