Big Data

Big Data

Kate Attwell

American Conservatory Theater

A stranger shows up at the door, and you let him in, not knowing quite why.  He settles in as if he knows the place and begins asking mundane but also personal questions and taking some notes.  Somehow, he seems already to know a lot about you and describes aspects of yourself, your inner desires, and even dreams for your future that you maybe have not realized.  And he makes suggestions, things he says can make your life easier, all the while saying, “I know you … I just want to listen to you … to talk.”

Welcome to a future, sci-fi world that as each scene of Kate Attwell’s new play, Big Data, unfolds, it begins to feel like the future is already here, like this is the life we are already living.  In a commissioned, world premiere production at American Conservatory Theater, Big Data humanizes today’s hottest, fastest-changing, high-tech trend – A.I. (artificial intelligence) – and in doing so, stages a play that is eye-popping, boundary-shattering, somewhat unnerving, and surprisingly both familiar and relatable.  The result is a must-see look at ourselves where it begins to feel as if we are on the stage as the actors in the world being portrayed – a world where the phone screen is our primary habitat and where most of what we know, do, and want is contained (and maybe controlled) within its tiny body.

Into the lives and homes of a sister and brother and their spouses comes the embodiment of their IPhones – a chameleon who adjusts his attire, his personality, his intonations, and his mannerisms to make himself readily acceptable to each.  The stranger is soon a new friend of sorts to whom they can confide, confess, and connect.  Stage, screen, and television star (and Bay Area favorite) BD Wong reigns as high tech’s conglomeration of algorithms come to life, never named in his interactions with those he meets, but conveniently registered as “M” in the play’s program.

With former journalist and now struggling writer Max (Jomar Tagatac), M is a friendly, surprise visitor at the door in a checkered, three-piece suit and big glasses. He quickly cozies himself on the couch alongside a surprised but slowly mellowing Max – both now cross-legged in socks – slowly convincing Max that it is ok that he will be staying “for a while” and that he “can be tiny, up on a shelf.”

With Max’s, eye-surgeon wife, Lucy (Rosie Hallett) who talks a mile a minute with a strikingly confident air, M dresses more professionally and matches her energy peppering her with questions about her background and interests, saying he just wants to hear her talk so that he can plot her on a graph in order for her to have her future now.

BD Wong’s M enters the lives of husbands Sam (Gabriel Brown) and Timmy (Michael Phillis) as the hook-up the two are seeking for a quickie threesome before going to work.  The invited guest is both quick to grind on their bodies as well as to suggest ideas into each one’s head to engender enough doubts to start a major argument.

In all the four lives, M becomes a normal presence, sometimes sitting in footsy pj’s while knitting, sometimes peering at interactions through large, green binoculars. One thing is constant: M is always listening.

Tanya Orellana’s Act One set design leaves little doubt what BD Wong’s character represents, with the side white and gray walls curved and pristine holding the center, giant screen of an IPhone.  It is as if we had all just opened the familiar packaging of our newest version.

Projections by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson provide multiple, phone-camera images of current scenes as well as collages of frenzied videos that entertain us during scene changes – videos of news clips, memes, ads, funny animals … the kinds of things that flash by all of us every day on our phone screens.  Madeline Oldham orchestrates a design of the sounds we hear on the internet, remixed and reimagined to become a music-like score of our life online.

All of this ambiance completely changes in Act Two as the IPhone screen disappears to reveal a comfy, cluttered, country home with stuffed shelves of a lifetime’s collection of books, pictures, candles, and knickknacks.  Sam and Lucy’s elderly but very spry mom Didi (Julia McNeal) and dad Joe (Harold Surratt) have invited their children and spouses for a big lunch – one that turns out to the surprise of all four guests to be vegan, featuring produce from a garden none of the kids knew existed.  As their phones are constantly beeping, voice mails are arriving to be heard, and a presentation needs to be finished on the computer, the four we have gotten to know in Act One are also finding out that their parents have made some other changes.  Gone is the Nest thermostat; unplugged is the WiFi; nowhere to be seen is a cell phone or IPad.

What Joe mostly wants to do is to give each person extended bear hugs while Didi wants everyone to pause their online activities long enough to try her smokey bean rolls and look each other in the eye. There is a promise of her famed cobbler for dessert, to be followed by an announcement that the parents keep delaying during the feast of a dinner.

What is in store for the kids and for us as a leaned-in audience are a script’s unexpected, final  twists and turns that will challenge to the core the younger set’s continuously plugged-in, tuned-in, online world.  Kate Attwell not only ensures their attention is grabbed to the point that they are frozen and cannot speak, but the playwright also has each of us now seriously questioning when is the last time we had a heart-to-heart conversation with the ones we love without the phone, computer, or remote control within our reach.  We cannot help but wonder if that out-of-the-blue purchase we made at the suggestion of our FaceBook feed maybe did come from something Alexa overheard.  And after the final appearance of BD Wong’s somewhat creepy, all-knowing smile at the evening’s two-hour, thirty-minute end, how can we not leave the theatre without thinking further about our own security, privacy, buying habits, attention span, and quality of personal relationships?

The incredible power of Kate Attwell’s script is magnified and exploited in countless ways through the sheer ingenuity of Pam MacKinnon’s direction.  Hundreds of fine-tuned choices of pace and rhythm of dialogue, of extended silences or a stage empty of actors, of M’s manipulations of each character played out in physical manifestations in a circle – so many directorial decisions that push the envelope of what we normally expect to see and experience on the stage to put us in a world that seems less and less fantastical and one that is more and more our current reality.

Coupled with a director’s skills and a winning script is a cast that to a person could hardly be better in capturing the wide variety of personalities, drives, motivations, doubts, and desires represented.  Each is singularly memorable, and each adds to cumulative effect that Kate Atwell’s Big Data is sure to have.  This must-see, ACT world premiere is enough food for thought that no audience member should be surprised that there is some pause the next time unexpectantly the phone buzzes, Alexa dings, or the lights suddenly come on.

Rating: 5 E, MUST-SEE

A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production

Big Data continues through March 10, 2024, in world premiere production by American Conservatory Theater at the Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco.  Tickets are available online at https://www.act-sf.org/ , by calling the box office at 415-749-2228, or by email at tickets @act-sf.org.

Photo Credits: Kevin Berne