Theatre Exile's "dark play'

Two years ago a Missouri woman named Lori Drew and her teenage daughter allegedly created a fake MySpace account in the name of “Josh Evans.” Over a span of several months, they sent emails and messages to Megan Meier, the 13-year-old daughter of a neighbor down the street. The pair first manipulated Megan into believing that Josh liked her, then later crushed her hopes and ultimately advised “the world would be a better place without you in it.” Megan committed suicide on October 17, 2006.

Now imagine a script that asks an audience to sympathize with— or understand and laugh at— Drew’s alleged online manipulation of this fragile teenager. That’s the perspective of Carlos Murillo’s dark play, or stories for boys, now in production at Theatre Exile.

Some players know the rules

After his first heterosexual experience, college freshman Nick (Robert DaPonte) lies in bed with his girlfriend Molly (Katie Gould). She strokes her hand down his chest, only to discover a series of scars on his stomach. Her innocent question— “What are these?”— launches Nick into a back-story of a few years earlier in California, when he was 14, lonely and picked on, and amused himself by pushing people’s gullibility thresholds.

In an online chat-room (remember those?), Nick discovers Adam (Doug Greene), a slightly older kid at a neighboring school, who earns a gullibility factor of 10 (the highest ranking) for a simple, earnest statement in his profile: “I want to fall in love.” Challenged by his drama teacher (Krista Apple) to create a “dark play”—a theatre-type game in which “some players know the rules and others don’t”— Nick exploits the anonymity of the Internet to invent Rachel (Gould again, double-cast), and manipulate Adam with his fantasy idea of the perfect girl.

Although Adam insists, “I’m not stupid,” Nick has clearly picked the dumbest kid in Southern California. Over a series of months, he manipulates Adam into (a) falling in love with a girl he’s never met, (b) nightly masturbation sessions in front of a webcam, (c) a pair of homosexual experiences, (d) believing that tragedy has befallen “Rachel” and (e) committing a horrific crime.

Don’t blame the cast

Murillo based his play on a true story, but unlike the outcome of Megan Meier’s Internet-related tragedy, Exile’s production shows little that’s dark or dangerous. Although I found Greene’s too-sober performance unsatisfying, I can’t blame the cast. In a number of roles, both Apple and Dave Johnson add genuine moments of humor, and Gould delivers a charmingly fictitious Rachel. DaPonte sustains Nick’s long monologues nicely, alternating at times between the personality of a used-car salesman and stand-up comic as he reverts back and forth from his narrator role to that of a teenage boy who’s starved for attention.

But the question Nick asks his drama teacher— “Was my dark play dangerous enough?”— should be asked of director Deborah Block, who pulled back from opportunities to make this “dark play” truly dangerous. Not that I wanted to watch Greene masturbate in front a webcam or see Katie Gould undressed. But when the script says, “My girlfriend’s lying naked in bed” and on multiple occasions calls for Adam to comply with Nick’s appeals to “Do it again for me,” this production took no risks in either direction.

Block’s other artistic associates at Exile—Joe Canuso and Matt Pfeiffer— didn’t shy away from the simulated sex and nudity required by their respective successful productions of Red Light Winter and Bug. More important, in Block’s production, the sloppily staged scene that culminates the action and caused Nick’s scars entirely lacks shock value or homoeroticism.

The playwright doesn’t follow his own advice

Playwright Murillo, too, ignores the advice of his own characters— specifically, a drama teacher who observes, “The best theater is dangerous and challenges the audience.” Instead, Murillo fills his play with easy assumptions and unexplored themes.

For example, Nick’s simple question to Adam— “Did your parents stay married?”— just assumes the old stereotypes: Divorce damages children, while kids reared in traditional families grow up blissfully naïve. Earlier, Adam’s “10” for gullibility follows a similar unspoken assumption: that in a hyper-sexed youth culture, anyone who yearns for honest intimacy must be a sucker. The credibility of these stereotypes, I would point out, depends on the jaded cynicism of adults in the audience.

Murillo leaves the more interesting themes unexplored: Can a liar become someone who tells the truth? If he does, will people believe him? Instead, dark play offers only a kid getting manipulated to the point of committing a horrible crime. The journey in this production—to which Nick’s narration makes us fully privy—contains very few secrets and no insight.

We live in an age when kids armed with video-capable cell phones broadcast their violent group attacks on YouTube, and adults troll Internet chat-rooms to prey on unsuspecting minors. A few hours after writing this review, I logged on to check my email and read about Miami teenager Abraham Biggs, who earlier this week told users on a bodybuilding forum of his impending suicide and invited them to watch the live video from his webcam. A number of viewers are said to have watched, some even egging Biggs on as he swallowed a handful of pills, lay down on his bed, and died.

If Murillo’s type of cyber-manipulation represents the worst that one kid can do to another these days, who needs theater? On the Internet, truth is much scarier.