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Uploaded

Reviewed by Steven Mikulan

Rogue Machine Theatre

Through Dec. 6

It can’t be much fun having a big ego while living in a small apartment. Just ask Daniel (Jeff Lorch), a seething 32-year-old Los Angeles millennial of uncertain talents and no visible means of support, now that his father has cut him off.

Daniel desperately wants to make his mark and first million. But how? Enter Sam (Erik Odom), a drug-dealing friend who drops by and, hoping to cheer Daniel up, offers him a couple of rails of cocaine and Adderall. A blinding self-revelation instantly seizes Daniel, as he now understands what great thinkers from Karl Marx to Tears for Fears have known: Everybody wants to rule the world.

As Daniel catapults around his apartment jabbering a mile a minute, an idea takes shape in his drug-blasted brain: He can make “a shit ton of money” by starting his own religion — specifically one that borrows heavily from Mormonism and Scientology. The novel belief system Daniel invents on the fly will be based on sequencing a worshipper’s DNA code and “uploading” it to a higher power. Now all Daniel needs are followers.

This is the launch point for playwright L.R. Gordon’s 75-minute one-act, a wryly observed field autopsy of American gullibility. Daniel persuades Sam (who has to be the world’s most patient and generous drug dealer) to accompany him on a desert pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon – because, you know, that’s the kind of place prophets go. There, things seem to fall into place for the would-be DNA messiah, as Daniel sweet-talks a beautiful young heiress named Annika (Suzanne Quast) into marrying him. Not only is Annika seduced by Daniel’s vision of uploading his future flock’s genomes, but so, too is her tycoon father – who, she says, is very interested in Daniel’s plans.

While the play often seems like an extended comedy sketch that dwells too much on Daniel’s outlandish recriminations and epiphanies, it shows potential as a longer, more fully realized satire. Gordon certainly gets easy laughs poking fun at Daniel’s airheaded lover, a former Aimee who changed her name to Annika to suit her more exotic self-image, and who has her old Girl Scout troop number tattooed on her arm. Yet beneath the ripples of such surface humor lie deeper pools of understanding about the balm and damage religion applies and inflicts, and of the reflexive self-entitlement that animates so many people. Nothing speaks of Daniel’s delusionary thinking more vividly than when he orders Sam to stop taking notes when, in fact, Sam hasn’t begun writing – whereupon Daniel tears up the first sheet of Sam’s blank pages.  This bare-bones production, tightly directed by Mark L. Taylor, races along thanks to Lorch’s performance, a human cannonball whose explosive character scars everyone he touches.

Rogue Machine Theatre, 5041 Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles; Fri.-Sat., 10 p.m.; through Dec.6. (855) 585-5185, https://www.roguemachinetheatre.com/