If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]
Like the reply-all taboo and the necessity of logging out of a public computer, the latest formative lesson our society is learning is that absolutely anything posted online can take on a life of its own. Playwright Kevin Kautzman phrases it better in the enticing title of his new internet-age sex comedy, If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]. The world premiere by The New Theatre Project is notable for meticulous production values that give the show the resplendent obsession with technology it deserves. Yet as directed by Natividad M. Salgado, the strongest material resides offline: this script has so much fun guiding its characters into a zany, last-ditch enterprise that the ramifications can’t hope to reach the same level of enthusiasm.
The play’s emphatically contemporary context suits the immediacy of its premise. Lucy and Chris (Elise Randall and Peter Giessl) are a couple of textbook ninety-nine percenters, overeducated and underemployed in a crummy economy: she’s thanklessly waiting tables while toiling on an expensive MBA; he’s a college dropout whose service job affords them the barest health coverage. It’s a lamentable career picture for both, so for things to get worse merely adds insult to injury. And when the business world has no place for a couple of hungry, desirable youths, these two blaze their own trail that plays to their unique strengths — in this case, putting a technologically new spin on the oldest profession. True, selling sex online is hardly a novelty, and why this venture is expected to succeed against oceans of competition requires some suspension of disbelief, but it’s well worth the effort in a first act this fresh and funny. Kautzman’s text is magnificent as he submerges these two characters robbed of forethought into a trajectory of pure discovery, and Salgado and company play the beats with realistic give and take and fed-up desperation that ably sets up the foolhardy scheme and everything that follows. As a team, Giessl and Randall operate with fantastic chemistry, bandying about impulsiveness and familiarity that elicits laughter from every sardonic quip and well-placed withering glance.
Designer Janine Woods Thoma fleshes out this story of an ambitious computer-based idea with a plethora of ambitious computer-based ideas that knock the concept out of the park. Monitors and screens pervade the Mix Studio Theatre, both supplementing and overwhelming the cramped efficiency setting with legitimate IKEA-hack functionality (plus plenty of components by properties designer Logan Ricket). Lights by Keith Paul Medelis rely heavily on desk and table lamps as well as the ambient blue cast of computer screens that ground the show in its home-office, wee-hours entrepreneurial reality. Between-scenes interactions and set changes, rendered as tightly choreographed and sometimes lengthy montages, are managed by use of a universally accessible symbol that delighted this reviewer with its spot-on ingenuity. It’s one of many ancillary details that encourages full immersion into a not-quite-real, not-quite-virtual world.
Medelis is also responsible for the costume design, which ranges from everyday laundry basket castoffs to skimpy fantasy underthings. Indeed, from a sexy photo shoot in the first act to one-on-one client interactions in the second, various states of undress and compromising positions come with the territory (although the onstage raciness stays generally safe and tactful). Kautzman ensures that the weirder the requests get, the funnier the interactions become, which helps to defuse the mounting tension of the second act: as their business grows exponentially, Lucy and Chris grapple with the changes in their relationship when sex becomes work, with morphing demands on their privacy and consent, and with the surprising consequences of success. Their world opens up via web and video chats, which are displayed in real time on the monitors and draw the viewer in to this online bizarro existence. Yet all the same, such increasing reliance on this impressive technology requires more and more scenes of instant messaging conversations played out in voice over, leaving much of the second act frustratingly quiet and wanting for contact between the actors. However vital to this story, and however thought-provoking the effects, such intentionally humdrum fallout ultimately can’t compare to the wicked fun of the first act.
The resulting If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn] is an entertaining and technically proficient show, albeit somewhat top-heavy. Yet even so, the downward trajectory from massive flash into ensuing smolder comes entirely from the brightness of the spark — that is, the production’s only shortcoming is answering an impeccable first act with a lesser second. Salacious, curious, and certainly a multimedia spectacle, this cutting-edge, boundary-pushing comedy is poised to win viewers on the strength of its online and offline connections both.
March 3, 2012