100. STOP.
RESET
Regina
Taylor’s STOP. RESET, at the Signature’s Linney Theatre, which she also
directed, is a blah blah yada yada “tone poem on memory and change” based on a
potentially promising academic/sci-fi premise. It is produced with elaborate
and sophisticated technical expertise but is theatrically flat, vague, and
pretentious.
The Signature Theatre Center at Pershing Square.
The play imagines a Chicago publishing house devoted
to black literature presided over by the 70-year-old Alexander Ames (Carl
Lumbly), the recent victim of a stroke, who grieves over his son, senselessly
shot while standing in the street. The effects of his stroke, however, are visible
neither in his speech nor in his rather limber movement. Because of the advent of
technology and social media, and the consequent decline in book sales, the
business is going downhill; since it is a subsidiary of a much larger
corporation, Ames is being forced to cut his already skeletal staff of four down by one. Having
built the business from scratch, he is reluctant to downsize further but, forced to do so, he decides to interview his
employees. Each has an interview scene except Jan, a 59-year-old woman who has been with
him the longest. The only reason she never has her interview is because she’s been sent out
to buy coffee and, with a snowstorm swirling, all the Starbucks stores nearby are
closed; when she comes back she’s practically frozen to death. Each of her
coworkers, Deb (Michi Barall), an Asian-American woman; Tim (Donald Sage
MacKay), a white man; and Chris (Teagle F. Bougere), a black man, is asked
during their uncomfortable interviews whom they would fire if it were up to
them;, this is a decidedly unprofessional question and one that the workers do their
best to navigate. These scenes are the most effective in the play.
Meanwhile, the janitor, J (Ismael Richardson Córdova), a bizarre young man of indeterminate racial makeup, who seems to be an avatar from the future, goes around the office with a squeegee and duster, while stealing computer data on a memory stick and talking to someone we don’t see, the way people do with Bluetooth devices in their ears. He seems engaged in some kind of beyond-digital game, racking up points so he can get to a higher level. He gradually captures the boss’s attention and eventually assumes a position of authority, being hired to move the company into the future by abandoning books as we know them, and going beyond e-books into some ambiguously futuristic experience involving capturing the entirety of a person’s memory (his “soul,” says Ames) and reliving it, or something like that. There's a lot of talk about how, in 100 years time, race and gender issues will be little more than pixilated concerns. As a sort of pseudo-magical realist style invades the premises the script becomes increasingly dense; I found it easy to tune out to J's mumbo jumbo or how Ames, going off into some kind of spiritual transport, was responding to it.
Meanwhile, the janitor, J (Ismael Richardson Córdova), a bizarre young man of indeterminate racial makeup, who seems to be an avatar from the future, goes around the office with a squeegee and duster, while stealing computer data on a memory stick and talking to someone we don’t see, the way people do with Bluetooth devices in their ears. He seems engaged in some kind of beyond-digital game, racking up points so he can get to a higher level. He gradually captures the boss’s attention and eventually assumes a position of authority, being hired to move the company into the future by abandoning books as we know them, and going beyond e-books into some ambiguously futuristic experience involving capturing the entirety of a person’s memory (his “soul,” says Ames) and reliving it, or something like that. There's a lot of talk about how, in 100 years time, race and gender issues will be little more than pixilated concerns. As a sort of pseudo-magical realist style invades the premises the script becomes increasingly dense; I found it easy to tune out to J's mumbo jumbo or how Ames, going off into some kind of spiritual transport, was responding to it.
From left: Carl Lumbly and Ismael Cruz Cordova. Photo: Joan Marcus.
However talented the actors may be, they all struggle
to make their versified language sound believable, and their cardboard
characters to seem real, expending a lot of professional energy in getting
through an intermissionless hour and 40 minutes of tedious drama. Ms. Taylor demonstrates once
again how unwise it can be for a playwright to stage her own material, as she
is unable to coax the play to life or to make clear or compelling whatever it has to say about what
the onslaught of technology augurs for mankind’s future.
Neil Patel’s attractively sleek, white office, with
glass panels used for projections and other technical effects combined with
floor to ceiling bookcases—a perfect combination of the
new and the outdated—is combined with a marvelous array of
verbal and pictorial images—many of African-American faces and writing related
to the Civil Rights movement—designed by Shawn Sagady. We don’t go to the
theatre to watch sets and video projections, however; their purpose is to support
dramatic writing, not to be appreciated on their own.
If there were a way to stop and reset this play, you
can bet I would have done it.