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Imagine a future with such advanced virtual reality that it can replace your entire life with a continuous and unending stream of pleasurable experiences. What do you love most? The Bliss Option makes those things, and nothing but those things, seem so “real” that you never need to exit the hookup and return to the actual real world. Of course you may come back if you wish. Indeed the government-run technology comes with the slogan “Every day the choice is yours.” But what if no one ever chooses to leave?
That’s the premise of The Bliss Option, an intensely imagined comedy-drama by Andrew R. Heintze. The one-act two-hander stars Mary Murphy as Stoddard, a high-level Bliss Option functionary tasked with signing up the most hesitant citizens, and Eric Percival as Dave, a newly unemployed husband and father who finds himself not only jobless but discarded as a no-longer-needed “commodity” by his wife and children. Dave is a perfect candidate for the Bliss Option. But with a thoughtful nature and artistic temperament, he believes happiness can’t be happiness without the sadnesses and struggles that give it its redemptive power.
The action takes place in one long scene in Stoddard’s antiseptic office outfitted with just a lucite desk and two chairs, a video screen for showing Bliss Option promotional videos, and, incongruously, a guitar case. Over 75 minutes of arch dialogue, the two thrust and parry over Dave’s future. The stakes are high for Stoddard as well as for Dave. The former is under pressure to maintain her perfect record of getting hard cases like Dave to sign up. For Dave, of course, his whole future is at stake.
So many lines of work are gone in this technological utopia/dystopia that more and more people seem suited only for the Bliss Option. And why not make people happy who would otherwise struggle? Dave doesn’t know anyone who has come out of Bliss. Has anyone ever? he asks Stoddard. She won’t give him a straight answer: “Why would they want to?”
Stoddard has done her homework on Dave and knows ways to approach him sympathetically. But there are some things about him that she hadn’t counted on. Dave is resourceful, and just as perceptive as she. Their war of words evolves into something else. Might there be something more life-affirming than sinking into artificial bliss?
Brought to life by two superb actors, the characters convincingly develop a truly human relationship in no more than 75 real-time minutes. In one of those minutes, Dave is expostulating on how Stoddard’s minimally furnished office feels like a mousetrap. “It’s all set up that way, if you think about it,” he says, then turns sharply to Stoddard and repeats those three words, now in an imperative tone: “Think about it.” Fiery little moments like that abound.
Like the prickly script’s emotionally elevated language, what ultimately happens may not be real-life realistic, yet still it feels truly human. It’s the more powerful for the concentrated artistic license. Eva Minemar directs with sparkle and empathy, if now and then not quite enough pace. Over-the-top creepy promotional videos and stark lighting and sound add to the spell.
This is the rare kind of play that makes you laugh a lot and sends you out thinking. The Bliss Option runs through Oct. 12, 2025 at the Chain Theatre in Manhattan. It’s a production of the American Renaissance Theater Company. Tickets are available online.
