For two-and-a-half millennia theatrical storytelling has been rooted in conflict and connectedness. From Sophocles to Lin-Manuel Miranda, a playwrights main tactic has been to put people on a stage, give them something to contest, and see what happens.
For most of history this was both a practical matter (how else could you have put on a play?) and one of aesthetic dogma: for centuries playwrights (including Shakespeare) and critics fought pitched battles over the so-called unities proposed by Aristotle that called for every tragedy to comply with three rules: 1. There should be only one central action; 2. The entire action should take place in a single 24-hour period; 3. The entire action should take place in a single location.
We still live in a world filled with conflict, of course. But we also live in a moment when the central paradox of our time is that physically most of us are profoundly isolated but apart from the occasional frozen Zoom screen more immediately connected to others in the world than ever before, at least if were part of the privileged, affluent, technically advanced, networked world.
Over the past year, theater companies have used technology to make connections in myriad ways.
The astonishing thing about Drew Larimores play Smithtown, which is streaming in a production by The Studios of Key West (where Larimore serves as artist-in-residence), is that it is fundamentally a drama of profound disconnection. You might think of Smithtown as a kind of techno-twist on Rashomon, where a story is revealed in multiple accounts except that the characters and accounts revealed in Smithtown will never confront one another or be adjudicated.
Larimore is a Louisville native who started writing plays pretty much as soon as he learned to hold a pencil and has never stopped. In 1999, when he was a sophomore at the Youth Performing Arts School, his play Third Shift was selected for production in a festival of short plays in New York City. In the years since, his plays and musicals have been staged in theaters everywhere from Off-Broadway to Australia.
Smithtown, Larimore said in a phone interview, was intended for the stage and he hopes someday to see it play on stage. But as directed by Stephen Kitsakos, it turns out to be a perfect vehicle for streaming delivery.
I watched the stream. Its a story told through a sequence of four relatively close-in monologues delivered by a quartet of remarkable actors whose vocal and facial tool sets transcend the physical stasis of the action.
The first monologue features actor Michael Urie (a busy TV, film and theater actor and director with a long list of credits and awards, including a stint on the TV show, Ugly Betty). Here, Urie plays Ian A. Bernstein, a bespectacled graduate student who is teaching the first day of a Smithtown College class dealing with the ethics of technology. This first lecture is an exercise in stilted academic pomp that soon goes off the rails. He plans to teach ethics based on instances. And when he sets out to explain what he means by an instance, he tells his class about a night months earlier when his longtime girlfriend jilted him by text, and he set out to get revenge by enticing another girl, Melissa, whom he describes as a well-known doormat, to send him some indiscreet selfies. Ian forwards those to his girlfriend as an act of vengeful power, but what follows is a predictable viral onslaught that inevitably leads to tragedy a tragedy that, in Uries remarkably fraught performance, Ian has somehow managed to isolate as an instance to dissect rather than a cruel act for which he must account.
The second monologue brings us Bonnie, a tensely upbeat text angel whose business is sending people upbeat motivational texts by subscription. Played by Ann Harada (whose extensive theatre credits include Broadway roles in Avenue Q, 9 to 5, Les Misérables and more). Bonnie has a feverish caffeinated energy that borders on panic and in this deftly written monologue, keeps us guessing about her connection to the first piece.
The third monologue, too, is a deft act of misdirection with a finely-honed comic edge from actor Colby Lewis, whose acting credits include One Tree Hill and Chicago Med. Here hes Eugene, a photographer, videographer, social media manager and apparent curator of a wildly implausible collection of heritage artifacts who is looking forward to the dedication of the Heritage Centers new water fountain. And, hes driven by a fierce desire to prove his worth as an artist which, to him, means a cool-eyed, uninvolved observer of reality, no matter how cruel. This monologue, which veers from droll ironies to gut-wrenching horror, could well become an audition piece for a generation of performers. Its a superb piece of writing, and a great performance and I feel duty-bound to observe that it probably deserves a trigger warning for its depiction of the plays defining event.
The final monologue likewise is a fine piece of writing, performed with devastating emotional impact especially if youre watching this up close on a handheld portable device. Constance Shulman, another performer with an arms-length list of credits (including Orange is the New Black) plays a woman who is welcoming strangers with sweets and inane chatter that gradually unwinds to reveal her own tragic reality.
Smithtown is an unsettling and extreme collection of provocations and if you are looking for naturalism and a hefty dose of plausibility, it may not pass your test. But thats true of much theater. The intriguing thing here apart from the nakedly exposed performances given by experienced performers working in close proximity to a camera is Larimores lateral approach to this dark narrative.
Smithtown streams through March 13. For information and tickets, connect to The Studios of Key West: tskw.org/smithtown-2/