Seven women stuck in a purgatoryesque bardo are waiting to be assigned to either their own heavenor hell of their making. Each had a place in the corporal world but now they are as lost as a beachedjellyfish on a Florida beach. Roasting in the sun but not quite melted yet.

There’s so much to say. Who’s listening? Perhaps no one. Perhaps the all the universe. The wordsare so important because they prove existence at a sometimes low and sometimes high level. Thebardo waiting room is like a circus with many actors performing simultaneously. You don’t knowwho to listen to first, second, last. All the conversations begin to blend into one show. None of thewomen can account for their sinful passage to this clearly ominous place. Now it’s home, Now it’s abattlefield. Now it’s a comforting therapy. It changes as the women reveal their angst.
Marie Glancy O’Shea asks the question, “What makes women different from men and from eachother?” The profound answer is they’re not so different. The ethereal actor Sam Flynn emotes abouttransformations that can be both physical and spiritual. It’s Gina Bonati who brings to the bardo ahumanistic presence with motherly compassion and down to earth humor.
Brilliantly sequinned actor-singer Sonia Villani brings color and high energy sparks to the bardo.She singlehandedly turns the black mourning clothes of the six women into a center of fireworks
and possibilities for a different life. But alas to no avail. The profound sadness of language sweeps
over the women like a net over fish at sea.

Adding to the chaos and mayhem of the bardo’s parnoia comes a television shock interviewer
seeking a dramatic personal story to report to…whom? Michelle Best metaphorically scares the
panties off the women who don’t want to be glamorized for their sins. The bardo is no place for
antagonism or provocative acts.

Lisa Giobbi and Danielle Aziza give outstanding performances with their physical theater
movements and dance. Tatyana Kot mirrors them with quotidian notions of movement in a simpler
less verbal world.

All this is made palatable and possible by director Ildiko Nemeth. Her signature style of ensemble
directing once again creates a profound world on stage.

To imagine who you really are and where you originally come from is one of humankind’s greatest
goals. Contemporary social critics are always telling people that being themselves is an appropriate
starting point to live a fulfilled life. But how do we know we’re on the right track? This is the
question Italo Calvino’s novel “Cosmicomics” attempts to answer.

In the masterful hands of veteran playwright and director Ildiko Nemeth, Calvino’s many questions
as displayed in connected vignettes by superb acting and ensemble movement. Nemeth’s answer for
starters is to show the origin of the cosmos as Calvino wrote it. Not an easy job. Calvino
contemplates the entire multi-billion year History of Everything from big bangs to contemporary
little women and men.

The stunning projected animations and visuals created by Isabelle Duverger and Laia Cabrera
project a dramatic alternative reality on this journey from scientific abstractions to mankind’s
emotional confusion. The visuals ask the same questions as the novel while Nemeth’s cast plays in
and around this cosmic setting.
Nemeth’s storyteller/narrator Paul Guilfoyle sets a calm tone for exploration of the cosmic history.
His passionate tone is both very human and almost godlike. Listening to him I felt like the world
was being created for the love stories about to unfold. There’s always another love story he says.
Long time New Stage actress Jeanne Lauren Smith gives one of her funniest performances as an
evolved shore dweller who falls madly in love with a sea dwelling fish convincingly played by
roguish Justin Ivan Brown aquatically outfitted with scales and fins. It was love at first sight and
swim.

In a brilliantly comedic piece of solo vignette scientist Markus Hirnigel convinces us there is
intelligent life on other planets. The interplanetary messages are not merely sound or radar telescope
signals, they are revelations of personal surveillance. The messages and the scientist’s responses are
a laughter filled spoof on intelligent life theories. What if the aliens are just as annoying as we are?
Could we stand them and their irony? You can decide.
Several of the vignettes are ensembles showing off Nemeth’s ability to create new meanings in the
face of romantic challenges and overblown egos. Using dance as a communication between
enamored characters Nemeth matches charming young actor Tanner Glenn with experienced aerial
artist/choreographer Lisa Giobbi posing as his mythical, ritualistic, all powerful Woman-in-
White love object who vanishes when colors suddenly appear in their world. This vignette
especially was a duet of matching talent.

Each of the vignettes are worthy theatrical endeavors with their own characters and meanings. I
highly recommend “Cosmicomics” both as a transformed example of Italo Calvino’s writing and
European thinking and as an evening of engaging, inspiring theater.

Clarice Lispector’s debut novel Near To The Wild Heart shot out of a canon in an era where many assumed the twenty-three-year-old woman was, in fact, a man writing under a pseudonym because no woman could write that well. Dear 1943, a woman did. The New Stage Theatre Company’s attempt to stage this seminal work is a provocative (albeit safe) homage to the envelopment one experiences reading the novel.

