"Please tell me," a curious man begs a reluctant woman as they wait on a train platform at the top of Caryl Churchill's effervescent new play Love and Information. She possesses secret information he would desperately love to acquire, and after the usual amount of cajoling, she finally caves and whispers it into his ear. Judging by his reaction, the news is shocking, but it's what he said preceding the revelation that rings in our ears: "If there's a secret between us we're not close anymore."
Over the course of 57 scenes of varying degrees of brevity, Churchill examines our civilization's lust for information, our inability to process it, and our loss of secrecy and privacy. None of the characters in these dozens of scenes reoccur, and nobody in the 15-member ensemble plays the same person twice. But each character feels immediately familiar, and as their various scenarios accumulate, a story, of sorts, emerges. It's the story of a culture's addiction to information-on-demand, told in the short attention span format to which we've grown accustomed after a generation of channel changing and Internet surfing.
I may have made Love and Information sound heavy handed, and it's not (though at two hours it's about a half hour too long, in my opinion). Churchill, a British playwright who has spent four decades brilliantly stretching theater's boundaries with plays such as Top Girls and Far Away, is not here to condemn our Information Age, but to understand how it's changed us. "You shouldn't fire people by email," one outraged office outcast yells at his former boss, who refuses to honor his request to be terminated in person. We feel his pain, but at the same time, here we are in 2014, and it's starting to seem quaint to expect much dignity IRL.
(Joan Marcus)
Performed in a sterile white box lined like a grid, the concatenation of scenes burst into form and then vanish as quickly as a hastily closed tab, but the pacing of each one varies in a way that keeps the conceit from getting repetitive. Director James Macdonald and scenic designer Miriam Buether are both masters of the material, evoking setting and circumstance with imaginative zeal. A woman visiting an isolated cottage worries that without cell phone service or Wi-Fi she'll never know the weather forecast. "You'll find you can feel when it's raining," her host tartly advises. In another scene, an older woman appears to be packing up her deceased husband's possessions. "He must have meant everything to you," a consoling friend offers. "Maybe... We'll see," the widow replies.
Two teenage girls are sent into a frenzied panic by the realization that they don't know their favorite celebrity's favorite food. A pair of interrogators lament a prisoner's reticence, even in the face of torture. "It'll get the point where he'll say anything," one bemoans to the other, who cheerily reminds him, "We're not paid extra for it to be true!" A woman in bed can't sleep. "My head's too full of stuff!" she shouts to her husband before deciding to get up "and go on Facebook." A clown getting into costume learns that her lover has been unfaithful, and her partner clown wastes no time swooping in to fill the void.
A few of the shorter scenes have the disposable feel of cheap one-liners, like when a boozed-up Elvis impersonator blurts out his informed opinion on Israel and Palestine. But other short scenes are surprisingly affecting, and the overall tone is whimsical and sweet. A young woman rubbing sunblock on her male companion gleefully explains how sex exists solely for the exchange of genetic information. He's taken aback by her seemingly sterile view of intercourse. "You don’t think that while we’re doing it, do you?” he asks. "It doesn’t hurt to know," she says, adding, "Information and also love." The two aren't mutually exclusive, but Churchill's play makes you wonder if a surfeit of the former is making us numb to the latter.
Love and Informationcontinues at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village through April 6th.
