Theatre Review: “An Ark” and “Data”

There volition beryllium aboriginal applications of “mixed reality,” I’m sure, and I anticipation they enactment with funkier material. Personally, I’d alternatively get clobbered by holographic McKellens than beryllium told not to panic, which conscionable made maine miss Douglas Adams. Truly pleasurable interactive theatre requires a interaction of panic, or, astatine least, of earthy sensation. In the lawsuit of Diane Paulus’s glammy, enjoyably shameless “Masquerade,” a supercut of “The Phantom of the Opera” playing successful midtown, this means scarfing inexpensive champagne, getting frog-marched from ballroom to boudoir, and vibrating arsenic the Phantom belts “The Music of the Night” successful your face. At dazzling productions of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “Oedipus,” creators utilized prerecorded video to assistance viewers reflect, sometimes literally, connected the self-mythologizing mirrors of online life. In a satellite of deepfakes, ersatz oculus interaction is tiny beer.

I got a stronger footwear from a small amusement called “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” which was portion of the Under the Radar festival. At 1 point, the dancer Lena Engelstein, slinky successful a violet suit, screamed, “Where are my AirPods?” implicit and over, sending the assemblage into hysterics of self-recognition. As she spasmodically leaped astir the stage, twitching and gyrating, we roared—until, a fewer minutes in, she patted the beforehand of her pants. There was 1 AirPod successful each pocket. Shrugging, she enactment the earbuds in, and then, erstwhile a fellow-dancer walked over, she heedlessly tossed them onto the stage, with a clatter. The regular said much astir our narration with tech—and the pleasures of community—than each of “An Ark.”

“Data,” a nifty, twisty Silicon Valley thriller by the young playwright Matthew Libby, was astir derailed by the pandemic, which bumped it from the signifier to a streaming platform. A caller accumulation astatine the Lucille Lortel, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, with lighting plan by Amith Chandrashaker and acceptable plan by Marsha Ginsberg, is much visceral. It opens with a unrecorded crippled of Ping-Pong, successful an concern abstraction flooded by “BRAT”-green light, giving the assemblage the vertiginous feeling of having landed amid thing some breathtaking and sickening. The proscenium is framed by a flickering achromatic tube; betwixt scenes, we perceive carnal growls and location beats. The effect is to portion the play into abrupt tableaux, arsenic if we were blinking our eyes, trying to aftermath from a nightmare.

That’s surely the lawsuit for the protagonist, Maneesh, a naïve, stressed-out coder who’s hoping to fulfill his migrant parents by taking a low-pressure occupation successful U.X., oregon idiosyncratic experience, astatine a institution called Athena. His brogrammer mentor, Jonah, urges him to be Taco Tuesdays, to network; Riley, a erstwhile classmate who bluntly clarifies that she’s much an acquaintance than a friend, pushes him to articulation the “real” engineers successful information analytics. A concealed task is successful the works, involving information mining, and erstwhile Alex, their “thought leader” boss, gets Maneesh to leap jobs, helium finds himself lasting astatine the borderline of a motivation cliff.

Libby, who came of property successful Silicon Valley and studied cognitive subject astatine Stanford earlier getting an M.F.A. successful melodramatic penning astatine N.Y.U., knows this world: successful his inferior year, helium conscionable missed landing an internship astatine Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, years earlier it evolved, “Gremlins”-like, into a spouse of ice. As a teen-ager, Libby was influenced by Aaron Sorkin and Annie Baker, a existent Devil-on-one-shoulder, angel-on-the-other situation. Like a Sorkin script, “Data” moves accelerated and underlines a fewer themes excessively thickly. But it besides has existent verve arsenic a play of ideas, exploring ethical questions—about collusion, whistle-blowing, and what it means to beryllium a existent American—that are queasily timely. If Libby’s code is little scathing than that of, say, Jesse Armstrong’s HBO movie “Mountainhead,” a satire of libertarian billionaires, it captures thing arsenic meaningful: the quarter-life situation of STEM kids struggling, successful the property of DOGE, to benignant retired however liable they are for the systems they build. The play’s large revelation, which drew a gasp from the audience, whitethorn person felt similar sci-fi erstwhile Libby began penning “Data,” astir a decennary ago; present it feels similar a documentary.