[ad_1]
Jomar Tagatak (left) and BD Wong star in the world premiere of Kate Atwell’s Big Data at the American Conservatory Theatre.
There’s no denying that smartphones and social media have a huge impact on the human psyche and real-life relationships.
Distractions are always at hand, people are glued to their devices rather than engaging with each other, the information we receive is fed to us by algorithms, and we have a completely different picture of reality based on our browsing habits. It allows you to live inside.
The pitfalls of this online world have rarely been better illustrated than in Kate Atwell’s play Big Data, currently having its world premiere at the American Conservatory Theatre.
“Big Data” premiered at the same time as Ming-Na Lee’s “My Home on the Moon,” a very different play about online life invading the real world, was wrapping up its run at the nearby San Francisco Playhouse.
ACT previously premiered Test Match, Atwell’s time-travel drama about cricket and colonialism, in 2019, but Big Data is somehow even more adventurous, unconventional, funny and thought-provoking. This is a rich work.
The play focuses on how websites collect data about individuals and track their behavior in order to improve their marketing to individuals and influence their behavior for profit. Atwell does this not by explaining what particular companies are doing or developing events in a journalistic sense, but through characters who embody greedy information gathering and manipulation.
BD Wong is a man in a plaid suit who enters people’s lives, constantly observing, asking personal questions, and deducing out loud what kind of people they are. He appears throughout the play as Researcher M.
His whole demeanor changes depending on who he’s talking to. He is sometimes gently engaging, sometimes aggressive, sometimes smiling and dismissive. He translates some of their phrases, body language, and sometimes clothing into Lydia Tanzi’s clever costume design. But he always imposes people’s worst instincts, always provokes them, encourages them to do anything that might benefit him.
Charismatic and chameleon-like in appearance, Wong manipulates others with a grin and immoral amusement, as if to see what he can make them do just to do it. I’m looking at it.
His subjects are all couples who are part of the same family. Jomar Tagatak plays Max, an out-of-work writer whose worries about the world he has no control over make him laugh at his Logorean anxiety, unable to focus on getting anything done. His partner Lucy, played with professional poise by Rosie Hallett, is an otherwise stressful eye surgeon with a sense of holding the world together through sheer force of will. Therefore, the ways in which M weakens their defenses and inserts himself into their lives are completely different.
Lucy’s brother Sam and her husband Timmy are always at each other’s throats. Timmy, played by Michael Fillis, is refreshingly careless but jealous and easily excitable, while Sam, played by Gabriel Brown, is distrustful and defensive.
When M is in the room, as he always is, the two characters do not seem to be looking at him at the same time or in the same way. It is as if he is having a private conversation with each person at the same time, looks away when his partner is speaking, suggests hasty life changes, instigates arguments.
Sam and Lucy’s parents, Julia McNeil and Harold Surratt, exude a calm, easy-going demeanor and seem content with their quiet life. They are patient, cooperative, and loving towards other people’s various upsets, but they can also be gently evasive when it comes to certain topics. There’s something they don’t say. We don’t meet them until the second act, but they’re not at all what we expect, given previous comments about their children worrying about them. did.
Artistic director Pam McKinnon’s direction is exquisitely paced, dizzyingly fast and propulsive at times and arty and jarring in its long stretches of silence. The second act is completely different from the first, with one continuous scene of him rather than short, varying scenes, and the contrast is surprisingly effective.
Tanya Orellana’s scenic designs are stunning, starting with a sleek, minimalist set that resembles an iPhone, and evoking a lovingly cluttered country living room with stunning details that make you feel like you’ve lived your whole life inside the walls. I will set it.
Caitlin Pietras and Jason H. Thompson’s projection design is used to hypnotic effect in the first act, with a barrage of montages between scenes and alternating video perspectives of people on stage creating a sense of constant surveillance. I’ll give it. Madeleine Oldham’s Sounds Her designs are filled with delicate bird calls and aggressive loop music.
“Big Data” makes viewers think a lot about how we live today. But more than that, it’s a dazzling theatrical experience, hilarious and chilling, tense and original, and always completely engrossing. Like M, I know how to get your attention.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com.
‘big data’
Written by Kate Atwell, sponsored by American Conservatory Theater
Through: March 10
where: ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco.
Execution time: 2 hours 35 minutes, 1 break
ticket: From $25 to $130. 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org
[ad_2]
Source link
