Playwright: Regina Taylor. At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St. Tickets: 312-443-3800; www.goodmantheatre.org; $10-$40. Runs through: June 21
The written word's Armageddon has long been a topic for speculative fiction, ranging from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to Anne Washburn's Mister Burns. Faced with the Four Horsemen of the Internet heralding the extinction of their earthly mission, as well as the multitude of seductive toys threatening to sway them from their purpose, writers today are easily propelled by the urgency of rescuing their craft into employing extravagant plot devices straining both credibility and coherence.
Regina Taylor's premise does not focus on writers or readers, though, but on the manufacturers of old-fashioned ink-on-paper, fabric-and-glue books—specifically, a publishing house dedicated to African-American literature for nearly half a century, now in crisis after having been ordered by its corporate partners to increase its sales or decrease its workforce.
On this bitterly cold winter morning in 2016, its staff is nervously awaiting the decision of company founder, Alexander Ames. The only office personnel unconcerned over the imminent future is the cleaner, called simply "J," who remains serenely wired up to his earbuds as he goes about his chores. When Ames inadvertently becomes privy to J's input, however, he gets more than he anticipated. In fact, what he gets is nothing less than an entire re-examination of "information" as a concept—its storage, its delivery, and, ultimately, its value.
Playgoers familiar with William Golding's The Inheritors, the Brother Rabbit "trickster" tales of the Deep South and the Trekker telepsychic phenomenon dubbed "mind-meld" have the best chance of following Taylor's kaleidoscopic narrative, but others are warned to listen closely, or just go ahead and obey the playwright's exhortations to ( oh, the irony! ) interact with their phones during the performance. That's because this Goodman production features sensory overload commensurate with that of Blue Man Group. Riccardo Hernandez has designed a runway stage ( not unlike that in the recent Marie Antoinette ) festooned with flashing LEDs, Brechtian video screens and robotic chirps all gamboling merrily in a carnival of kinetic clutter.
Eric Lynch, Lisa Tejero, Tim Decker and Jacqueline Williams make up a racially diverse squad of techspeaking executives generating theatrical fizz as they contemplate the dubious rewards of their service, but their banter's sole function is to delay the real showdown, in which Eugene Lee's Ames and Edgar Miguel Sanchez' J do the right thing and save the universe—maybe. With so many ideas scrambling in so many directions, the necessary grounding in the immediate knowable quickly becomes obscured in a blizzard of cyberjargon as thick as the snow enveloping this columbarium of literacy's ashes.
