In Mariah Carey's latest single, "Touch My Body" the chorus goes: If there's a camera up in here/Then it's gonna leave with me when I do/ ...I'd best not catch this flick on YouTube.
We live in an over documented world. Every little thing we do is captured by cameras. Often, before I even get home from a party, the pictures are somehow posted and tagged on Facebook. There is very little that we do, that we don't have a record of. And as we let this kind of documentation into our lives, it doesn't end with just drunk party shots, but begins to exploit deeply personal moments in our lives for everyone to consume.
This issue is at the center of Good Boys and True, a new play at Second Stage Theatre by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. In it we're introduced to students at a prep school where a scandal involving a sex tape between two unknown students is about to burst. I won't reveal a lot as the play revolves around the mystery of the scandal itself, but the more the scandal is investigated and we learn the identities of the students in the tape, the more we learn about the dark history of the school and their families, in influence of class and privilege.
The play is set in the suburbs of Washington DC in 1989. So when I say sex tape, I really do mean tape as in VHS. (Where did they manage to find that prop?! I didn't know they still had those.) But it was this tape that made me think about our over documented world today. Isn't amazing how a sex tape is sort of a PR blessing in that it gives it's participants instant notoriety. That's exactly what happens in this play, as more and more people see the video and get involved. But we can't all be Paris Hilton, and in the play we're shown the horrible personal side effects that occur for this sort of fame.
It's currently running in previews and opens May 19th and runs through June 1st. While the play's 90 intermission-less minutes are captivating, it can lose it's focus and flounders back and forth between one of the students involved in the scandal and his mother, and I wondered at time whose story is actually being told. But the play is just starting previews, so it's more then possible that that will change.
While the play may show the possible dangers of documenting and sharing every aspect our lives, I'm not going to be giving up my photobucket or facebook accounts anytime soon... well on second thought, maybe I'll just take them private.
2 comments:
First of all I love Roberto's work, he's doing some great stuff right now. Second of all, when I was in D.C. for the Kennedy Center Playwright's Intensive, he had a stage reading of this play and I thought, "wow, I really enjoyed it." So glad that it's finally being produced. Hopefully I can catch it, maybe the last performance since that's when I'll be arriving to N.Y.
When are you coming in? There might be an extension, I'm not sure. But I happen to know someone in the box office... wink, wink. Great work, Alex!
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