Walt McGough invents delightful characters,
like Tower Girl, the accidental (super) heroine of PAPER CITY PHOENIX (@ Boston
Playwrights’ Theatre through July 27th). He writes immensely clever
dialogue and wildly imaginative scenarios like PAPER CITY’s
cautionary tale about our omnipresent internet culture.
We’ve all sold our souls to the internet.
It’s already taken over our lives so it’s no stretch to suggest that we could
be totally controlled by the electronic monster. As one of McGoegh’s characters
warns, “If the internet collapses, there will be no record of anything.”
To remedy this, Tower Girl’s friend, Gale,
begins to make printouts of everything on the web, starting alphabetically.
This, of course, triggers the homeland security police, who troll cyberspace
looking for possible crime. (And we now know that our e-mails and internet
activity really are under surveillance.)
The only people in PAPER CITY
who have sworn off the internet are a flock (and don’t call them a “cult”) of
Luddites. I always root for Luddites but when everything (“No more networks, no
more clouds, no more electricity”) is destroyed during a singularity, they’re
not much help.
In McGeough’s vision of global disaster,
people are sucked into the ether, a sort of limbo where internet automatons
have started “rendering” humans obsolete to make room for more data. These
authoritarian robots speak a lot like Tony Kushner’s angels (“I, I, I”) but
they’re not nearly as kind.
Not to worry. Tower Girl (the wonderfully
manic Caroline L. Price) who was struck by lightening in the first scene, can
communicate with them. Gale (Danielle Lucas) finds her working cell phone and
the two set out to save the world. Alas, when the electricity comes back on, so
does the internet and we’re back to where we started, with no one communicating
face to face.
Director Melanie Garber’s crackerjack cast
keeps all of McGeogh’s balls in the air and I hardly noticed that the last bit
(of plot) had gotten away from me, I was so engrossed. Michael Fisher is wryly
amusing as the novice in David W. Frank’s doomed Luddite movement and Monica
Shea and Anthony Rios make goofy, chummy cops. (Shea morphs with panache after
intermission into one of those computer geek bots.)
Rendition comes up again in Christopher
Durang’s broad, satirical swipe at the religious right and their love of
gunplay, WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM (opening July 25th
appropriately @ the Arsenal
Center). The Titanic
Theatre Company’s raucous production is full of barbs aimed at our national
obsession with the “War on Terror.”
Poor Felicity (a lovely Caroline Rose
Markham) wakes up from a drug rape to find herself married to an unsavory
character named Zamir (an edgy Alexander J. Morgan). Her pistol happy pappy
(the spectacularly outrageous Jeff Gill) calls in his paramilitary pals (Alisha
Jansky in the “pants” role and Brett Milanowski in the “Bugs Bunny” part) to
torture the man and get him to confess his Al-Qaeda connections.
Durang lampoons everything from
the rights of a fetus (to vote, of course!)… to the use of torture under the
new “Terror” guidelines… to Tom Stoppard’s lengthy three-part UTOPIA. (Sometimes
his targets wander a bit.) Most of the humor lands successfully thanks to
director Adam Zahler’s devotion to the absurd. It’s an awfully long play but whenever
it started to flag on opening night, Gill’s antics brought the energy back with
another infusion of madness. Zahler gets fine comedic work, too, from Shelley
Brown as Gill’s wacky, distracted wife and from Jonathan Barron as a new age
minister who makes porn films (and gets to deliver one of the worst puns I’ve
ever heard!).
