“An Ark” Imagines the Afterlife; “Data” Imagines a Corporate Hell
Before you enter “An Ark,” a “mixed reality” performance at the Shed, you check your coat and, more oddly, your shoes. Contact lenses are recommended. Inside, there are three concentric circles of chairs arranged on a red carpet and, overhead, a white globe resembling a hot-air balloon. A docent explained that, through my virtual-reality headset, I would see four more chairs—and, ideally, they shouldn’t float. They did float, so she adjusted the tech.
Minor glitches aside, the V.R. experience was crisply efficient, like a good day at the D.M.V. Express. Unfortunately, the show itself, directed by Sarah Frankcom, was blander stuff: less mind-bending spectacle, more earnest meditation. After an ominous rumble, four holographic figures apparated, then sat in their virtual chairs, facing me. One of them was Ian McKellen, draped in Jedi white, who purred, “Don’t panic.” What followed was forty-seven minutes of an existential monologue by the British playwright Simon Stephens, chorally divided among the quartet: two twinkly elders, played by McKellen and Golda Rosheuvel; a young woman, who seemed skeptical and hostile and therefore more relatable, played by Rosie Sheehy; and a young man who was beatific and then melancholy, played by Arinzé Kene. The gist was that I had died and was being welcomed to the afterlife, via an orientation that required the characters to list details of my life, or someone’s life—or really, everyone’s life—beginning at birth. “You’ll want to tell people about the things that have happened to you in here,” one mentor said, earnestly. “They matter,” another said.
Mostly, this meant a litany of sensations (“Cherry blossom. Chocolate milk. Night terrors”) and stoner insights: “It is impossible to waste energy. All you can do is pass it on.” Maybe, but my mind kept hot-air-ballooning away to my fellow-cultists, who were facing their own spiritual co-op boards. In Manhattan, we don’t stare at celebrities, so I tried to luxuriate in warm, extended eye contact with McKellen, but after a while I resented this faux intimacy. I felt like Carol from the TV show “Pluribus,” trapped by a gooey hive mind, or like Emily Webb, had she remained stuck in the Grover’s Corners cemetery for all of Act III.
Ultimately, the issue was less the goggles than the damp spirit of woo, the regimented serenity and us-ness of it all. In the evening’s single moment of tension, Sheehy’s skeptic upbraided Kene’s character for—I think, it was all a bit elliptical—having killed a girl while driving drunk. He stalked away, later returning without explanation. Twice, the holograms made teasing offers to touch my hand. It was weird, but weird isn’t the same as fun or profound. Mostly, “An Ark” resembled a webinar with a staring contest, one that no human could win.
There will be future applications of “mixed reality,” I’m sure, and I hope they work with funkier material. Personally, I’d rather get clobbered by holographic McKellens than be told not to panic, which just made me miss Douglas Adams. Truly pleasurable interactive theatre requires a touch of panic, or, at least, of raw sensation. In the case of Diane Paulus’s glammy, enjoyably shameless “Masquerade,” a supercut of “The Phantom of the Opera” playing in midtown, this means scarfing cheap champagne, getting frog-marched from ballroom to boudoir, and vibrating as the Phantom belts “The Music of the Night” in your face. At dazzling productions of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “Oedipus,” creators used prerecorded video to help viewers reflect, sometimes literally, on the self-mythologizing mirrors of online life. In a world of deepfakes, ersatz eye contact is small beer.
I got a stronger kick from a little show called “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” which was part of the Under the Radar festival. At one point, the dancer Lena Engelstein, slinky in a violet suit, screamed, “Where are my AirPods?” over and over, sending the audience into hysterics of self-recognition. As she spasmodically leaped around the stage, twitching and gyrating, we roared—until, a few minutes in, she patted the front of her pants. There was one AirPod in each pocket. Shrugging, she put the earbuds in, and then, when a fellow-dancer walked over, she heedlessly tossed them onto the stage, with a clatter. The routine said more about our relationship with tech—and the pleasures of community—than all of “An Ark.”
“Data,” a nifty, twisty Silicon Valley thriller by the young playwright Matthew Libby, was nearly derailed by the pandemic, which bumped it from the stage to a streaming platform. A new production at the Lucille Lortel, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, with lighting design by Amith Chandrashaker and set design by Marsha Ginsberg, is more visceral. It opens with a live game of Ping-Pong, in an industrial space flooded by “BRAT”-green light, giving the audience the vertiginous feeling of having landed amid something both exciting and sickening. The proscenium is framed by a flickering white tube; between scenes, we hear animal growls and house beats. The effect is to slice the play into abrupt tableaux, as if we were blinking our eyes, trying to wake from a nightmare.
That’s certainly the case for the protagonist, Maneesh, a naïve, stressed-out coder who’s hoping to satisfy his immigrant parents by taking a low-pressure job in U.X., or user experience, at a company called Athena. His brogrammer mentor, Jonah, urges him to attend Taco Tuesdays, to network; Riley, a former classmate who bluntly clarifies that she’s more an acquaintance than a friend, pushes him to join the “real” engineers in data analytics. A secret project is in the works, involving data mining, and when Alex, their “thought leader” boss, gets Maneesh to jump jobs, he finds himself standing at the edge of a moral cliff.
Libby, who came of age in Silicon Valley and studied cognitive science at Stanford before getting an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at N.Y.U., knows this world: in his junior year, he just missed landing an internship at Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, years before it evolved, “Gremlins”-like, into a partner of ice. As a teen-ager, Libby was influenced by Aaron Sorkin and Annie Baker, a real Devil-on-one-shoulder, angel-on-the-other situation. Like a Sorkin script, “Data” moves fast and underlines a few themes too thickly. But it also has real verve as a play of ideas, exploring ethical questions—about collusion, whistle-blowing, and what it means to be a true American—that are queasily timely. If Libby’s tone is less scathing than that of, say, Jesse Armstrong’s HBO movie “Mountainhead,” a satire of libertarian billionaires, it captures something equally meaningful: the quarter-life crisis of STEM kids struggling, in the age of DOGE, to sort out how responsible they are for the systems they build. The play’s big revelation, which drew a gasp from the audience, may have felt like sci-fi when Libby began writing “Data,” nearly a decade ago; now it feels like a documentary.
As Maneesh, the doe-eyed Disney Channel alum Karan Brar exudes depressed decency but never quite taps into the messy turmoil that might complicate the coder’s choices. Brandon Flynn is likably hot as the U.X. mediocrity, the worst kind of extrovert; Justin H. Min is effectively silky as their boss, who manipulates Maneesh by bonding over their immigrant roots. But the show’s standout is Sophia Lillis, whose distraught, morally inflamed Riley is the play’s most original figure. Stooped, uptight, and explosive, she’s a smart girl who blurts out rude remarks and then groans in apology, like Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News.” Riley has reasons to worry—student loans, for one thing—and she also has an irrepressible Cassandra streak. “You don’t think you were involved when you worked down the hall?” she snaps at Maneesh.
Lillis adds a welcome flash of danger to the play, a feeling that anything could happen. It’s the same spontaneity suggested by those Ping-Pong games, with their flickers of nostalgia: for the video game Pong, for the innocent give-and-take of online debate, and for the fantasy of a tech job with free snacks and a cozy game room, back when coding felt like a hip, lucrative way to save the world. ♦