Are you pulling my leg? I hated this play. I’m lying, I loved this play. I loved the stories, I loved the video/audio. I loved the audience’s role as an analyst of authenticity. We were tasked with vetting the truth from fiction for each story. Each actor told two stories, one was true and the other false. Each audience member was given a card with a T on one side and an F on the other and after each actor told you their story, the audience voted. The director tracked the vote and kept the collective score.
Our Saturday afternoon audience only guessed correctly 2 times out of 12 stories. That was the worst of any performance of this work anywhere. We cheered own incompetence.
I fully enjoyed this work. It’s complicated staging was extremely well done. A wall of TV monitors, multiple live cameras, and interesting special effects. The most cleaver was the simulation of a horse’s mouth using a small camera on teeth and mouth of one of the actors behind stage.
Jeremy’s Schaefer’s roast of his Myspace page is one of the stories that I didn’t know how “True” it was or not (I voted yes), but his take on it was biting satire. The concept of being someone’s #1 friend on Myspace is one of the more trivially significant elements of the modern world’s virtual authenticity. It doesn’t matter, but it does.
The crowd was very good for a 2PM show at CAC. I only wish the venue was closer to rest of the venues. I also wish this production had its shows more spread out so they could build into ending the run with sell outs. The staging makes that totally unfeasible. If you get to the show tonight at 8:30 or tomorrow at 3PM, it will be worth it.