Big Data: Kate Attwell’s Modern Masterclass In Live Theatre

In a recent phone conversation with playwright Kate Attwell, whose new play Big Data debuted two nights ago in San Francisco, we talked about the challenge that modern theatres are facing, and have been facing, for decades: attracting and retaining new audiences. Megawatt exceptions on Big Broadway notwithstanding, theatre has increasingly been a hard sell for a sad host of reasons: the costs, the business model, and, more often than it’s acceptable, its relevance.

Now comes a new kind of exception. Big Data, which San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) commissioned for its 59th season, which uses the unique attributes of live theater to explore one of biggest challenges we face today: human agency — our ability to make own choices.

Everything that follows is a spoiler. You may want to go straight here instead.

The medium is the message

At its core, this is a story about the impact of surveillance capitalism – the corporate and government practice of gathering data about consumers to better understand and persuade them to buy, vote, fornicate, whatever. Relevant topic, for sure. But how might one convey that theatrically? Attwell employs the call-and-response dynamic that’s been the domain of theatre and church from the very beginning. From the opening moment she asks the audience to participate by giving them the means to start the play (I’ll not spoil that for you except to say that folks sitting in front seats may want to prepare themselves for their fifteen seconds of fame).

From there, the stage – crazy wonderful, designed by Tanya Orellana – unlocks like a transformer into an iPhone-shaped shell that hosts a huge screen playing black-and-white snippets of an interview with a morally unhinged lab scientist. The scientist is in the midst of giving a lecture on manipulating pigeons by controlling the conditions and intervals in which the pigeons are fed.

Turns out, the scientist is the hero of our play, an impish sprite whom the program identifies as M. He pops up from under a center-stage trap door, delighting the audience. It’s B.D. Wong, the actor who decades ago starred in M Butterfly, a megawatt play in its time. For much of the first act, M intrudes into the lives of two couples (Gabriel Brown and Michael Phillis; Rosie Hallett and Jomar Tagatac), seducing each of them to do something they are not sure they want to do.

Director Pam MacKinnon thinks of M as Mephistopheles, a Facebook/LinkedIn/iPhone incarnation that’s constantly monitoring you, mesmerizing you, and ultimately confusing you into a state of learned helplessness. M’s magic is the art of seduction. He mien is not mean, but smiling. He earns your guilty respect, much like the Satan character in Bedazzled, the 1967 Faustian comedy by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. We love the devil because he’s cute. Closing Act I, M throws all the characters down the trap door into his netherworld — in a scene so deftly staged by MacKinnon — in the same method the father of Don Giovanni sends his son to hell. It’s an old stage meme revived for a modern tale. And then, in a Big Broadway flourish, M moves downstage for a comic, grinding, sexy little dance. The audience erupts. It would never work on Netflix.

In Act II, the stage is transformed once again – turned upside down, in fact – into a naturalistic set, the home of the parents of Sam and Lucy. It’s like suddenly we’re watching Uncle Vanya, with M nowhere to be found. But a few moments into the Act, we feel his presence. The parents, Didi (Julia McNeal) and Joe (Harrold Surratt), exit, and the audience sits quietly for what seems a full minute – an eternity in theatre time – so as to adjust to a more human pace. The couples arrive and a tragic denouement unfolds. With Act I still in our consciousness we gain some empathy for each of the characters and the choices they have made with M’s direction. As the story comes to a close, the action freezes into a still. M then appears. Big Data’s Big Dada is satisfied with his work. And satisfied with us, whom he has also cast under his spell. He gives us time to think as we stare at the freeze-frame tableaux, illuminated in the cold of laboratory-grade flourescent light. Are we the pigeons? Can we reject algorithms of lives. As we’re pondering this, M snaps his fingers and the play comes to an end. Poof.