If there’s any reason to see As We Speak, an otherwise unbearable new play by John Patrick Bray, it’s to see how theater is slowly beginning to adapt to the Web 2.0 era. It seems virtually impossible to dramatize a generation who grasps their laptops like respirators, but as liberal grad student Noreen, Alyson Brock assumes a pose in the first act that people of my generation are all familiar with: hunched over a tiny screen, unable to turn away, willingly ignoring one’s surroundings, and unable to function in the world off the web. Minor technical difficulties aside, director Tom Berger and projection designer David Bengali succeed in maintaining an effective staging of this otherwise dull act, and sound designer Henry Akona keeps attention constantly tuned in.
There’s little else to redeem As We Speak, a play with a script, performances, and ambition that all reek of amateurism. The script itself has very little if anything to bring to the table. Though the director’s note speaks of multiple edits, somehow lines like “Go to Hawaii, wherever you can drive to” evaded the red pen. Attempts at humor unfailingly miss their target, and the balance between realism and fantasy, both in actions and realistic human emotions, never comes close to harmony.
The basic weaknesses of the script speak to nothing of the problems of the play’s premise. As We Speak is a present-day adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, which imagined a dystopian fascist America. The novel was written in 1935, a time when major world democracies were falling into totalitarianism with terrifying frequency. It seemed that the fundamental viability of democracy was breaking down, a concept that was also addressed by Brave New World, 1984, and even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Yet, after fascism was defeated in World War II, all future attempts to revive Lewis’ novel seemed spurious. The idea of a totalitarian America was intellectually alluring, but subsequent adaptations usually had to resort to science fiction or alternate histories to make the scenario remotely plausible. Most successful attempts, such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, attained believability by reversing the results of World War II.
Bray, however, tries to update the premise to Dick Cheney’s America, post-9/11 and post-Katrina. Bray could be forgiven for the bad timing of the play, coming after an election that trounced fear-based conservative politics, had he dealt with those fears in any sort of interesting way. But Bray treats a fascist American uprising as a narrative inevitability that ultimately make the play simply boring. At the production I saw, not a single audience member clapped at intermission. I can assure you that was not due to awe.
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