Translating Ms. Lispector’s work into English is no easy task, as her Brazilian wordplay is linguistically unique and rule-breaking. Entrekin’s 2012 translation serves as a fiercely rich arsenal for adaptor/director Ildiko Nemeth to paint a surreal pastiche of theatrical elements, which negotiate time and space on a horizontal plane, co-existing as an orchestral, almost operatic, composition.

Near To The Wild Heart follows amoral Joana through a series of moments from present-day to childhood in what one could most succinctly describe as a feminist structure. Ms. Nemeth expertly weaves this structure through a subtle nod to Aristotelian storytelling in her conducting of the multi-disciplinary music of the evening; movement and design converse together sometimes in whispers, sometimes in crescendos, and often with juxtaposed binary components.  The ride is an emotional journey, enveloping the room in a simultaneously satiating and vexing haze of poetic unease.

Sarah Lemp (Joana) is expertly disparate in cognizance while (remarkably) completely present as a moving breathing vessel in space, almost outside of time. Joana could easily be a character unengaged or seemingly unaffected, even bored.  Ms. Lemp encapsulates the qualities necessary to capture the experience of this emotion story by electrifying the energy and focus needed to lure us into her journey. Witnessing her Joana, one can’t help but feel the weight of the world compressing their whole being while they drift through the inescapable dull longing of existence.

Lisa Giobbi (Narrator, Mother, Aerial Dancer) is a delightful surprise. It is a shame that Ms. Giobbi’s aerial work is tucked off to the side, as it is a stunning visual and physical metaphor and a genius theatricalization of the feminine voyage and its corruptions.

Jessica Sofia Mitrani’s Video Design paints a powerful landscape, drifting in and out of the proverbial spotlight while flowing ever-present and persistent in flavour. Notably, Ms. Mitrani collaborated with Hailey De Jardins on the costumes, which speak their own language in striking service to the storytelling.

Frederico Restrepo’s Lighting Design is a testament to the explosive expressions that can come from exploiting the challenges specific to the architecture of a space.

Overall, New Stage Theatre Company’s production is a successful attempt to stage the work of arguably one of the most prolific literary voices of the Twentieth Century. Where the production leaves one longing for more, there is a sense that that is the very point – an ominous wink.

Reading the work of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector often feels like diving into a pool of dark water, where the fear of drowning doesn’t deter the desire to bathe in mystery. For those willing to take the plunge, her writings come with many rewards: reminders that someone has shared your deepest fears, passions, even seemingly inhuman thoughts.

It’s a quality she understood. As she wrote in the 1977 novel “The Hour of the Star”: “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

While theatrical adaptations of her work are popular in Brazil, the delicately violent power of her writing might be the reason her novels have rarely been turned into plays in English. They’re too dense and surreal, almost dreamlike in nature.

The need to preserve this ethereal quality is what makes the New Stage Theater Company’s adaptation of Lispector’s “Near to the Wild Heart,” an admirable attempt at taming the beast.

Published in 1943, when she was 23, the partly-autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel is a fractured portrait of the upper-middle-class Joana, cutting between her present life and her childhood, as she tries to grasp what it is to be a woman in a restrictive society.

Heavily relying on video, the director and adapter Ildiko Nemeth has focused on some of the novel’s most tangible passages to create 90 minutes of sensuous, though uneven, entertainment.

And in Sarah Lemp, who gives life to Joana as both a girl and a woman, she has an expert lead performer. When Joana overhears her auntie (Gina Bonati) describe her as “a viper,” Lemp’s body contorts like a child who’s both about to throw a tantrum and attempt to grow wings and fly away.

When her father (Ken Raboy) declares to his friend (Theodore Bouloukos) that Joana “hasn’t the slightest idea about everything,” Lemp contracts, as if wanting to disappear. When the father continues by declaring, “She told me that when she grows up she is going to be a hero,” her eyes widen, as if thinking that maybe she is being seen after all.

It’s quite telling that Joana is the only character dressed completely in white, while the men and women in her story don colorful suits and dresses with bold patterns (the vibrant costumes are by Jessica Sofia Mitrani and Hailey De Jardins). After all, she is merely a screen for them to project what they fear and desire.

Through the use of impressionistic lighting (by Federico Restrepo) and video projections (also by Mitrani), Nemeth evokes a synesthetic space. That’s appropriate, given Joana describes herself as someone who thinks in music. When we learn of Joana’s passion for poetry, a view of the ocean in high contrast black and white takes on the quality of ink caressing paper.

