Remember the VHS? New Lunchbox Theatre show revisits the world of the video store

Catch 'Please Return to Empire Video' at Lunchbox Theatre March 25 - April 13, 2025.

A new play by Calgary playwright James Odin Wade takes audiences on a nostalgia-fuelled ride back to your local video store.

Please Return to Empire Video, which opened Thursday, is set in 2003 in a small town Alberta video rental store where three movie lovers must organize hundreds of VHS tapes in time to make it to a sneak peek screening of The Matrix Reloaded.

It’s the final play of Lunchbox Theatre’s 50th anniversary season, and even though it’s about movies, it’s also about a time when people connected about movies in person rather than online.

Odin Wade said in a media release that he wrote the play as a nostalgic elegy for the days when movies were a source of passionate debate and people had to go out to get them and talk to each other.

It was first workshopped in 2023 as part of the Lunchbox Stage One Festival, which is the theatre company’s new play development series.

“It depicts the friendship that develops around the love of shared favourite movies,” said director Bronwyn Steinberg, “as well as the heated debates bout the not-so-favourites.

“Stories are such an important part of how we understand each other as humans, and I feel like this was magnified by having the actual VHS or DVD in hand.”

Please Return to Empire Video also features a set where the back wall is constructed entirely of 1,200 VHS cassette tapes that were donated to Lunchbox in January.

The show runs through April 13 at the studio in Vertigo Theatre, at the base of the Calgary Tower.

For more information, go here or call the box office at 403-221-3708.