Elizabeth Marvel has been summoned to an ominous-looking room by a uniformed official; she doesn’t know why, and the chatty official keeps her (and us) in suspense. She is the lawyer who will represent a woman who murdered her entire family, the official (Scott Shepherd) finally informs her, at the end of the first scene in Tim Blake Nelson’s play.
“Find someone else,” she begs the official.
“We both know this must happen.”
As cryptic futuristic dystopian procedurals go, “And Then We Were No More” has much to recommend it. The title is enough of a tip-off that things will not end well, but the downbeat journey is made worthwhile by a splendid cast, an impressive set, and some provocative philosophical observations.
Nelson is best-known as a versatile character actor with more than a hundred screen credits (including “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”) but he is also an established playwright, whose previous plays reflect an interest in intellectual inquiry (“Socrates,” about the Greek philosopher) and real-life terror (“The Grey Zone,” later a film, which takes place in a Nazi concentration camp.)
The conversation in that first scene between the lawyer and the official (nobody is given a name in the play) is wide-ranging and seemingly idle, about the nature of justice and mercy, and the place of Man in Nature. But it sets up the two characters as intelligent, educated human beings, which makes it all the more dispiriting that they are completely under the control of what they call “a function” – surely, future generation Artificial Intelligence, although AI is not mentioned.
Part of the appeal of the play is that the arguments the official makes for the superiority of a society controlled by machine are at least reasonable-sounding: The impersonal and unemotional, the removal of human frailty, makes for a more just and equitable system. They even make a case for execution, with the introduction of a newfangled death machine that’s touted as being able to kill without pain.
We always know where Nelson stands on such matters, particularly when he introduces the character of the analyst (Jennifer Mobock), who works for the makers of the death machine, and hopes its imminent demonstration will make it more marketable overseas.
The arguments become even less persuasive once the lawyer meets her client. The inmate killed her husband, two children, and her mother. The official told the lawyer the inmate had agreed to be killed in the new death machine. The woman is undeniably insane to the point of incoherence, speaking in random-seeming words, but the lawyer is able to discern someone struggling to communicate (as do we, thanks in large measure to a spot-on performance by newcomer Elizabeth Yeoman.) What the lawyer learns is that the inmate was sent to another facility, where she was the subject of a series of intrusive medical probes and experiments that left her brain damaged; hence the incoherence. The official and the machinist (Henry Stram), the man who operates the death machine, argue that it was necessary to conduct these experiments to understand the criminal mind, in order to prevent such aberrant behavior in the future. The lawyer says this was torture, and articulates an elaborate argument for why the inmate thus shouldn’t be executed at all.
Indeed, all the characters are so articulate that it’s the main pleasure of the play, even when what they are saying is alarming. The official has a great monologue about how the invention of the clock was “the most important machine ever devised; that from which all other advancements followed,” to which I can’t do full justice without quoting the whole thing.
The lawyer questions the machinist how they know that the death machine kills without pain. Because the machine has tested it, the machinist answers.
“You trust that?”
“More, frankly, than I’d trust a dead person. Or a living person for that matter….We’ve built technologies that can think faster than we can, microphones that can hear better, and cameras that can see better. Why would I not trust a machine’s sense of pain?”
Unfortunately, the clarity of the play’s monologues is undermined by a plot that becomes increasingly vague, especially after the intermission. Act II is set a year after Act I, and everything apparently has changed. But we don’t get a full enough picture to follow what’s going on, and it’s harder to care anymore; Act I has offered such a climactic finish that the play seems to overstay its welcome after that, as if Franz Kafka had added a chapter where we hear from Josef K’s parents.
David Meyer’s set, with big orange tubes and metal doors, is appropriately scary, helped by the lighting and sound design. It’s something of a particular achievement given the size of the Off-Off Broadway stage (and, likely, budget) at La MaMa. I did wonder momentarily whether the current, longstanding trend towards ever-smaller technological devices would really be so monumentally reversed in the future with such a cumbersome contraption. Still, from beginning to end, the design helped make “And Then We Were No More” feel never less than palpably ominous.
And Then We Were No More
La MaMa through November 2
Running time: Two hours including an intermission
Tickets: $10 – $99
Written by Tim Blake Nelson
Directed by Mark Wing-Davey
Scenic design by David Meyer, lighting design by Reza Behjat, costume design by Marina Draghici (and sound design by Henry Nelson and Will Curry
Cast:Scott Shepherd as An Official, Elizabeth Marvel as A Lawyer, Jennifer Mobock as An Analyst, Elizabeth Yeoman as The Inmate, Henry Stram as The Machinist, William Appiah and Kasey Connolly as Guards, EJ An and Craig Wesley Divino as Engineers
Photos by Bronwen Sharp
