Love And Information
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Kim McKean
Trap Door Theatre
If you ask me, and by clicking on this post I suppose you are, Caryl Churchill is one of the world's greatest living playwrights. Top Girls, The Skriker, and Mad Forest are just my favorites among the many plays of her half century spanning career.
Her 2012 play Love and Information it must be admitted, is a tricky beast. Less a play than a series of minute to two minute long vignettes strung together to full length, Love and Information has no overarching characters or storylines.
What it does have is some very good writing about fascinating themes, one of which is whether it's better to know things or not know them, along with the various ways technology is reshaping the human experience.
Some of the standout scenes for me included one about a person experiencing hallucinations and refusing to take her medication because she thinks of the hallucinations as "information", another about a young woman who reveals to her younger sister that she's actually her mother and their mother is her grandmother, another in which a doctor tells a terminally ill patient how long they are likely to live.
These stories all have wit, poignance and humanity, and are performed by a very lively and energetic cast.
This is an enormously difficult work to make theatrical, but McKean and her crew do an admirable job with video projections and choreographed dance routines. I felt the show's pacing moved at a bit too fast a clip, not quite allowing the audience to digest one vignette before breathlessly moving to the next.
Overall, the show was still fun, thoughtful and worth seeing.
September 12 – October 19, 2019
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 8PM
Admission: $20 on Thursdays and Fridays, $25 on Saturdays, 2 for 1 Admission on Thursdays
Where: TRAP DOOR THEATRE 1655 West Cortland Ave. Chicago, IL 60622
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