A phenomenal critical success when first produced by Western Theatre Conspiracy in 2004, Omniscience is much more than a murder-mystery set in a quasi-familiar contemporary landscape of high-tech urban warfare. The plot, not surprisingly optioned already for a movie, is redolent with untrustworthy “embedded” journalists manufacturing positivist pseudodocumentaries about the ongoing victories of our military forces over any and all stripes of vaguely defined terrorists, hell-bent on destroying the “wellness” of our contemporary “free society.” We recognize immediately the storyline’s seamless meld with everyone’s favourite post-9/11 reality TV show, the Evening News. On reflection, however, that recognition is strangely discomforting if not downright threatening.

Omniscience subtly and relentlessly begs the question of how many of our freedoms we have already lost to the institutions engaged in our surveillance “for our own protection” and the uses they make of the power over our lives we have voluntarily abrogated to them through our support of such phenomena as The Patriot Act, anti-terrorism legislation and Operation Enduring Freedom. But ubiquitous surveillance has become a fact of our everyday lives not only in our public acts, but also in our private spaces where increasingly every conversation we have is monitored for the purposes of corporate and careerist “quality control.” What is so unique about Omniscience is not its patently transparent storyline, but its dialogue which so utterly reconfigures language that nouns become verbs, making all human actions a reflection of “industry standards” and corporate “best practices,” and verbs become nouns, so that no one can do, and everyone just is—no independent thought or action is conceivable that is not based on its ideal and preconceived corporatist template. What is so unsettlingly disturbing about Omniscience is how perfectly accomplished Tim Carlson is in his “dialoguing” of the corporatist, military-industrial Newspeak of our age.

Tim Carlson is the artistic producer of Theatre Conspiracy in Vancouver. Tim is currently leading Conspiracy’s creation of Live From the Bush of Ghosts, inspired by Amos Tutuola’s novel and the Brian Eno/David Byrne recording. He developed the newsroom comedy A Liar’s Guide to Non-Fiction during his time as artist-in-residence at the Vancouver Playhouse.Conspiracy’s premiere production of Omniscience was nominated for six Jessie Richardson theatre awards in 2005, including best production. Omniscience was translated in German in Theater der Zeit’s anthology, Dialog. The translation received a staged reading at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre in 2006 and was produced by Theater Magdeburg in 2007. The play premiered in the U.S. at Stage Left in Chicago in April 2008 and a Portuguese-language translation was produced by Novo Grupo de Teatro in Lisbon in June 2008.The Theatre Conspiracy production of Tim’s most recent play, Diplomacy, premiered at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in November 2006. He is also the author of the one-act newsroom comedies Night Desk (2001) and The Chronicle has Hart (2000). His short comedy The Reinvention of Minister Thorne is included in the Brave New Play Rites anthology (Anvil Press, 2006). A new one-act play, And this is this one, was recently produced by the Walking Fish Festival in Vancouver.As an arts writer and editor, Carlson has worked on staff at the Vancouver Sun and the Halifax Daily News and has also written regularly for the Georgia Straight, the Globe and Mail, and the Vancouver Review.Carlson was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up on a cattle ranch near Medicine Hat. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, earned a journalism degree at the University of King’s College, Halifax, and a BA in English from the University of Regina. Carlson is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and the Playwrights Theatre Centre in Vancouver. He teaches writing in Simon Fraser University’s Summer Publishing workshop.

Tim Carlson's profile page

“This assault on the modern media makes a clever stab at warning its audiences of what’s to come on this crazy granite planet … [A] nuanced murder-mystery … ”
— Vancouver Sun

“Omniscience is a gritty and complex drama with a clear, important message about … the censorship of mass media, the lack of true human contact, and the easy access to information about individuals in our society.”
— Canadian Literature