MeTube at Collaboraction

★☆☆☆☆

Collaboraction. By Rachel Havrelock. Dirs. Havrelock and John Wilson. With Yuri Lane. 1hr; no intermission.

Though video-sharing site YouTube is just seven years old, its role as a platform for viral fame has quickly become commonplace. The ever-churning pace of YouTube notoriety has shrunk Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes to 15 seconds. Just ask Chris “leave Britney alone!” Crocker or Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday—if you can find them. 

Indeed, Internet media like YouTube have made temporary fame so accessible and so fleeting that to create and perform a piece of live theater about one’s brief YouTube popularity, as beat-boxer Yuri Lane does in MeTube, could be either brilliantly meta or Gingrich-level grandiose. As the title might imply, MeTube is the latter.

Lane’s hour-long piece, with a script by his wife, Rachel Havrelock, details his experience as a relatively early YouTube star. His beat-box harmonica video blew up on the site in early 2007, not long after Google purchased YouTube. The deep-pocketed search giant was in the mood to promote its new toy, and Lane soon found himself beat-boxing for sheikhs at Davos. But like Crocker and Zonday, both of whom Lane briefly impersonates here, Lane’s notoriety fades faster than his ego could handle. He finds himself obsessing over his video’s hit count and ends up at a humiliating audition for America’s Got Talent. And that’s about it. Lane’s mic skills are intermittently impressive; his observations aren’t. In an age when 20-year-olds are cranking out memoirs, the standards of notability may have sunk, but Lane’s slight story still doesn’t merit most-viewed status.—Kris Vire