"The play celebrates the basic human need to connect, to be cherished, to be understood."

from offoffonline.com


Meeting Cute, Online

by Kirthana Ramisetti
stirring reviewed March 16, 2007

	The cast
	Photo Credit: Serge Cashman

Have online personal ads become passé? There was a time when nearly everyone seemed to be trying for luck on dating Web sites. Yet now it appears the trend has begun to nosedive. People are steadily logging off these sites, no longer convinced that the Internet is the best way to meet Mr. or Ms. Right. Even Match.com seems to recognize that online dating is waning in popularity and is trying to entice singles back with its new slogan, "It's O.K. to look."

The characters in stirring are wary of the online dating stigma, but they can't help logging on to look for love anyway. On the surface, their taste in music (Mogwai, Devendra Banhart), the clothes they wear (vintage Converse high-top sneakers and thrift store jackets, ballerina flats, and leggings), and their place of residence (Brooklyn's Williamsburg) advertise that they are too cool for personal ads. Nevertheless, these lonely hipsters are registered on Match, Jdate, and Nerve.com, risking potential humiliation for a chance to meet that special someone.

Shalimar Productions's performance of stirring memorably captures the search for connection through modes of technology that keep people separated from one another. The play originally enjoyed sold-out runs at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival and the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is now being restaged at the InterArt Annex for a limited time.

The seven lovelorn Brooklynites are James and Sasha, whose long-distance relationship thrived on titillating e-mails but soured once they moved in together; Sasha's ex-boyfriend Ryan, who generates sparks with Daniel based on their mutual love for the same books and bands; Daniel's friend Joy, who lovingly derides her neighborhood on her widely read blog; and romantic Laura and darkly charming Trip, who quickly fall in love without having ever met.

Kim Gainer and Matt Bridges
Photo Credit: Serge Cashman

The script, by Charles Forbes and Shoshona Currier (also Shalimar Productions's artistic director), adeptly captures the online dating world, specifically the carefully cultivated personas men and woman create to woo each other in cyberspace. The play is based on and heavily influenced by Currier's research on actual online personal ads, which is why the characters' ads are so hilarious in the way they mirror real-life dating profiles.

All of the hipsters are well versed in the rules of writing profiles, such as "start with a hook" and "supply a narrative." The play is most exuberant in its recounting of these rules and the difficulty of cramming one's sprawling personality into neat categorizations like "favorite sex scene" or "five items you can't live without."

The affable and talented cast members play well off of one another, whether harmonizing slightly off-key to a Smiths song, chanting their personal ads in overlapping dialogue, or lustfully circling and even chasing each other around the stage in an entertaining visual demonstration of the online mating dance, where they woo one another by e-mail and instant messenging.

All give wonderfully real performances, but Jen Taher's sardonic yet vulnerable Joy is a standout, especially when skewering the wannabe artistic pretensions of Jersey City denizens or talking about meeting a cute guy in a bar and desperately trying to reconnect with him via his MySpace page. Rachel Plotkin infuses Laura with a lovable goofiness, and the character's dreamy notions of romance are both funny and surprising.

	Joey Williamson and JenTaher
	Photo Credit: Serge Cashman

Kim Gainer's Sasha shows great dramatic range as she struggles with her excitement and guilt over meeting someone new on the Web as her boyfriend withdraws into his own world. And while Matt Bridges is appealing as James, his recounting of the Pygmalion myth and musings on binary codes feel odd and out of place. You feel too acutely that the playwrights are using him as a mouthpiece to express their ideas about love and disconnection, causing James to seem less three-dimensional than the others.

The stage in which the characters interact off- and online is intentionally sparse, with props and sound used inventively to signify setting in terms of physical space and cyberspace. Desk chairs indicate that characters are communicating via laptop, while bar stools under Christmas lights show they are interacting face to face.

