(no subject)

[skygiants]

The 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 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, when Ljuba's actress turns directly to the audience and delivers a passionate second person monologue about her tragic life history: "You are seven years old, and your parents have disappeared ..." "You are fifteen years old, and you are pregnant ..."

Absolutely no shade to the actress, who really did the best she possibly could, but it takes a certain kind of show and a certain level of writing talent to pull this sort of thing off without hitting bathos and I regret to inform that both of us agreed that this Did Not Land. Ljuba has a great sense of humor, actually? Ljuba is suddenly projecting all her feelings about her dead daughter onto Masha and is going to take her under her wing, actually? Ljuba's downfall as being engineered by Steve and Egor is in fact a tragic echo of Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 election, actually? AND YOU ALL THOUGHT IT WAS A JOKE. Sure, okay. Sledgehammers raining from the sky!

It's possible this all might have worked better if it had been a throughline from the beginning, but twenty minutes from the end was not the time to speedrun it; at this point the reveal that she was! also! a Jewish lesbian! really just felt like icing on the cake.

Comments

[sushiflop]

Oh NOOOO this sounds like one of those concepts that could be so good, and the execution just biffs it. At least there were good granules.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I really was mostly enjoying myself pretty well until 80% of the way through! And then obopolsk and I were walking back and we just kept 'AND ANOTHER THING'-ing at each other, which honestly is part of the joy of experiencing mediocre theater, so.

[blotthis]

KDSJFKDSJFLJS:DL PALSO A JEWISH LESBIAN DLKFJ:LSDJFL:

[skygiants]

the whole monologue is a buildup to how she's a lesbian AND THEN AT THE END A CASUAL DROP THAT SHE'S JEWISH ALSO

[larryhammer]

You can do far worse than try to carry a show with the impish energy of an evil Jack Black. Just sayin'. Not this show, though, it sounds like.

(If this were a Reddit sub, I'd be asking for "Sledgehammers raining from the sky!" as a user flair.)

[skygiants]

oh, yeah, full kudos to evil Jack Black, genuinely did a fantastic job in terms of craft

[evewithanapple]

I couldn't quite picture what you meant by "second person monologue" and then when you started to quote it, I just covered my face with my hands.

[skygiants]

YEAH. this poor woman. alone on the stage. really and truly giving it her all

[portico]

oh no this would have killed me. i would have died.

[skygiants]

beth very wisely declined to come with me for reasons of having foresight

[davidgillon]

"So how do we make this work for the MAGA crowd who are missing that this is satire?"

[skygiants]

skldfjdk i mean MAYBE

[chestnut_pod]

Ohhhh dear. Oh dear! Well, this is what it takes to write a better play ten years down the line, I suppose!

[skygiants]

Right! There's a GREAT play in there somewhere, who doesn't love a satire on an evil office

[aella_irene]

Reading this, I had a horrific flashback to the experience of watching a play called Two Ladies, where just as you thought you were in for a dull play with flashes of interest, there was a violent left turn into graphic descriptions of gang rape and the murder of the entire G8.

[skygiants]

oh NO

[obopolsk]

In thinking about it further, I think some of the last third would have landed better for me if the present-day character and Ljuba's dead daughter hadn't both been named Masha. I was half waiting for the reveal that Masha wasn't dead after all! and was in fact present-day Masha all along! (It still would have been heavy-handed, but maybe...5% less so?)

[skygiants]

oh my god yes same I was briefly CONVINCED Masha 2 was going to end up to somehow be Masha 1. Then after Masha 1 died I did the math and realized that Masha 2 would have had to be like fifty years old for this to make sense, which she clearly wasn't, but NONETHELESS