Please return to Empire Video: Calgary play rewinds to rentals

Lunchbox Theatre’s latest production hearkens to a bygone era where consuming a new movie meant leaving the couch, going to the store, interacting with other humans and taking a chance: 2003.

‘Please Return to Empire Video’ is a Canadian premiere hot-off-the-press new show written by southern Alberta playwright James Odin Wade.

It’s set at an interesting twist in the history of consuming media; a point in time when video rental stores stateside had made the shift to DVD, but Canadian locations had not. The American stores sent all their VHS tapes north, leaving the employees at a video store in southern Alberta to sort, stack, rewind, and stock thousands of tapes that had been dumped there.

Wade said he experienced it at Video Update in Lethbridge.

“They were just stacking them on the floor and that is where I saw most of my favourite movies and became really into movies,” he recalled.

From there, Wade worked at other video rental locations, movie theatres, and HMV locations. He said he gained a lot of affection for the types of people and characters, that chose to work at media sharing jobs,

“Who I might describe as people who express themselves better talking about art and media than they do without that artifice,” he said.

As the characters in the show rush through a late night of organizing the tapes hoping to make it to a late night screening of ‘The Matrix Reloaded,’ they share hot takes about contemporary films.

Wade said the way society now consumes media has really shifted the quality of film, and he feels that movies produced for streaming are not the same quality; that often times the expansion of a 90-minute concept into a six episode run does not serve the story.

“Netflix executives have talked about acknowledging that they are often a second screen experience, so they tell screen-writers to dumb down what they are saying so that someone who is cooking at the same time, or folding their laundry or scrolling on their phone will still understand the story,” Wade said.

He adds that he aims to watch movies in theatre, or movies that have been presented there.

The play is a wistful trip to the past of movie consumption, but Wade says it will also speak to anyone who has worked retail and formed friendships. The run time of the show is one hour.

Ticket information on the Lunchbox Theatre website.