X Joey (Cheech Manohoar) watches the sun set over the Hudson River in X the Experience
X THE EXPERIENCE
Fridays at 8:30 and Saturdays at 3:30 through May 22, $25-$50
www.xtheexperience.com
“Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep / It starts when you’re always afraid / Step out of line, the men come and take you away,” Stephen Stills sang in Buffalo Springfield’s 1966 counterculture classic, “For What It’s Worth,” inspired by the Sunset Strip curfew riots between LA rock clubs and the police. Paranoia is a continuing dilemma during the pandemic: about contracting the virus, about keeping a job, about kids going back to school and adults going back to work, and now about the country opening up as vaccines get widely distributed. “The exceptionally prolonged lockdown because of ineffective management and the subsequent social disruptions and economic misery — in many ways worse than the Great Depression, with tremendous inequities, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, and despair — are already leading to rampant drug addiction, depression, suicides, and homicides,” Dr. Bandy X. Lee, president of the World Mental Health Coalition, told CNN last month. “Meanwhile, we now have a large segment of the population that has been encouraged and conditioned to avoid reality. When living in delusion, detached from reality, one naturally becomes paranoid because facts and evidence are constantly ‘attacking’ these false, cherished beliefs,” the doctor added. Of course, as Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” a quote that Nirvana adapted for its 1991 song about isolation, “Territorial Pissings.”
All of which brings us to X the Experience, an interactive, immersive online theatrical production that uses paranoia and fear as key ingredients in an exciting two-hour adventure into the dark underbelly of the near future. Conceived, directed, and coedited by Aaron Salazar and written by Jason Veasey, the show casts the viewer as a trainee for WE, an all-powerful organization that squashes individuality and personal identity in favor of the hive-minded whole. “So it’s your goal. And hope. That you can aid in someone’s journey back to the collective. To the community. To WE,” a disembodied robotic voice known as the I (Gillian Saker) commands. You are tasked with helping first X Joey (Cheech Manohoar), then X Joei (Kim Exum), to come back to the fold. WE believes it is transforming the citizenry from “self-importance to selflessness,” but there’s much more to it, as the I explains:
You. I. They. Them. Black. White. Man. Woman. / What are you? Where are you from? Who are your people? / Equity. Inclusion. Diversity. / So many questions about so many labels. / That was life. For a long time. For a lot of people. / The focus on having a society where individuals of all backgrounds could exist in an equitable and harmonious world. Where we could be every adjective we wanted and somehow would all live as one. . . . It’s time WE all let go of the constructs of gender and race and sexuality that were used to keep us apart and actually just be WE.
A HAL-like disembodied voice (Gillian Saker) is in charge in immersive virtual production X the Experience
It might sound like a nirvana of inclusiveness, but it’s also like becoming part of the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. We watch X Joey and X Joei as they contemplate their choices, deciding whether to face their responsibilities to the WE or take off. All the while, as an audience member you are text messaging over WhatsApp with your supervisor, who is asking questions to ensure your loyalty to the cause. (Note: You will not be on camera or speaker at any time.)
X the Experience features an ever-shifting visual style, from high-tech computer imagery to low-tech surveillance, from stark confessional to poetic beauty, from hypnotic colors to grainy grays, incorporating music and dance into the story. Wearing headphones and turning all other devices and browsers off to immerse yourself fully in the action is highly recommended. I found myself putting my face nearly right up against my monitor to get sucked into some of the more mesmerizing animation. It is a bit too long at two hours (there is a five-minute interval) and can get repetitive, and the overall world building is ambitious though flawed, but is also like nothing I’ve seen during the pandemic. It evokes X-Files conspiracy theories, HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tron-like video games, the urgency of Logan’s Run, and the opening sequence of Dr. Who, leading viewers into a mysterious universe that points toward the future of hybrid entertainment. The ominous score is by Matt Katz, Giancarlo “Ssanti” Bonfanti, and Manuel Pelayo, with yearning songs that recall Joy Division and Suicide.
X Joei (Kim Exum) has to decide her future while being constantly monitored by the mysterious WE
Salazar, the producing artistic director and founder of Poseidon Theatre Company and executive director of Alvarez Keko Salazar Productions, previously staged such works as Antigone and BitterSweet at the Cell as well as The Cooping Theory 1969: Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe?, a 2019 immersive hit at RPM Underground, where audiences followed multiple arcs through different rooms, trying to uncover the true tale behind Poe’s demise. While X the Experience can’t have the same kind of interactivity, Salazar makes viewers feel that they’re part of the story, involved in something special that is occurring in real time.
Exum (The Book of Mormon, For the Last Time) and Manohoar (Mean Girls, Mrs. Fletcher), a trained Bollywood dancer, capture the paranoia and fear of the moment, staring directly at us, practically begging us to free them from their dilemmas — which relate not only to the fictional narrative but to their reality, actors who cannot perform in front of in-person audiences, and therefore our dilemma too, sheltering in place at home. Like all of us, they just want to live happy, full lives, free of constant paranoia and fear, but we — WE? — are there to judge them in a changing social order where such judgment is appropriately shunned. But in this world, no one is innocent, and no one is to be trusted.