(no subject)
Jan. 31st, 2024 09:02 pmThe other play I saw while traveling was a satire at the Vineyard Theater called Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, which I felt compelled to check out somewhat against my better judgment and which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obopolsk bravely accompanied me to see despite the fear of miserable flashbacks both from the 2016 election and from previous Very Online jobs.
I'm not sad to have seen it; I would have been forever curious if I didn't, and it had beats and moments that I quite liked. The show has a cast of five:
- Masha, Disaffected Millenial Working A Soulless Job and obvious audience surrogate
- Nikolai, pretentious hipster, endlessly working on a screenplay, endlessly flirting with people who are not his well-connected wife
- Egor, Top Performer, who does not want to make friends with his officemates but IS discovering that he wants to make friends with the #BlackLivesMatter accounts that he's been infiltrating for work and does NOT want to target middle-class women in Wisconsin instead
- Steve, alt-right office asshole, played with the horrible impish energy of an evil Jack Black
- Ljuba, ex-KGB, Hated Boss
I laughed when Masha and Nikolai, deeply starved for fulfillment in the workplace, became obsessed with the Rules of Story and started trying to create Narrative with their troll accounts; as commentary, was it subtle? as a Looney Tunes hammer. Am I an easy sell for evil metafiction and also easy workplace comedy? Sure. I also enjoyed Egor's plot, which for me landed somewhere between a fun satire on the Spy Who Gets In Too Deep and a genuinely somewhat poignant portrayal of a lonely guy forging ultimately impossible connections, and was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for out of the show in general.
( The point where it really lost me was about 2/3 through; playwrights I think ought to use second person monologues with GREAT care )
obopolsk bravely accompanied me to see despite the fear of miserable flashbacks both from the 2016 election and from previous Very Online jobs. I'm not sad to have seen it; I would have been forever curious if I didn't, and it had beats and moments that I quite liked. The show has a cast of five:
- Masha, Disaffected Millenial Working A Soulless Job and obvious audience surrogate
- Nikolai, pretentious hipster, endlessly working on a screenplay, endlessly flirting with people who are not his well-connected wife
- Egor, Top Performer, who does not want to make friends with his officemates but IS discovering that he wants to make friends with the #BlackLivesMatter accounts that he's been infiltrating for work and does NOT want to target middle-class women in Wisconsin instead
- Steve, alt-right office asshole, played with the horrible impish energy of an evil Jack Black
- Ljuba, ex-KGB, Hated Boss
I laughed when Masha and Nikolai, deeply starved for fulfillment in the workplace, became obsessed with the Rules of Story and started trying to create Narrative with their troll accounts; as commentary, was it subtle? as a Looney Tunes hammer. Am I an easy sell for evil metafiction and also easy workplace comedy? Sure. I also enjoyed Egor's plot, which for me landed somewhere between a fun satire on the Spy Who Gets In Too Deep and a genuinely somewhat poignant portrayal of a lonely guy forging ultimately impossible connections, and was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for out of the show in general.
( The point where it really lost me was about 2/3 through; playwrights I think ought to use second person monologues with GREAT care )
