Fringe Fest’s Monica vs. The Internet tackles online hatred

There are few plays turning heads at this year’s Nutrien Fringe Festival quite like Monica vs. The Internet.

Pitting one woman against the vast online space may seem like a daunting task, but co-creator and actor Monica Ogden has been taking the small victories with her along the Fringe circuit this year.

The one-woman show’s first iteration hit stages in 2017, but it got its start around eight years earlier when Ogden created a YouTube channel called Fistful of Feminism to finish off her gender studies degree.

As she explored terms like intersectionality, reactions and comments to her videos soon exceeded anything her few hundred followers could have produced.

“The hatred that I got amounted to a famous YouTuber, and I have no idea how that happened,” she said. “With the thousands and thousands of comments that I amassed, and the hate videos that were made about me, I was the only one looking at it. So I thought I’ve got to use this content for something.”

Ogden, a Filipina mixed-raced woman, reached out to friend and now co-creator of the show Ann-Bernice Thomas to weave the racism and hatred hurled at Ogden into a production.

“It was more of a springboard to tell the stories of the Filipino women in my life,” Ogden said, pointing to her grandmother, her mother and herself. “The story is really about us three, the inter-generational trauma we share, living in a colonial nation-state, and so the comments are a way to draw people in because they know that kind of hatred exists, but it humanizes my experience.”

The production tackles a variety of social justice causes like growing up in a mixed-race home, pushing the conversations further, and the highlights and drawbacks of Ogden’s outspoken activism, all while working some self-pointed humour into the mix.

“I talk openly about white people, and white people don’t like to be called white people,” Ogden said, providing an example of the nature of her show. “So there are places where I do address that discrepancy.”

Leaving each show, Thomas gets a first-hand experience at the brief education the audiences received after Monica vs. The Internet.

“The discomfort is a lot more palpable. You can kind of feel the squeaky, awkward moving in the chairs,” Thomas said. “I love watching all of it and seeing where the jokes are landing. It’s always different every night.”

Monica vs. The Internet can be seen at the Victoria School Gymnasium until the festival wraps up on Saturday.