The production is less successful when it deploys obvious imagery. A female android looking at its hands in puzzlement is projected against a starry sky when Joana feels most detached, while a ghostly apparition (Lisa Giobbi) sleepwalks in the background when Joana longs for her dead mother.

In her only televised interview, shot a few months before her death at 56, Lispector explains she had recently learned about her own mother’s knack for writing poetry. One gets a sense this finally made her feel connected to another woman, an unfulfilled longing that permeates all of “Near to the Wild Heart.”

Sitting through the play made me wish Joana was invited to the party in “Fefu and Her Friends,” Maria Irene Fornés’ own study of the ways womanhood is debated and challenged, now playing in Brooklyn. If not complete contentment, at least there Joana would feel near to other wild hearts, finally allowed to roam free.

2020 marks the centennial of Clarice Lispector’s birth.  The Ukrainian-Jewish refugee who settled in Brazil has long been acclaimed as a feminist trailblazer in male dominated South American literature.  Fortunately, her canon is newly translated into English. The New Stage Theatre Company celebrates Lispector with an evocatively uncompromising adaptation of Near to the Wild Heart. Artistic director Ildiko Nemeth’s production is both an English-language premiere and first-ever North American stage adaptation of Lispector’s 1943 debut novel.

Lispector’s writing is semi-autobiographical and surreal – the artistically experimental, not the hashtag kind.  The “Wild Heart” belongs to Joana (Sarah Lemp), who is smart, bored and unhappily married to Otavio (Markus Hirnigel). He’s just as disinterested; his mistress Lidia (Katalin Ruzsik) is pregnant.  Joana’s 90-minute stream of consciousness biography reveals a lifetime of uncomfortable relationships with the other men in her life, including her Father (Ken Raboy), adored Teacher (Fritz Buecker) and lover known as The Man (Maciej Bartoszewski).  Her spectral Mother (Lisa Giobbi) and the bitter Aunt (Gina Bonati) who took her in only to send her to boarding school are even less comforting.  When Joana owns up that her memories are a part of her reality, she resolves to life live for herself.

Artistic director Ildiko Nemeth’s production makes terrific use of The New Stage Performance Space, a basement seating approximately 30. There is no stage platform, making the actors and audience equal participants in exploring Joana’s wandering mind. Nemeth, who used Alison Entrekin’s English translation of the novel, controls the heroine’s shifting perceptions of time and reality so well that what could be heavy doses of literary tour de force is fluidly presented.  Jessica Sofia Mitrani’s black-and-white video designs projected against the back wall create a properly surreal atmosphere of clinging vines, rolling waves, cloudy skies, overgrown flora and fauna and creepy eyeballs. Jessica Sofia Mitrani and Hailey Desjardins’s are exaggerated as only in a nightmare or really bad day can be.

Lispector’s feminism allows women regardless of background to see themselves in ordinary circumstances presented in unusual ways – though interior monologues are certainly not limited to books or the stage. That is why Sarah Lemp’s Joana is relatable.  How many young women still experience insensitive sexist remarks from their obnoxious Father’s Friend (Theodore Bouloukos)?

The rest of the cast is equally convincing as the shadowy participants in a reality not exactly of one’s own making.

Dark, deep, mysterious and moving, Near to the Wild Heart echoes the voice and valor of the award-winning 1943 novel by Jewish-Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. Like the digital aquatic imagery that often spans the upstage perimeter, the play ebbs and flows through one woman’s interior and exterior selves as she reflects on the reality of her relationships.

Translated by Alison Entrekin and adapted/directed by Ildiko Nemeth, Near to the Wild Heart beautifully merges the physical life with the metaphysical musings of the female protagonist, Joana (Sarah Lemp). Even as a child she contemplates her role on life’s stage; an omniscient Voice tells us: “Between her and the objects there was something, but whenever she caught that something in her hand, like a fly, and then peeked at it–though she was careful not to let anything escape-she only found her own hand, rosy pink and disappointed. She would never allow herself to say, even to her father, that she never managed to catch ‘the thing.'”

Not to say that she doesn’t try…and try…and try. An old soul with a reflective mind, Joana holds fast on her non-linear journey, moving beyond (but frequently revisiting) a precocious childhood. Across 18 chapter-scenes, Lemp emotes the many facets of Joana: curious, contemplative, discontent, bored, yearning, inquisitive, candid and communicative.

Her clothing may be understated (unstructured muslin/gauze gown with no shoes), but Joana has plenty to say on behalf of anyone who has been stuck in a loveless marriage. There are opaque musings (“Eternity. A thought without content or form, or dimensions. Eternity is the impossibility of knowing how many human beings will succeed my body, which will one day shoot like a star, far from the present”) as well as questions that cut to the core (“Who…is he? …that stranger, this man…my man”).

