A husband and wife stand side by side on a large, empty stage. They are close enough to touch. However, an unbridgeable gulf separates the two.
Blind runnera gently moving new piece, currently available at St. Ann’s Warehouse through January 24 (as part of Under the Radar), uses live video elements to travel that distance home. Intense close-ups of the two performers’ faces are projected on the back wall, towering over their small bodies in the Warehouse space. Nothing fancier is needed: the actors’ expressions, filled with pain and desperate desire, do all the work.
Runner is one of several works in New York’s busy January festival season that rely heavily on live video elements and new technologies. Some parts, like Runnercombine these technological elements seamlessly with storytelling, while others deploy these tools more clumsily or, in more unfortunate cases, distract from their narrative goals by unnecessarily using artificial intelligence.
Runner uses video for a clear purpose. Created by the Mehr Theater Group and performed in Farsi, Amir Reza Koohestani’s play follows the weekly visits of an Iranian man to his wife, a political prisoner held in Tehran. Koohestani’s invasive close-ups (he also directs; the video is by Yasi Moradi and Benjamin Krieg) highlight not only the couple’s growing detachment, but also the daily stifling of life in a state of surveillance. When the pair run side by side in a later scene, their bodies blend on screen like ghosts passing through each other, a simple but moving effect.
Runner ultimately gets bogged down in melodrama – the husband is drawn into a complicated new relationship that offers an intimacy his wife can no longer offer. The dialogue becomes circular, often repetitive. But the restrained work of performers Ainaz Azarhoush and Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh keeps the piece on its feet, while the use of video always enhances its liveliness.
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In 2020, when Sinking Ship & Theater in Quarantine was first presented The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy as an online work, I questioned the “liveness” of the piece. Writing for Exeunt, I groaned: “Apparently parts of 7th trip were actually live, but I wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t told me.
My uncertainty arose from the premise of the series, which saw space traveler Egon Tichy (Joshua William Gelb) falling into a time vortex and confronting multiple versions of himself. Josh Luxenberg’s screenplay for this dizzying sci-fi farce is sharp and witty, but in its online form it was difficult to tell which elements were precisely “live,” and some impact was lost.
The play’s in-person debut, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (Redux) (at New York Theater Workshop’s Fourth Street Theater through February 2, also as part of UTR) seems to exist as a direct response to this very criticism. On two giant screens, the show takes place as online, with a few adjustments. But at the center of it all is Gelb, in the flesh, rushing into that famous TiQ closet in the form of several Tichys.
It’s a lot of fun to watch, even if Luxenberg’s script still sags in its middle section. The greatest pleasure here is watching Gelb work his magic through a hundred fluid scene changes. As for live Circle Jerk at the Connelly in 2022, you get both the show itself and its entire inner workings: two trips for the price of one.
Kanishk Pandey’s was less successful in linking history and technology. PRISONCORE!as part of the Exponential Festival. (Full background: I saw the series on a night when Pandey himself, admirably, became the book’s protagonist due to illness.) This multimedia piece, directed by Rachel Gita Karp and presented at The Brick, begins by the story of a sadistic prison guard named Lucky. In the name of “reform”, Lucky forces his inmates (the public) to participate in his online gaming efforts. After Rain, his live dealer, becomes involved in Lucky’s cruel antics, the story changes and becomes his own.
Lucky’s interactions with Rain’s livestream are technically seamless. And Pandley’s ideas about the inhumanity of life behind a screen and the personal prison of a life lived exclusively online are certainly timely. But its central concept of a prison reform program based on online gaming – even if we’re supposed to take it literally – is too vague and silly for any of these ideas to really gain traction.
In the moments when PRISONCORE! makes (minimal) use of AI imaging, the technology is hardly presented as a boon. New multi-part digital project TECHNE, on the other hand, places generative AI at the heart. In both TECHNÉ presentations I saw at BAM Fisher (out of four in total), where TECHNÉ runs until January 29 under the UTR, the results of AI adoption were not encouraging.
The most unnecessary was “The Vivid Unknown,” a recreation of Godfrey Reggio’s legendary documentary. Koyaanisqatsi generated entirely by AI. The whole value of Reggio’s original film, of course, lay in the painstaking effort of collecting and assembling hours of time-lapse footage filmed across the country. Dumping all of this into an AI generator simply produces a much uglier modern imitation of a great work.
“Voices,” Margarita Athanasiou’s witty video essay tracing the history of mediums and spiritualism in America, was more successful. The use of AI imagery in this piece was also distracting (and, again, ugly). But when the essay focuses on his grandmother’s obsession with mediums, tying home movie sequences into a historical tapestry, Athanasiou discovers, much like the creators of Runner And Tichy did—that rich and intriguing collision point between technology and storytelling.
Blind runner continues at St. Ann’s Warehouse until January 24. The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (Redux) continues at the Fourth Street Theater through February 2. TECHNÉ continues at BAM Fisher until January 19. PRISONCORE! has finished its race.