But
in Broken Codes, now playing in a
space at the Rising Star Roastery on the west side, the food truck has skidded
into a guardrail, spilling it’s contents on the road. And they’re asking the
audience to pick it all up and make sense of it, which some will no doubt be
willing to do. Others, of course, will just carefully drive around the incident
and be on their way.
This
show is the third in a series that the TN group has been working on for a
while. It started with Code: Preludes and
continued later with The Turing Machine. Central
to these plays is the story of Alan Turing, the math genius at Britain’s
Bletchley Park who led the team that broke the Nazi’s Enigma code.
In
my review of that first play, I offered the wish that “future iterations of
this experience will be more accessible to the average attendee and less smugly
superior.” Alas, TN artistic director Jeremy Paul has decided to go in the
latter direction with the current Broken
Codes. And it doesn’t work for me, which is odd. I would seem to be the
ideal audience for such a show, since I have read extensively about Alan Turing
over the years and have enjoyed works of fiction related to the subject, such
as Neal Stephenson’s dense but explicable novel Cryptonomicon.
The
major problem with this production involves the premise that Paul states in his
curtain speech. To paraphrase, he explains that modern technology (smart
phones, computers, computer games, social media, etc.) is so confusing we can’t
understand it by looking at it or dealing with it directly. Well, playwrights
have been staring directly at imponderable issues for eons—including love,
death, and the reason for living—without throwing up their hands and claiming
it’s all too mysterious. Grappling directly with those mysteries is why we are
attracted to theater and the stories that reside there.
Hewing
to his premise, Paul and his hard-working minions create a collection of small
vignettes, or performances, or art installations that touch on technology in
occasionally understandable but mostly oblique ways. Then we, as individuals in
the audience, are asked to look at it all and, as they say on their website,
“decide how they all fit together.” Well, thanks for the help.
Try
to pull all this together: A woman interacting with a computer with the aid of
drawings from elementary school kids, a violin performance accompanied by
electronic and computer music, a woman exercising her facial muscles and
scrawling notes about selfies on transparent sheets projected on a screen, a
couple scenes involving young female code breakers at Bletchley Park, a group
of people reading from scripts about a “Beta uprising,” and so forth. And just
to make it a bit more quizzical, these offerings are sometimes split up and
mixed amongst the others.
Hey,
it’s art! And what you get from it is…what you get from it. But what I don’t
get is why theater artists don’t appreciate that making their material
accessible, even in unconventional and non-linear ways, is not inherently
offensive. I would actually like to understand what these people think about
modern technology and its impact on society.
I
don’t intend to be dismissive about the efforts of so many young, industrious
and talented people. But my reaction may result, in part, from Theater Ninja’s
dismissive approach to their audience. When you abdicate your responsibility to
take your patrons on a decipherable journey—no matter how challenging—your food
truck isn’t happily and inventively roaming the city. It’s up on blocks in the
front yard.
Broken
Codes
Through
May 21, produced by Theater Ninjas at Rising Star Roastery, 3617 Walton Ave.,
theaterninjas.com
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