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 a playwright, songwriter, journalist who co-founded Theatre Conspiracy and served as artistic producer from 2008 to 2022. He led the creation of Foreign Radical, which won the 2015 Jessie Award Critics Choice Innovation prize and a 2017 Edinburgh Fringe First Award. The script was recently published in Canadian Theatre Review. His play, Isolation Suite, was turned into an audiobook series in 2021 and he is currently writing The Dynamics, set to premiere in the 2024/’25 season.Carlson’s documentary play, Victim Impact, premiered at The Cultch in Vancouver in June 2018. He also co-created, wrote the music for, and performed in Tanya Marquardt’s Stray, seen at The Tank in New York and SummerWorks in Toronto in 2018, as well as Vancouver in 2019. He was researcher/ interviewer for Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll’s latest show, Top Secret International, seen at the 2017 Under the Radar Festival in New York as well as researcher/ dramaturg for Best Before (Rimini Protokoll, @ PuSh 2010) and 100% Vancouver (Rimini Protokoll / Theatre Replacement, @ PuSh 2011).The 2013 show Extraction, won the Rio Tinto Alcan Award, Canada’s largest prize for new play development. His play Omniscience(Talonbooks, 2007) was nominated for six Jessie Richardson theatre awards in 2005, including best production. Omniscience was translated in German in Theater der Zeit’s antholoTgy, 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.He founded Club PuSh with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver and served as co-curator along with Veda Hille and Norman Armour from 2009 to 2016.As a journalist, he worked on staff at the Halifax Daily News, Vancouver Sun and Georgia Straight. He holds an English degree from University of Regina, a journalism degree from University of King’s College, Halifax, and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.

Tim Carlson's profile page

“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

“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