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The play opens promisingly enough with an increasingly anxious kindergarten teacher (Jillian K. Waters) about to read to her class from a book without pictures or even words, depicting the "one story," the only story she is allowed to teach. Her eyes seem to glaze over as she tells the class—and later, other characters in the play repeat—what she has been well-trained to robotically recite: "There has only ever been one story. There will only ever be one story. If you forget this history, there will be no more stories." As the well-structured scene ends, we see her looking nervously around, as if "Big Brother" were watching her every move. The play then shifts the setting to a university classroom. We meet two of the students, close friends Andrew (Rafa Pérez) and Conrad (Damon Trammell), and their professor (Matt Tracy). It is the professor's responsibility to spout the official line about the "one story," as well as to encourage the students to engage in sex as often as possible, presumably to keep them preoccupied and prevent them from giving too much thought to how they are being brainwashed. But Andrew is an outlier, and he sees himself as a rebel with a cause. Secretly, he has been writing his own book, his "theory of pseudo-practicality" based on the notion that all thoughts are "inherently contradictory." Much of the play focuses on the formation and development of this theory, which he shares only with Conrad. For his part, Conrad is growing increasingly alarmed at what he sees as Andrew's mental instability, and allows himself to be talked into betraying his friend. Conceptually, an updated version of 1984 would seem to fit in well with the unsettled times in which we currently find ourselves. But the playwright needs to rein in the 100-minute play, which rambles and repeats itself like a late-night dormitory bull session. The actors, under Cihangir Duman's direction, acquit themselves well within the framework they are given, and strive to bring meaning to the intellectual babble, but the play itself feels like an early draft in need of serious revision and perhaps the steady hand of a dramaturg to help shape it.
The Answer-Killing Question Buys A Crisis
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