[ssba]
Love and Information
Reviewed by Lyle Zimskind
Son of Semele Ensemble
Through December 7
RECOMMENDED:
The text of Caryl Churchill’s 2012 play Love and Information does not offer a performing company much guidance.
Lines of dialogue follow one another down the page but lack identified speakers. Groups of short scenes follow no prescribed order. Random scene fragments and context-free snippets of speech (for instance: “chicken tikka masala”) are lined up for insertion at any point in the presentation of the work.
There certainly aren’t any stage directions, specified settings or physical descriptions. What’s a group of theater artists to make of it?
In this Los Angeles premiere production of Love and Information, the Son of Semele Ensemble takes on Churchill’s implication that the tissue of inter-human connectivity is being irretrievably frayed in our contemporary world. It renders her ideas within an intimate technological dystopia of aural static, jarring video projections and matching ugly shirts.
Set designer Drew Foster has created a rotating structure that alternately exposes and obscures the actors, who climb its staircase on one side and hunker down in its cubby hole on the other.
In dozens of scenes unlinked by any narrative structure, a constant parade of new characters struggle to sustain their relations to each other and to perceive the signals that surround them.
A schizophrenic has to abjure from taking his medication in order “to get the information” he’s looking for. Another young man, unable to experience pain, is desperately eager to have the feeling explained to him (“it’s like being unhappy but in your leg?”)
Director Matthew McCray ingeniously diminishes a heated exchange over how Bush and Blair led the world into war by having the parties wage their arguments via text, with debating points punctuated by the familiar iPhone whoosh of a message taking off electronically through the ether.
Everyone wants to know things in this play, but it’s not clear how that helps anyone. Knowledge is reduced to reciting the word for “table” in a handful of different languages. Or a doctor’s prognosis to a patient merely states that “ten percent of people with [his] condition are still alive after three years.”
And love is more elusive still in the difficult universe elaborated by Churchill, arguably the most prominent English playwright alive today, given Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Serious Money, and many others.
The ensemble of 11 actors deftly move in and out of one character after another, while the electronically evocative landscape that McCray and his production team have created consistently reminds us that we are no match for the information age now overwhelming us.
Son of Semele Ensemble, 3301 Beverly Blvd. (at Hoover); Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; Mon., Nov. 16 and Dec. 7 p.m.; through December 13; www.sonofsemele.org.
