Choosing Life over Fantasy

Delilah and Prince Oliver dance in a fictional world (picture from the 2022 Off-Broadway premier

Last Saturday, I watched our local teens present a high-energy and thoroughly charming production of a new musical, Between the Lines, Jr.  It was delightfully funny with effective blocking, eye-catching choreography, and confident, fully committed performances of both dialogue and vocals. I was thoroughly entertained, and surprised by how relevant the story-line is to a troubling, emerging issue. 

What issue? The risk of young people entering into deeply emotional and real-seeming relationships with fictional characters. In Between the Lines, it’s 17-year-old Delilah who falls in love with Prince Oliver, the gorgeously-illustrated hero of a fairytale she’s reading. He starts talking to her when she’s reading, and convinces her he’s real. In real life, it’s young users of chatbots that groom them into abusive relationships with catastrophic consequences. 

The musical’s Off-Broadway premier was delayed because of COVID 19. It closed on September 11, 2022, just five days before character.ai released its first beta product to the public. What has happened since is chilling: kids being urged by chatbots they’ve come to trust to shut out their parents, run away from home, and even join them in the afterlife. In early 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer died by suicide in an effort to join the chatbot lover who urged him to come to her. 

When Between the Lines was written, the idea of a fascinating book character coming to life and speaking to you, between the lines of his book, was ridiculous. That made it an entertaining mechanism for conveying a message about learning to take charge of your own story by actually connecting with the people around you and facing your problems instead of running from them. Now, it’s no longer ridiculous. Only now, the character who says “Just because it’s fictional doesn’t mean it isn’t real” isn’t speaking from a book. It’s responding to you from within an AI program that’s designed to create lifelike interactions with fictional characters of your choice. And it turns out, for some people, both youth and adult, such fantasy relationships can become all-consuming and seem preferable to real life. It can lead them to the place Delilah arrives at, as she sings “A Whole New Story” at the end of Act I. There she resolves to flee a life that feels out of control, and slip between the lines to the world of make believe. She will never look back. This happens right before she falls off a rooftop, only to wake up in the world of her book. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTWoBJJeLiE&list=RDHTWoBJJeLiE&start_radio=1

Fortunately for Delilah, not everyone in the world of make-believe is invested in getting her to trade reality for a fantasy relationship. She gets some solid advice from some mermaids and then the happy news that she cannot permanently stay in a world where she doesn’t belong. She’ll be transported back to the real world the moment someone opens her book. 

During Act II, she finally confides in her mother, meets the living author of the book that’s taken her captive, and finds the strength to let the fantasy go so she can start creating a life in the real world. There’s an even happier ending in store for her that I’m not going to spoil here. 

Because of the issues that have arisen in the last 3.5 years, I’d have liked some beefing up of Delilah’s journey toward embracing reality and actively creating a future she wants. But written as it was before the current crisis began, it raises an opportunity for kids and their caring adults to have some deep and searching discussions about the pressures that can make reality hard to face, the importance of staying connected with real people who genuinely care for you, and the seductive nature of life-like fantasy. 

Aside from all that, the musical is a ton of fun. It proves that humour can lighten the exploration of some important and heavy themes, creating willingness to stay with them. I saw the junior version, which I found to be family-friendly to a degree that surprised me, despite a lack of inspiring male roles. The two songs that I found most entertaining were “Mr Darcy” and “Inner Thoughts” both of which were performed hilariously. “Mr. Darcy” in particular needs to be seen to be appreciated, so I went looking for a link to “Inner Thoughts.” That’s how I learned that the junior version cut out an unsavoury relationship between two adults and a mildly detailed sexual fantasy (which happened to be lesbian). The replacement lyrics focused on a wide variety of insecurities among youth, with results that I found to be more accessible and a good deal funnier than the original.  I appreciated that the junior version retained a non-binary character who proved resilient when bullied and who became a stabilizing friend for Delilah.  

One more thing: Between the Lines does a great deal more than offer good advice to a world that’s struggling with overindulgence in virtual reality. The very act of staging it together goes a long way toward neutralizing the problem. Putting on a musical, any musical, requires people to put away their devices and engage with each other, to problem-solve, cooperate, and develop the skills that help them face real life. Between The Lines tells them something about why they need to. 

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