‘Love and Information’ raises questions
Main Street Theater’s intimate Rice Village venue was perfect for the minimalist set of “Love and Information,” the edgy and innovative work of award-winning British playwright Caryl Churchill.
Churchill, who at 77 still is writing plays, is best known for “Cloud Nine,” “Top Girls,” and “Serious Money” — all plays reflecting her interests in politics and language and showcasing her often radical experimentation with form.
In this regional premiere, the play’s 13 actors ricochet through several fast-paced vignettes, focusing on the way the course of communication and love never runs smoothly, no matter how sophisticated our knowledge and modes of communicating seem to be.
Churchill’s social critique is pointed — technology hasn’t made us communicate better — but it has changed the form of how we communicate, our efforts as quick and ephemeral as the videos, emails, and Facebook posts that punctuate the days of our lives.
Director Philip Hayes keeps the scenes moving, with jarring fluorescent lights and techno-pop music often appearing between scenes to emphasize how unnatural and disparate our experiences of love can often seem. We need “information” in order to negotiate our emotional lives, but if the language conveying
information is unreliable, then how helpful is it?
This is the kind of question that Churchill forces the audience to address, but the scenes themselves often are engaging and even humorous. By the time you catch on to the significance of a scene, the actors may have moved on to something new — emphasizing how the sheer speed with which information is delivered is often too fast for us to fully process.
The opening scene — flags being waved at an airport — sets us up for one of Churchill’s main concerns: the way signs and symbols fall short of conveying what we need to know. Just when you think you have picked up on her not being so sure about Saussure, she pushes the envelope a bit further: Let’s say thing are not so arbitrary and you do get “information?”
As an early scene in which two women argue over a “secret,” the mystery is undercut by one of the women revealing, in a whisper, what all the fuss is about, but forget semiotics and theatrical symbolism — what are the stakes? Just as soon as one of the women demands that the other not “start guessing,” then the information is revealed.
Churchill’s point is that it
‘Love and Information’ is almost dizzying in the sheer number of questions it provokes. Two teenage girls remind us of how shallow our Internet searches are in getting information (‘his favorite color is blue!’) yet how insistent we are anyway: “We’ve got to know!”
matters very little what the “information” actually is — what matters is how we take it. Is the secret a “sin”? Does it matter if one says, “I don’t want you to know?” Well, maybe, but not as much as the final question that ends the scene: “NOW what?”
“Love and Information” is almost dizzying in the sheer number of questions it provokes. Two teenage girls remind us of how shallow our Internet searches are in getting information (“his favorite color is blue!”) yet how insistent we are anyway: “We’ve got to know!” When we size each other up, we ask for information, yet it is often too much. Yet Churchill is not coy: We can have all the “information” in the world, and still not be able to cope with it.
In a set of scenes that are the only recurrent characters in the play, a couple seems to lack communication skills, unable to connect. The woman’s male partner repeatedly dismisses her words before she even completes a thought. When the specter of death shows up, communication improves, the pressure of no communication making it more precious almost immediately.
Churchill asks us to consider the distractions of technology and our idolatry of “facts”: how do we create meaning out of what we say and what we feel, and, “What to you mean when you say ‘it has meaning’?” If that is only valuable in the realm of facts and technology, then Churchill thinks we are sunk. With strong performances especially from Patrician Duran, Jovan Jackson, and Molly Searcy, Love and Information might just inspire you to put down that remote or turn off that phone, and figure out what to say, in person, when asked, “Do you love me?” and instead of defaulting to the rational, just say, “Yes I do.”