Game, theater make-believe an even match
If your feelings about roleplaying video games lie somewhere among apathy, disdain and fear, San Francisco Playhouse’s “Non-Player Character” breaks down the medium’s high barriers to entry. And if you’re already an online gaming fan or player, one in no need of the glossary in the show’s program for terms like “guild” and “battlemage,” you’ll likely be impressed by how seriously Walt McGough’s play takes your pastime.
The characters in “NonPlayer Character” aren’t just jargon-spouting young men who never grew up and who channel their misfit rage into digital bloodlust and sexism on social media — though that is a blight on gaming culture, and one the play seeks to investigate. Rather, this Sandbox Series world premiere, which opened Thursday, Feb. 15, at the Creativity Theater, paints gamers, and especially game developers, as world builders and artists and storytellers.
For developer Katja (Emily Radosevich), playing isn’t just about carnage. Exploring the universe of a video game with her old friend Trent (Devin O’Brien) is like taking a walk through a park together, impossible in real life since they haven’t lived in the same town since high school. Her life has rocketed from a prestigious college to a pitch with gaming bigwigs, while his dubious claim on adulthood is that “sometimes I do my own laundry.”
But the two still share a bond forged in the earnestness of youth, and the actors’ openness with one another is one of the show’s highlights. Katja and Trent constantly grill each other on their minuscule shifts in mood or expression, always interrogating, apologizing and realigning, and Radosevich and O’Brien keep every twinge of feeling right on the surface. O’Brien’s Trent, in particular, always seems one slight away from balling up into the fetal position or erupting into a tantrum. Every conciliatory smile or display of concern he offers is the result of a battle won — charging even the most banal of exchanges with a dangerous undercurrent.
If a game is the platform for all this solemnity, it’s also one punctuated by the occasional, deliciously silly trouncing of a bad guy, via balletic twirl or karate chop or the casting of fire, and in a costume (by Leandra Watson) straight out of “I Dream of Jeannie” or “The Last of the Mohicans.” Directed by Lauren English, these extravagant flourishes are so made for theater that you wonder why there aren’t more plays about video games.
Yet even more than flamboyant cosplay, gaming in “Non-Player Character” is about mastery and (supposed) meritocracy, and it’s here that McGough’s script falters. When Trent’s romantic overtures to Katja aren’t requited, “Non-Player Character” requires him to morph instantly from nebbish to invectivespewing troll, one who marshals an entire digital army to harass, threaten and smear his purported lifelong crush, stigmatizing her and her whole gender as the reason he and his fellow men don’t get what they deserve. (The show is partly inspired by the 2014 Gamergate controversy.)
The play moves both too slow and too fast, spending eons on the overwrought preamble to a game, but then making characters vault, sans pretext, into whole new personae or fast-forwarding through Katja’s doxing and its fallout. When Katja finally takes on one of the men (played by Dean Koya) who’s been privy to her attacks, McGough wastes the confrontation; ultimately, all Katja does is tell him to stop talking.
But the show salvages itself in the final scene, when Katja doesn’t turn away from gaming but reinvests herself in it — in the world she’s creating within it. Gaming, “Non-Player Character” says, doesn’t belong to the trolls. It’s waiting, ripe, for any of us to create something beautiful out of it.