Last year, La Jolla Playhouse launched its The Edge program to showcase new theater projects outside the mainstream -- a noble idea, but unfortunately the first Edge production was a big disappointment.
"Most Wanted," a commissioned musical about former San Diego gay party boy-turned-serial killer Andrew Cunanan, was flabby, unfocused and it lacked a raison d'etre, which may have made Playhouse-goers wonder if they really wanted to live life on the Edge.
Fortunately, The Edge regained its mojo this past weekend with the series second production, "Continuous City," which closed Sunday after a four-day run at the Potiker Theatre. The disappointment this time is that more people didn't have the opportunity to see the creative show before it closed.
The site-specific, multimedia theater piece was created by New York's Builders Association theater troupe and it has been touring the globe (continuously evolving at each stop) since its creation last year. "Continuous City" uses computer, film and video technology to tell a human story about communicating and connecting in our digital world.
The production features actors (both on prerecorded video and live onstage) performing on and around a backdrop of 32 pneumatically controlled video screens, which spring open and shut in booklike fashion to show people in different locales around the world. The videos are a mix of dramatic fiction featuring actor/playwright Harry Sinclair and real footage from "Continuous City" audiences who have uploaded their own video blogs (or vlogs) from cities worldwide.
Although the story at the heart of "Continuous City" is pretty pedestrian and predictable, the play is designed and intricately executed in such a fascinating way that the end result is engrossing.
In "Continuous City," Mike is a famed "urban anthropologist" who is living the life of his own best-selling book, "Network Nomads," hopscotching the globe as a consultant for a soon-to-launch social networking site called Xubu.com. A single dad, Mike stays in touch with his grade school-age daughter, Samantha, with daily video phone chats from China, Africa, Europe, Mexico and other stops on his Xubu world tour.
Completing the cast are Deb, the ex-bingo caller-turned-Sam's nanny who launches her own amusing vlog; and J.V., the slithery Xubu entrepreneur who prefers the cold efficiency of digital relationships to the messy reality of the face-to-face variety.
But all is not well in Xubu land. Sam misses her father (who tries valiantly to connect with her across the netherworld, playing virtual hide-and-seek and shopping via video from parks and markets in China and Mexico) and she begins to withdraw, ultimately refusing to speak to even her nanny except via text message. Plagued with guilt, Mike slowly sours on the erosion of interpersonal communication in favor of digital networking. And the increasingly desperate J.V. begins manipulating Mike's itinerary and even his recorded remarks to sell Xubu to investors.
While the story's message isn't particularly groundbreaking (computers are great, but people are happier when they relate to each other and the outside world directly), director Marianne Weems' interweaving of prerecorded video elements, as well as fact and fiction, is exceptional.
For the La Jolla production, nanny Deb (actress/writer Moe Angelos) moves to Mike's La Jolla home and she spends her days off visiting San Diego County's weirdest locales for her vlog (including the Lawrence Welk museum at the Welk Resort in Escondido, Oasis Camel Dairy in Ramona, a Mexican mall in San Ysidro and a Vietnamese grocer in Southeast San Diego). Angelos actually arrives in town a week before the Builders Association company to scout out and photograph local attractions, so her wry, hilarious, accurate and timely observations add local color and authenticity to the story.
Giving the story heart is Sinclair as Mike, seen only on film in segments prerecorded Shanghai, Canada and Tijuana (which serve as numerous international locales). Sinclair credibly portrays a man who goes from ebullient optimist at the beginning of the play to a disillusioned, lonely and near-broken man just 80 intermissionless minutes later. And young actress Caroline O'Neill plays Samantha with the sort of indifferent, disconnected quality of a parentless girl isolated in her electronic world. As J.V., eerily charismatic Rizwan Mirza serves as ringmaster, a Steve Jobs-like Internet messiah who has come to believe his own hype and will stop at nothing to wipe Myspace and Facebook (which he calls the "F" word) off the digimap.
From here, "Continuous City" moves on to Ohio and then Spain. The production marked the end of the Playhouse's 2008-09 season. The 2009-10 season begins in June with the West Coast premiere of Terrence McNally's "Unusual Acts of Devotion." The next Edge production has not been announced.
