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| Some of the large cast of Teh Internet Is Serious Business (Jeff Carpenter) |
Washington Ensemble Theatre
Through October 2, 2017
The press release blurb for Washington Ensemble Theatre’s
mounting of Teh Internet Is Serious
Business by Tim Price says, “Forward slash forward slash, angle bracket,
quotation, command, dialogue, angle bracket, semicolon: it’s 2004, the year
hacktivist group Anonymous emerged as a can’t-be-tamed digital authority with
unexpected influence. This mercurial and irreverent tale follows the network’s
pointed take down of the Church of Scientology and ponders the revolution of
online global power. Called “liberating” and “enlightening” by The Guardian,
Washington Ensemble Theatre will mount Tim Price’s smart and captivating play.
Can you feel the lulz?”
I’m not sure what the description prepares you for, but
embedded in the description is the fact that the play is “about” a real piece
of actual Internet history. The way that playwright Price goes about telling
that compelling history is incisive and interesting and, as produced by
director Wayne Rawley and the team
at WET, it’s a very entertaining story.
Rawley infuses the piece with song and dance, with the help
of choreographer Alyza DelPan-Monley,
to great effect. There is no such direction from Price about how to create the
world he writes about. So Rawley and company have a bit of free rein to run
with creative ideas.
In particular, Rawley decided against a whole bunch of
laptops and people typing at each other! The play is written essentially about people
across the world connecting with each other via the Internet, so they don’t
meet and talk in person. Here, though, that convention is stood on its head and
a sort of freewheeling, meet-and-dissolve action is created. You might think of
it as oil swirling around in water.
Infusing choreography, then, is an almost natural segue! It
helps unite and break up the action and the dialogue and keep the play alive.
But the key aspect of the evening has to be the absolutely
brilliant set/lighting work of Tristan
Roberson. You have to see it to believe it. And so I’m not even going to
describe it. You seriously have to see it. No matter what else you think of the
play, his contribution is mind-blowing, both in essential simplicity and also
in bringing to life Internet actions such as coding. (I am not suggesting his
work is simple. I am stating that what he creates, however complicated it was
to create it, ends up as a sublime simplicity in storytelling.) The play cannot
be the play without it.
As far as the subject matter and message, there’s a lot to
ponder over what the “untamed” Internet has unleashed on the world. The history
focuses on those who immediately grasped the opportunities presented, the
teenagers who absorbed Internet usage like snacks, and then saw and used the
almost unlimited power to roam around in packs of non-moral arbiters. There is
little moral about the Internet, now, and this play helps explain why.
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