Results tagged “michael alltop” from Drama Queen
Last night I saw User 927, a new play commissioned by Philly's Brat Productions, that before its opening garnered quite a bit of national press. Its central conceit derives from a 2006 news story about AOL's release of 650,000 of its members' search logs. The most notorious of these, its searcher anonymously coded as User 927, tracks three months of steadily escalating perversions that start innocently enough with "Yoko Ono" and end somewhere around "F*** Her Throat" (my asterisks). The actual production, which I review in Friday's Inquirer, didn't go so well, at least according to me. But Brat artistic director Michael Alltop was onto something. Unfortunately, playwright Katharine Clark Gray chose to couch the subject in a fairly conventional murder-mystery, a choice which quickly waters down the topic's potency, and leads me to wonder why Alltop didn't choose a more tech-savvy and unconventional writer.
In any case, there's a bit in the play about AOLStalker.com, a website that allows you to search all those released records for better or for worse (here's 927's actual log, but I warn you to give it a pass, because it's a real bummer of a read). Through AOL's records, the New York Times was able to sleuth out the names of two of the company's actual human members. Creepy. What have you searched for in the last three months that you might not want the New York Times to know about?
I know I'm a couple of years late to the site--even 927 knew about Numa Numa before me--but I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
What's so interesting about these logs is that some tell horror stories, some are dramas, others read like parody. They are, as Gray's characters explain, bits of "time travel," but they're more than that. User 927 is the most prurient example, but each seeker in their turn creates a deeply affecting portrait of their individual struggles, neuroses, passions, hobbies and defects.
Once you start AOLStalking, just try to resist assigning features to a log's creator. User 30011 has light brown skin, is pretty, young, harried, with long layered black hair, a pink tank top and cut-off jean shorts, worrying about her kids and fanning herself in the Miami heat. User 1366195 is white but tan, athletic, with short black gelled hair, wearing a white t-shirt at the wooden desk in his bedroom, trying desperately to stay focused on finishing an Abraham Lincoln term paper. AOLStalkers even rate the users' records, from "Masterpiece" on down. There's probably enough material for a comedy--or tragedy--in that fact alone.
It's a digital version of Our Town, and all those voices unwittingly and unwillingly pulled through the ether are still waiting to have their proper say onstage. It was a great idea; maybe eventually it will also make great theater.