The characters giddily fall for each other online but fear meeting in the real world, worried that the illusion will be broken (as it often is). Some of them meet and some do not. Yet the play is not about what happens when two people finally see each other; instead it celebrates the basic human need to connect, to be cherished, to be understood. And no matter what future advances in communications technology occur, in the end we will always seek a beating heart over a blinking cursor.

Following three of the performances, there will be speed dating sessions for single theatergoers and cast members (two are for straight singles, the other for gay singles). So after watching the play's characters reflect on finding love in New York City, audience members will have the chance to do the same—but in person.

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all photos by Serge Cashman

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cold hands, cold feet...

Last Monday was cold. Wind whipping, lips chapping, fingertips freezing, the whole deal. I took a trip downtown to pick up some keys. Then I took a trip to midtown to pick up Pat and husband. Got more keys. Then Pat and husband and I walked three avenues and ten streets in the blistering cold to the truck. The Cupcake Cafe truck, painted blue with a sloppy mural of animals all over it, is a little bigger than a UPS truck. It has no shocks. The doors don't really work. It leaks anti-freeze. I got into the driver's seat. My feet barely reach the pedals.

We spent the day moving stuff into our new chashama space, to make it more liveable. We rehearsed there once two weeks ago and it was so cold (due to space heaters being off all day and the near-zero weather outside) we decided we couldn't go back until we had curtains to close the room off and a chair or two to sit on.

So on Monday Pat and husband and I went to the chashama warehouse on 57th and 12th where we used to rehearse and loaded chairs, tables, and scrap wood into the truck. I had a major nostalgic experience in there. It's where we rehearsed Bad Girls Good Writers and the Photo Plays and did a few LA FEMME readings. We shared the space with Banana, Bag, and Bodice, one of our favorite companies. They had built their box set for The Sewers on one end of the space while we shifted around beds given to us by The Debate Society at the other end of the space. It was summer and things are always easier in the summer. We weren't saddled with the need to raise $40K to get to Edinburgh. We were going to have an easy time of it. We were creative and happy. It was hot out. I would sit in the entrance of the space, a driveway, and watch cars on the West Side Highway.

On Monday our fingers were freezing. We were sniffling. It was fucking cold. After the 57th Street stop we made our way into Harlem to pick up an air conditioner a guy from the Directors Lab list was giving away. I wanted to give it to Interart, but Josh was uptown, so we brought it to chashama instead. We unloaded everything there, at our space on 126th and Amsterdam, drove back to midtown, ate chicken fingers, went home, limbs frozen. I had a sore throat.

On Tuesday at 9am, I met the indefatigable Chris Illing inside the 145th St subway. We traveled to Long Island City together and found ourselves in Materials for the Arts. We loaded up on pieces of rug, big gray blanket-y pieces of material, and some windows that I couldn't let get away. Cabbed up to 126th and Amsterdam, dropped off these pieces, ate food, I was home drinking chamomile tea and praying for health by 2 in the afternoon.

At rehearsal that night Jen walked in sick as a dog. I kept my illness to myself, not wanting to call the rehearsal. Matt and Rachel hung the curtains, closing in the room, raising the temperature ten degrees. I popped tylenol when no one was looking. Jen sounded like a drag queen. The next night she asked to leave early and I made my displeasure clear. Matt is away for the next ten days out of a very necessary necessity and we didn't have the option of letting people go. Even if they were sick. Even if they could barely speak. Even if they were making the rest of us sick by being there.

I have never been more aware of our economic instability as a company than I am now. I feel our weakness as a structure, I feel us affected by the elements. Our space is too cold to rehearse in! But we can't go anywhere with heat because we can't afford more than this. I never understood the truth of suffering for your art (a bullshit phrase, but I can feel it a little now) until I stopped working for a paycheck in an effort to better serve the company I am building. We are getting ready to take a huge show overseas for a month. It is a great show and it will get great response. It's a show that could have a life for a long time. It's a show that audiences told us over and over that they fucking loved. We have $184 in the bank account right now. It's winter and we're looking for ways to stay warm in our rehearsal space. Will we use that scrap wood to make rehearsal furniture or will we just burn it for warmth?