Wirelessless

Directed by Katie Pearl

Playwright David Modigliani

New Works Festival, 2007

Tech in Turmoil

A DJ waits behind turntables, sound mixing gadgets and wires. Eventually, an actor, or “installer,” as the credits indicate, greets an audience member. “Hi there. I’ve been wireless-less for 3 years.” In seamless transition, the meaty story of Wireless-less begins with a man (Jason Newman) and a woman (Lee Eddy) flirting with their eyes while positioned on their separate areas designated by ever-shifting carpet spaces. She carries a book, he holds a laptop computer.

In a sound cue, “Shift Position,” the installers move the carpets into another formation—a bed. The couple wakes from their slumber. Newman, an internet junkie named Noah, recites a mantra, “I won’t check my email.” He gives in. Eddy, as the book lover Charlotte, can’t understand why her boyfriend is incapable of creating more than four notes in his Pro Tools music composition. The answer to his incompetence lies in realizing the symptoms of information addiction and time-wasting distractions. He is constantly “on,” unable to turn off the internet, which would in fact, be an enormous feat of terrorism, or so Noah remarks.

Playwright David Modigliani weaves a fascinating love story in a time of remote relationships and mechanical mirrors, where a blog defines you, and a Google search misleads you. Modigliani captures the “meta-heading” of websites and creates miniature characters of them. A symphony of texts swells into a dance of binary code, ones and zeros dizzyingly displayed on a screen while Noah is swept under the current of code. Computers are “potent tools,” but what is lost in our kneeling down to the machine?

Noah sinks deeper into a technological love affair and physically seduces his laptop. This action, understandably, worries Charlotte. She sends him to a rehabilitation center for technological addiction. Here, Noah meets others unable to unglue themselves from cellular phone text messaging, Blackberry emailing, and stuttering double-u, double-u, double- u’s.

Wireless-less is sound and sight driven with the action following smoothly. Under the direction of Katie Pearl, most moments are crisp and dense. Eddy and Newman have good chemistry, though loss of subtlety in more tender moments tends to disrupt. Sound designer Michael Joplin incorporates the almost undetectable sounds that are always pulsating and rising in empty space, as well as a fantastic medley of beats and tunes to accent the action. Most impressive is the complicated stage management of Tanya Schurr.

Witty, modern, and culturally germane, Modigliani has created a time capsule play. It’s difficult to say how relevant some of the material might be in five, ten or twenty years, but it most certainly is NOW. With the advent of YouTube, myspace, facebook, blogging, instant news and pornography, how are human beings (living with computers, internet, ect.) developing relationships with each other? Instead of touching flesh, the primary characters in Wireless-less develop tactile obsessions with keyboards, scanners and monitors. As Charlotte labors over a mindless, anonymous job, scanning classics to be “read to the whole world,” she feels compelled to imprint her identity as her scanned hand into the digitized pages. Noah has to cope realistically, not virtually, in a hi-tech world. Wireless-less is ultimately a survival story during a time when our most precious resource, intimacy, is depleting each day with our persistent dependency on machines.