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.
