There’s no denying that smartphones and social media have had a tremendous effect on the human psyche and on real-life relationships.
There’s always a distraction handy, people are glued to their devices instead of engaging with each other, and the information we receive is catered to us by algorithms that enable us to live in completely different realities informed by our browsing habits.
Rarely have the pitfalls of this online world been illustrated as well as in Kate Attwell’s play “Big Data,” now getting its world premiere at American Conservatory Theater.
“Big Data” premieres just as a very different play about online life encroaching onto the real world, Minna Lee’s “My Home on the Moon,” finishes its run nearby at San Francisco Playhouse.
ACT previously premiered Attwell’s time-traveling play “Testmatch” about cricket and colonialism in 2019, and “Big Data” is somehow even more adventurous, unconventional, funny and thought-provoking.
The play focuses on the way websites gather data about individuals, tracking what they do so as to better market to them and influence their behavior for profit. Attwell doesn’t do that through exposition about what any particular companies are doing, laying out a case in any journalistic sense, but through a character who embodies voracious information-gathering and manipulation.
BD Wong is omnipresent in the play as M, a researcher in a plaid suit who insinuates himself into people’s lives, always watching, asking personal questions and extrapolating out loud about what kind of people they are.
His whole attitude changes depending on who he’s talking to — he’s sometimes gently ingratiating, sometimes aggressive, sometimes smilingly dismissive. He mirrors some of their phrases, body language, sometimes even bits of clothing in Lydia Tanji’s clever costume design. But he’s always pushing, always prodding, encouraging people’s worst instincts into whatever course of action he might be able to profit from.
In all his charismatic, chameleonlike guises, Wong regards the others with grinning, amoral amusement, as if seeing what he can make them do simply for the sake of doing it.
His subjects are all couples that are part of the same family. Jomar Tagatac is hilarious in his logorrheic anxiety as Max, an out-of-work writer so plagued by worries about the world beyond his control that he can’t focus on getting anything done. His partner Lucy, played with professional poise by Rosie Hallett, is high-stress in a different way, a busy eye surgeon with a sense of holding the world together through sheer force of will. The way M weakens their defenses to insert himself into their lives is accordingly entirely different for each.
Lucy’s brother Sam and his husband Timmy are always squabbling. Michael Phillis’ Timmy is breezily inattentive but also jealous and easily agitated, while Gabriel Brown’s Sam is incredulous and defensive.
When M’s in the room, which he always is, no two characters seem to see him at the same time or in the same way. It’s as if he’s having a private conversation with each one at once, drawing their eye away when their partner is talking, suggesting rash life changes and egging them on in their arguments.
As Sam and Lucy’s parents, Julia McNeal and Harold Surratt exude a calm, easygoing quality, seemingly content in a quiet life. They’re patient with the others’ various agitations, supportive and loving with each other, but also genially evasive when certain subjects come up. There’s something they’re not saying. We don’t meet them until the second act, and after all their kids’ earlier comments about being worried about them, they’re not at all what we might expect.
Artistic director Pam MacKinnon’s staging is exquisitely paced, dizzyingly fast and propulsive at times and at others artfully uncomfortable in extended stretches of stillness. The second act is entirely different from the first — one continuous scene instead of short, shifting vignettes — and the contrast is stunningly effective.
Tanya Orellana’s scenic design is a marvel, starting with a sleek, minimal set resembling an iPhone and then conjuring a wonderfully detailed, lovingly cluttered country living room that gives a sense of a lifetime lived within its walls.
Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson’s projection design is used to hypnotic effect in the first act, with montage barrages between scenes and alternate video perspectives of the people onstage that give a sense of constant surveillance. Madeleine Oldham’s sound design is filled with subtle birdsong and aggressive looping interstitial music.
“Big Data” gives the viewer a lot to ponder about the way we live today. More than that, though, it’s a dazzling theatrical experience, hilarious and chilling, tense and inventive, and always thoroughly engrossing. Like M, it knows how to capture your attention.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com.
‘BIG DATA’
By Kate Attwell, presented by American Conservatory Theater
Through: March 10
Where: ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco
Running time: Two hours and 35 minutes, one intermission
Tickets: $25-$130; 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org
