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Cat Killer presents the purrfect crime

Interactive thriller blends video and live performance

Cat Killer, March 5 to 15 at Presentation House Theatre, 333 Chesterfield Ave., North Vancouver. Start times vary. Tickets: $15/$20, available at phtheatre.org or by calling 604-990-3474.

Curiosity killed the proverbial cat, but it's a mystery what caused the disappearance of scads of frisky felines in a new North Vancouver theatre production.

Were they eaten by a hungry cougar? Sacrificed in the name of science at the nearby research centre? Targeted by a crazed serial cat killer who was driven to violence by video games? Or perhaps there's an entirely different reason why hundreds of Ottawa-area cats would go missing in a matter of weeks.

Presentation House Theatre invites people to experience Cat Killer and investigate the situation for themselves. The show is a co-production with Germany's Theatre Wrede and it strays from the traditional sit-and-watch style of theatre.

"It's called a guided video walk experience," explains Presentation House Theatre's artistic director Kim Selody, who created Cat Killer with Winfried Wrede. Rather than being presented on stage in front of an auditorium, the story will unfold through promenade-style theatre. Spectators, in groups of three, will be guided to different locations in and around the theatre. They will also be given video cameras that show pre-recorded footage, putting them inside the head of an avid video gamer suspected of killing the missing cats.

"It's a mixture of video and live performance," Selody says, explaining that live actors appear along the promenade route.

Over the course of 75 minutes, theatregoers can attempt to piece together the mystery, which playfully combines elements of fantasy and reality, Selody says.

Cat Killer is loosely based on true events that took place in Ottawa in the 1990s when more than 400 cats - an unusually high number - were reported missing over the course of three months. The media began to speculate as to why the cats went missing, entertaining the possibility that a local gamer massacred them. The show premiered in 2013 in Germany where it continues to play.

"People found it thrilling, suspenseful, very engaging. It's meant to be exciting," Selody says of the German production.

The upcoming North American debut is essentially the same as the original, but uses an English script and has been adapted to flow through the Chesterfield Avenue theatre building.

"The plan all along was for us to create a Canadian version with Canadian actors," Selody says. The show has staggered start times with groups leaving the start point every five minutes. This necessitates a large cast, so Presentation House Theatre has collaborated with the Capilano University theatre program and its graduating students. "Because of the nature of the piece, it created a really good opportunity for mentoring these emerging professional theatre artists," Selody says.

At face value, Cat Killer is an interactive whodunit crime thriller, but beyond that, the show also explores the effects of technology on humans.

"It looks at what the impact our excessive exposure to screens and our addiction to looking at screens may be having on our brains in terms of empathy," Selody explains. "Are video games really bad for you?" Of course, Cat Killer makes use of the very screens it calls into question, allowing Presentation House Theatre to offer a different kind of live entertainment experience - one that may be more relevant to the younger generation and one that Selody hopes will entice people who don't typically go to the theatre.

"Today people are spending a lot of time on social media, they spend a lot of time finding information through their screens and they make decisions very quickly in terms of where they go and they're looking for experiences," he says.

Cat Killer presents a balance between the live performance regular theatregoers are familiar with, and the interactive, digital entertainment experience that has become so prevalent today.

"What this enables us to do is to use the technology of today that has become ubiquitous that everybody's got and try and use that tool to tell the story, but still make it a storytelling experience that's live theatre," Selody says.

That said, he hopes the production will appeal to multiple generations. "One of the most difficult things to do is to try and find a shared experience with your teenager. . . there's so few things that you both would do, and this is one."