The Nether, a contemporary classic, at Road Less Traveled Productions

The Nether, a play by Jennifer Haley. Directed by Katie Mallinson. A very good cast. Road Less Traveled Productions, downtown Buffalo.

This is a complex, good play, impressively directed, well-performed, with an excellent set and staging. It's a difficult play that feels like a contemporary classic.

I'm glad to have read Ben Siegel's review of this production in the Buffalo News. This is a demanding play, and it helps to read a good critic's words to settle your own thinking.

The time of this play is described as near-future, something in the next few years. "The Nether" of this play is a virtual reality world, accessible by logging in, just as you log in to your Gmail account today. Once logged in, you can act out your fantasies, benign or criminal. The story of the play is that a detective Morris -- icily well played by Eve Everette -- is investigating the online child sex operation run by Sims (Steve Jakiel). Men such as Doyle (Dave Marciniak) can enter the virtual reality world and act out their fantasies, sexual and murderous. Detective Morris wants to shut down the operation.

We see scenes inside the nether, cleverly constructed in Victorian British settings -- no doubt alluding to Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll's penchant for young girls. We see the emotional connections and tensions among the logged-in characters. I wondered what the characters actually got out of their virtual reality activities (essentially a kind of dream state). But the playwright Haley shows us that the men are dramatically changed by their experiences in the online world. Doyle is desperate to stay in that world, he depends on it. It's like an addiction for him, and he reveres Sims, the man who makes his virtual life possible. 

At first I didn't grasp why the state, in the form of detective Morris, is interested in what happens in the Nether. If these are avatars acting out their whims according to the prescribed algorithms, why would the state care? But then I began to see that what happens there really does affect what happens in the real world ("offline"). The online world seems just as real to the men, and to us, as their flesh and bones world. And thus the state has an interest in both worlds. A man who would act out his desires for a young girl online must be a danger in the real world as well (though Doyle argues the opposite).

There are plenty of thought-provoking turns in the story. It's almost too much. It's the best contemporary play I've seen in a long time. 

The movie Darkest Hour -- great speeches can change everything

I saw the movie Darkest Hour at the comfortable North Park Theater, in the University Plaza. The movie, directed by Joe Wright and written by Anthony McCarten, focuses on the short period of time in May 1940 when the Germans were threatening to destroy the 300,000 man British army near Calais, and Churchill (played by Gary Oldman, in a good performance) becomes the new Prime Minister of Britain. He refuses to negotiate with Hitler to sue for peace and save the army, though he is under increasing pressure from Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain, and even the French. In the end, moved by a scene in the London subway in which Churchill seems to ask the counsel of ordinary Londoners, Churchill decides to stand firm and refuses to negotiate, giving his famous "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech.

Much of the movie is about the political drama played out among Churchill, Halifax and Chamberlain, and the King. It's entertaining drama. The film starts slowly and builds in drama as we see Churchill beset with impossible problems on all sides. I'm not sure whether he and Britain just muddle through and save all those men at Dunkirk, or if it's Churchill's skill and stirring competence that does the job. The movie implies it's the latter, aided by Churchill's rhetorical skill. It's hard to beat quotes from heroic British poetry:

“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: "To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods,” ― Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome.

The subway scene is odd. We see a group of ordinary Londoners that seem as if they're from central casting. The camera looks them squarely in their faces, emphasizing their humble, straightforward natures. A black man (the lone black character in the film). A white workingman. Working women. Churchill's questions seem obviously slanted to elicit the courageous response -- we'll never surrender. It might have happened that way, but the scene has the air of a wartime propaganda film.  

Some friends in Facebook said that this Churchill depiction was a kind of rebuke to Donald Trump -- this Churchill was a real leader. But I think both the pro- and anti- Trump camps will find things they like in the film.

I did find myself wondering what the filmmaker's intention was in making the film. I'm not sure we learned something that we didn't already know about Churchill, or that dark time.