‘Love and Information” is a thought-provoking show about our ADD age. Except it wasn’t written by some young, plugged-in hotshot, but by a 75-year-old who isn’t even on Twitter.
Over her decades-long career, British playwright Caryl Churchill has tested audiences with shows as diverse as “Top Girls” (time-traveling feminist dinner party) and “Serious Money” (capitalism in rhyming couplets).
In her latest, presented by New York Theatre Workshop, Churchill has pulled yet another trick out of her bag — or rather, dozens of them.
A lesser writer would mock our shortened attention spans and communication meltdowns by showing people hunched over their phones or some such. Lord knows we’ve seen plenty of those clichés.
Churchill is a lot smarter than that: She suggests our modern world’s fragmentation by dividing the show into more than 50 scenes in which 100 characters are played by 15 actors — here including such A-gamers as Karen Kandel, Jennifer Ikeda, Kellie Overbey and Maria Tucci.
In one scene, two teenage fangirls freak out when they realize they don’t know their idol’s favorite smell.
In another, a woman answers absurdly obscure trivia questions about, say, the traditional ingredients of “poulash” (“duck and fennel”). The only time she looks rattled is when her questioner quickly sneaks in, “Do you love me?”
Only occasionally does Churchill directly address technology, as when two friends chat about their love lives. Echoing the recent movie “Her,” one of them has a crush on a robot: “The sex is great,” he says. His buddy objects that it’s virtual. The reply? “It’s virtual and great.”
Some bits last about 45 seconds, others go on for a few minutes. Each one requires new costumes and props, which are switched during lightning-fast blackouts on Miriam Buether’s white-box set — lined with graph paper and bathed in blindingly bright lights, it really makes the cast pop out.
James Macdonald’s production is technically stunning, but what makes it work are the characters.
Churchill’s script doesn’t attribute them names, or even a sex, race or age, giving great freedom to the director and cast. But despite that lack of specifics and the encounters’ brevity, we still feel we’re catching glimpses of full lives. We know these people — because they are us.