[ssba]
If You Can Get to Buffalo
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Son of Semele Theater
Through April 12
RECOMMENDED:
The world of 2013 was a radically different place from what it had been in 1993. And few would disagree that much of what changed in those 20 years — for better and arguably for worse — was driven by the same ideology that inspired the Information Age, which in the West saw the wholesale substitution of an economy of industrial production with one based on computerized information.
The deeply disruptive incongruities bracketed by those two dates may not be the explicit subject of Trish Harnetiaux’s subtle 2013 satire of the infancy of the internet and its wide-eyed cyber utopianism, but they are implicit in her play’s animating dramatic irony.
Based mostly on a sensational, 1993 Village Voice cover story by Julien Dibbell called “A Rape in Cyberspace,” If You Can Get to Buffalo chronicles a virtual “sexual assault” perpetrated by an antisocial NYU prankster on the online personas of several members of a virtual web community. Called LamdaMOO, the text-only site was one of the early web’s social networking playgrounds that served intrepid college students of the day as sort of a cross between fantasy chat room, a multi-user, real-time game of exquisite corpse and — if one got lucky — a text-based version of phone sex.
That long-ago teapot tempest, its perpetrator, his victims and both their risible naiveté and rude disillusionment are all faithfully resurrected as if freshly ripped from today’s headline in director Edgar Landa’s inventive and crisply staged production (on Meg Cunningham’s fittingly carnivalesque, text-projected set).
As the Voice reporter Julian, Bart Petty serves as guide to the story’s strange new frontier of early-‘90s, bargain-basement virtual reality and its etiquette, while via his online alter ego, Dr. Bombay, becomes a participant in the community’s fanciful if oddly unsavory compulsions. More importantly, Petty also perfectly embodies the overly insistent mix of self-importance and quasi-philosophical proselytism of Dibbell’s original prose as the character attempts to persuade the Son of Semele audience that something more profoundly disturbing than the symbolic violence of a sophomoric practical joke is actually being perpetrated on the computer screen/stage.
That argument is aided by Alex Wells, who delivers a chillingly creepy performance as the part burlesque clown, part oily virtual predator Mr. Bungle. His “victims” are effectively played by Cindy Nguyen as the sweetly bubbleheaded and soon-to-be sodomized chanteuse Starsinger, and a brittlely fragile Tim Venable as the high-strung, virtual cross-dressing New Yorker writer John. (Chase Cargill, Gina Manziello, Betsy Moore and Caitlin Teeley all lend expert support.)
But it is only with the appearance of Charlie Rose (Melina Bielefelt in a hilarious impersonation) that both the tenor and the latent critique of the play come into focus. In those scenes of the long-running PBS current affairs show, in which Harnetiaux neatly skewers the talk host’s ham-handed pomposity and chatachrestic grasp of a technology that was even then rendering TV obsolete as a primary medium of cultural influence, If You Can Get to Buffalo finally deflates the utopian pretenses of cyberspace by reminding us that any human technology also carries in it its makers’ most craven impulses.
Son of Semele Theater, 3301 Beverly Blvd., Westlake; Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; Mon., April 6, 7 p.m.; through April 12. Sonofsemele.org.
