Caryl Churchill’s ‘Love and Information’ in NY

The questions and answers come rapid-fire, like rounds of ammunition, one after the other.

But one question— “Do you love me?” — elicits no response.

That’s how it goes in Love and Information, Caryl Churchill’s breathless new creation. It’s more like a tsunami than a play: 57 scenes and more than 100 roles with no unifying narrative, save that the settings are all contemporary. These two-minute dramatic blips are bridged by blasts of deafening sounds: the screeching of subway trains, the clacking of machinery, the buzzing of technology, the roar of tidal waves, the screams of amusement parks, and so on. After two hours, you’re overwhelmed with info-overload.

That’s just the point. Churchill uses Beckett’s dictum — “Form is content, content is form” — to suggest that in our digital age of half-finished sentences, half-eaten meals, and half-baked relationships, we’re so overloaded that we’re about to crash.

Unpredictable playwright

Even with more than 30 arresting dramatic works in her oeuvre, Caryl Churchill is the least predictable of contemporary playwrights, as well as the most inventive, incisive, and consistently daring. She calls our attention to the urgent issues of our era by reinventing the dramatic form every time she writes. Indeed, it’s as if her plays themselves are rebelling against the idea of what a play is.

They range from the unconventional two-act form that suddenly skips centuries and changes casts mid-stream (Cloud Nine and Top Girls), to the 50-minute slam (Far Away and A Number), to the sly satire (Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?) to the seven-minute political “drive-by” (Seven Jewish Children). Churchill is also a writer with a deep and varied social conscience: Her topics range from women in the workplace and sexual stereotyping to colonialism and warfare to human cloning and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. You never know what she’s going to write about next — or how she’s going to write it.

Love and Information is no exception. Churchill’s minimalist script features words, words, words — and that’s about it. She provides no character names, no time and setting indications. The play is broken into seven sections, each averaging eight scenes, each scene featuring a title. Her script offers no cast list, nor any indication of who should read each of the lines, nor any guidance as to whether or not the lines are conversations (other than “The characters are different in every scene”). She also indicates that, within each section, the scenes can be performed in any order.

Futuristic box

Such a radically new dramatic form requires a radical directorial approach. James Macdonald seems more than ready for the challenge — indeed, he appears to thrive on it. He’s already directed two of Churchill’s minimalist scripts (A Number and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?) and created ingenious solutions to the problems that they pose. For Love and Information, Macdonald and his set designer (Miriam Buether) have come up with a giant white box that appears to be lined with graph paper. In this futuristic, antiseptic space, he has staged each of the 57 scenes with split-second changes— quite a feat, since the prop list features more than 500 items, including a piano that must appear and disappear in moments. We careen from kitchen to office to beach to subway to park to restaurant to airplane, and so on, in a matter of minutes.

Sound designer Christopher Shutt fills the interludes with a cacophony of sounds (grinding, sawing, clicking, roaring, exploding, buzzing, ticking, tocking, ringing, knocking) that serve two functions: to masquerade the noise of the scene changes and to hint at the content of the scene to come.

What sticks?

Then there’s the daunting task of distributing lines to the cast. Macdonald does it with 14 actors, but that needn’t prevent the next director from using 24 or 34. Whatever works, Churchill allows.

Is this playwright, as well as her inventive artistic team, messing with our minds? Assaulting us with random words, images, characters, and sounds to the saturation point? You bet. About 60 minutes into this two-hour roller-coaster ride, I stopped searching for sense, meaning, or a narrative. Instead I sat back and allowed the tidal wave to wash over me.

“No one could possibly have all the information,” I heard one character say. Apparently, that’s Churchill’s point.

After the performance, I asked each of the 22 playwriting students who accompanied me to name one scene that stuck in their mind. Of the scenes mentioned, only three were duplicates. Why were those remembered more than others? We came upon the notion that the ones remembered most were those that had emotional content. For example: In one scene a sister tells her brother that she is really his mother. “Does Mom know you’re telling me this?” he replies in shock, and gets a laugh. In another scene a middle-aged man and woman share their fondest memories with sweet regret. Are they still married? Were they ever? In another scene a man sits on a swing and a woman stands aside, spurned, exclaiming: “But I’m your wife!” Does he have Alzheimer’s? Or is she pretending? In still another scene, a young girl tries to relate to a boy who can feel no pain — by pinching him. Why is he like that? Why is she doing that? Churchill’s emotional hit-and-run method leaves you to figure it out. Or not.

The scene that stuck in my mind was another one-liner. A man and a boy stand facing the audience. “It’s one of the top ten zoos in the country!” exclaims the man, cheerfully. But the boy looks sad. Father and son? Love and information? Or lack of love…or lack of relevant information…However you see it.

It’s hard to find the love buried beneath the avalanche of information in this overwhelming work. But you can, if you sit back and let the play have its own way.