LINCOLN SQUARE — Shawn Bowers has one goal in life.
"To never be the a------," said the writer/director/performer.
That's easier said than done, considering that Bowers, 29, has spent the past two years passing himself off as a woman on Internet dating sites.
The result is "The Goldfish Project," one part social experiment, one part theater in which Bowers and friends, performing for free on a quarterly basis, read from the conversations he's had with the men who've approached his alter ego online.
Bowers admits to Patty Wetli that his rouse is in an ethically gray area:
"I can see how people would not agree with what we're doing," said Bowers, who admits he was catfished himself prior to moving to Chicago five years ago from his hometown of Overland Park, Kan.
"She was a voice, we talked on the phone," he said. "We had built up this really functional relationship" and then he discovered that his web girl had not only lied about working at the University of Chicago Press, she didn't even live in the United States.
"People want to believe," said Bowers. "When it's love on the line, you will go along with so much."
At its essence, that's what "The Goldfish Project" is about — finding out how long a person will remain on the hook in the face of copious red flags, as well as how emboldened people become by the anonymity of virtual dating.
"If anybody comes out 'anti' in this scenario, it's always guys," said Bowers. "A lot of guys are really aggressive off the bat about sex. If this guy were in a bar, he would never do this. But there's this weird empowerment of when you're scrolling through a catalog of humans."
The idea for the project was born out of Bowers' frustration with his own lack of luck on sites like OkCupid.
"You send out a lot of messages as a guy and you don't get a lot of responses back," said Bowers.
Meanwhile all of his female friends were complaining about being swamped with cyber-suitors. His life as an undercover female was born.
He set up a profile purposely meant to be as "vanilla as possible," found a treasure trove of photos on a defunct MySpace account to use for images of him/herself and immediately began fielding offers from guys who took the bait.
"I didn't have a show in mind when I first started it," Bowers said, but he gradually began exploring ways to turn his experiences into a performance piece that wasn't cruel or prank-based.
Acknowledging the moral ambiguity of his experiment, Bowers said he developed a code of ethics for the project: He never initiates the conversation, only responding to someone else's query; he'll only continue the relationship as long as the guy does; and if someone seems sincere about searching for true love, he doesn't respond at all.
"It's the low-hanging targets that I'm after," he said. "The best conversations are when the guys are really driving it, these guys who won't let up. You can't make that happen."
Like the guy who didn't try to hide the fact that he was married.
"His profile even says, 'I'm married. Is that a problem?" Bowers said.
"As it went on, I, in character, started to feel guilty," he said. "I know all the problems in his marriage."
Bowers said he took on the role of a quasi-counselor, suggesting ways the fellow could reconnect with his wife.
"I kept giving him all of these outs," he said — but it would always return to sex.
For "The Goldfish Project," playing Friday and Saturday at DANK Haus, 4740 N. Western Ave., Bowers is joined on stage by three readers taking turns acting out exchanges from his online chats, which typically revolve around a single theme. Each reader also contributes a piece drawn from his or her own life.
During the early days of the show, Bowers used to project photos of the men involved and screen grabs of their emails.
"I started feeling bad, so now I give them code names," he said. "The words speak for themselves."
Audience reaction, once people understand what he's doing, is generally positive, Bowers said.
"People come for the salaciousness" and stick around for the social commentary, he said. "They leave saying, 'OK, it wasn't just sex jokes.'"
So how long does Bowers plan on maintaining the ruse?
"I don't know," he said. "I think we parlay this into another experiment."
He's already developed a faux Facebook profile, posing as a 40-something-year-old man who lives in Michigan.
"He speaks with poor grammar," Bowers said of his creation. "He's like the anti-troll — he's always sincerely naive."
He said he treats the social media site like a form of serialized storytelling, carrying out plotlines through a succession of status updates and comments.
The character "was married for a long time, he has a son. He got divorced, then he got wrapped up in a cult. He got a cat," Bowers said. "It's bizarre how real he's become to me."
Real to a lot of other people too — the guy has 500 "friends."
The possibilities for replicating Goldfish-type projects are endless, he said. Future targets could include Yelp! or Craigslist or a website's comments section.
"They're disaster zones, these piles of creeps and weirdos," said Bowers. "It's always about playing with communication."
Despite all the time he's spent interacting with these creeps and weirdos, Bowers said he remains a believer in online dating — it's how he met his girlfriend of the past two years.
But he does have a few words of advice for those using the medium to make a true love connection.
"If you want to find a normal person: A) be a normal person and B) reply back to others as you would reply back to yourself," he said.
"The Goldfish Project" is a production of New Colony Theater. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at DANK Haus. Tickets are free but can be reserved in advance.
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