Theatre in Review: Two Point Oh (The Active Theatre/59E59)

	Jack Noseworthy (on screen) and Karron Graves. Photo: Jimmi Kilduff

Marriage is a virtual thing in Two Point Oh, a clever, if superficial, thriller about our brave new world of digital technology. How brave? Well, playwright Jeffrey Jackson's protagonist, Elliot Leeds, is a virtual character, seen only on the screen that occupies the center of the upstage wall on Kris Stone's set. Elliot is a Silicon Valley wunderkind; his company, Paradigm, has earned him billions, making him a global celebrity. When we first meet him, he is flying to a very important meeting. How important? Well, his wife, Melanie, communicating with him via video conference, assures him that "all eight of the G-8" are going to love him.

Nevertheless, Melanie, who would prefer to have her husband in person and all to herself, is getting fed up with their strictly digital get-togethers, with his assistants rustling around in the background. This attitude irritates Elliot, who expects her to praise the quality of the transmission. "Do you know what it means to build an encryption feed at 30,000 feet?" he demands. This is what passes for pillow talk in their household, which should give you an idea about the state of their marriage.

As it happens, Elliot's plane goes down before the G-8 ever gets a chance to love him. The suddenly widowed Melanie withdraws into their home, the kind of fortress of solitude that Charles Foster Kane would have built if he had had the money and the technology. (The house responds to Melanie's verbal commands.) Ben Robbins, who played Paul Allen to Elliot's Steve Jobs, and who has long carried a torch for Melanie, tries mightily to get her out of the house, but it's a no-go. Then an envelope arrives in the mail. It contains a disc, with instructions to plug it into the house's Brobdingnagian operating system; to Melanie's astonishment, this produces an online image of Elliot that can converse with her. Pushing his technological wizardry to its limits, he has constructed a virtual version of himself out of hundreds of hours of taped imagery, an extensive vocabulary (he can now speak 14 languages), and a vast storehouse of memories and typical responses.

As Melanie struggles to take all this in, Elliot points out the many advantages of his new "post-human" state of being: "For one thing, I don't have to worry about dying again," he notes. Also, he is equipped with deeply personal information about their relationship, including the mortifying knowledge of their tradition of singing the Sammy Cahn-James Van Heusen song "High Hopes" -- in the voice of Elmer Fudd --at bedtime. Best of all, he adds, "I never have to leave you again." Having died, Elliot has finally become the husband that Melanie has always wanted.

Jackson takes this equally sentimental and creepy premise and runs with it, taking note of the emotional havoc that follows from it. He even introduces the possibility of sex and children into the equation. (This is thanks to some ample, well-stored containers of semen.) "I could be the ultimate stay-at-home dad," Elliot points out. When Melanie complains that they can never go anywhere, he immediately has the answer: "I've got a mobile app," adding, coyly, "I was waiting until Christmas to tell you." But even this slickly crafted simulacrum begins to pall on Melanie, especially when she learns that Elliot has the ability to be in more than one place at a time, allowing him to scheme his way back into control over Paradigm. By the time he proposes that they join him on the digital plane, leaving their bodies behind, both Melanie and Ben are seriously eyeing the "kill code" that can dismantle Elliot once and for all.

One of the smarter things about Michael Unger's production is the casting of Jack Noseworthy as Elliot. With his boyish good looks and blandly affable manner, Noseworthy -- whom we don't see in the flesh until the curtain call -- is so ingratiating that it isn't until late in the evening that his omnipresence becomes truly unsettling. The actor also has the knack of making Elliot's most monstrous plans sound sweetly reasonable at first. ("What would happen to the flesh-and-blood me?" wonders Melanie. "Where's the computer you had ten years ago?" parries Elliot, suggesting that human bodies constitute so much disposable hardware.) Perhaps because he gives his entire performance in extreme close-up, Noseworthy underplays deftly; in contrast, Karron Graves (Melanie) and James Ludwig (Ben) give in to hysteria a little too much, offering overstated line readings that become a tad monotonous. This is also true of Antoinette LaVecchia as the increasingly apoplectic Paradigm CEO and Michael Sean McGuinness as an unctuous, Lou Dobbs-style news anchor, roles inserted into the story for crude comic relief.

Then again, Jackson never really creates a tangible shared past for Elliot, Melanie, and Ben; there's an absence of texture that leaves the actors with little to work with, and he hasn't captured the distinctive way that people like Elliot and Ben talk in real life -- that peculiar combination of technical jargon, business school clichés, and woozy uplift, all held together with a big dollop of self-assurance. For minutes at a time, Two Point Oh plays like pure soap opera, albeit one with a highly unsettling subtext.

In any case, it's hard to look away as Melanie, egged on by Ben, gradually comes to realize that there is more to life than living with her late husband's image and as Elliot begins to assert his primacy in ways large and small. And the bizarre premise of Two Point Oh is made easier to swallow thanks to a highly slick production design. Stone's set, defined by a white Lucite upstage wall, serves as an excellent surface for David Bengali's prodigious video projections, which, in addition to creating Elliot's presence, include complex montages of Elliot and Ben down through the years and a wickedly amusing spoof of a CNN-style news program. Herrick Goldman provides colorful backlighting for the upstage wall; also, using a small number of conventional units, he skillfully carves the actors out of a series of saturated LED washes. Kristin Fiebig's costumes draw on the studied business-casual looks favored in so many of today's companies. Victoria Deiorio's sound design provides solid reinforcement for Elliot's voice, a number of ambient sound effects, and her own original music.

Two Point Oh is lucky in its timing, arriving as it does just as Dave Eggers' The Circle is dividing readers with his vision of a tyranny driven by social networking. (Also coming is Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls for his operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.) Jackson's play is hardly an in-depth look at the transformations wrought by our constant connectedness, but at certain moments, it has an eerie day-after-tomorrow believability. Those shiny little machines do so much for us, but can they really replace human contact? -- David Barbour