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.