“This man” is Otávio (Markus Hirnigel) her handsome-and-explosive husband. He too is a vessel that holds pieces of Joana’s nested narrative: “Joana told me stories of child-Joana. At first, she dreamed of sheep, of going to school, of cats drinking milk. Little by little she dreamed of blue sheep, of going to a school in the middle of the forest, of cats drinking milk from gold saucers. And her dreams grew more and more dense and took on colors hard to dilute in words.”

Certain parts of the play grow more and more dense as well. Even as an avid reader, more than once I got lost in the complexity of passages that waxed more philosophical than conversational. The pace of the show is not problematic; it affords us time to settle in and follow the narrative.

Like Joana, Otávio also contemplates his place in life: “…Cowardice is lukewarm and I resign myself to it, laying down all the hero’s weapons that twenty-seven years of thinking have afforded me. What am I, at this moment? A flat, silent leaf that has fallen to the ground. No gust of air swaying it. But why, first and foremost call myself a dead leaf when I am just a man with his arms folded?

With its poetic, organic and otherworldly feel, Heart conjures up the mood and elements of a love story that got ghosted; versions of Joana are suspended in a hammock and appear upstage visually as she struggles to find herself spiritually. Her monochromatic attire sets her apart from the other actors who wear chalk-bright fashions: Lisa Giobbi (Narrator, Mother, Aerial Dancer), Katalin Ruzsik (Lidia, Otávio’s mistress), Gina Bonati (Aunt, Woman with a Voice), Ken Raboy (Father), Fritz Leonard Bücker (Teacher), Olimpia Dior (Teacher’s Wife, Isabelle), Maciej Bartoszewski (Man), and Theodore Bouloukos (Father’s Friend). Costume design is by Jessica Sofia Mitrani and Hailey De Jardins. Mitrani’s video projections provide a stunning cinematic-symbolic backdrop that remains subdued, mostly black and white, without being intrusive or disruptive to the onstage momentum, much of which is small-scale and intimate.

Cool-hued blue lighting (Federio Restrepo, Light Design) and instrumental music (ranging from Shigeru Umebayashi, Kronos Quartet, Franz Schubert and Philip Glass) helps evoke an ethereal feel throughout the 90-minute performance (Hao Bai, Sound Engineering/Programming; original music by Muriel Louveau and David Trujillo.)

Virtually impossible to reduce to a simple strand of specific related events, Near to the Wild Heart leads us to the edge where darkness and light, sand and surf, choice and complacency intersect: “Once you’re happy what happens?” Joana asks. “What comes next?”

Nemeth and The New Stage Theatre Company keep us guessing, keep us wanting.

Adaption of renowned literary works is always a challenge for theater professionals. Novels in particular pose a time based hurdle since much of a novel’s space is creating an environment in which its characters interact. Dialogue is often limited with deeply revealing emotional monologues being the center of a character’s inner life and motivations.

Ildiko Nemeth’s vision for Clarice Lispector’s poetically translated first novel is a combination of language, original mysteriously psychological film projections by Jessica Sofia Mitrani, sound and music, all together filling the New Stage Theater Company’s intimate off-off Broadway theater in Harlem.

Actress Sarah Lemp breathes youthful life and spiritual longing into Joana, Lispector’s narcissistic antagonist. Her inner life is revealed, through monologues, of anger and existential quest for some kind of personal perfection. Nothing is good enough for Joana. Not even as a young child does Joana get any satisfaction. She forces her single parent father to question Joana’s sanity and future. Eventually she is sent away to a boarding school.

Living with an aunt in Rio Joana is an isolated and introspective young woman who longs to break out of something as yet unknown. Her aunt drives her to the brink with scathing attacks on her individuality and anti-social behaviors.

Throughout the play Joana moves through a surreal video backdrop of austere natural beauty. On the stark white stage are a bed, a table, a few chairs. I am reminded of Beckett’s settings for his most starkly anti-social plays. Director Nemeth moves Joana into ill-fated loves and her doomed marriage. Joana almost sings the anxious poetry of her female inner life, a life of cold but clear impassion quickly dissolving into monstrous apathy.

Markus Hirnigel plays Otavio, Joana’s first husband, as a busy bureaucrat and cheating partner. Hirnigel gives Otavio an overpowering male life that confuses Joana. The couple can’t talk directly. Instead they provoke and jab leading to explosions of negative emotions. It’s with Hirnagel that Ms Lemp lets us see Joana’s vulnerability. She both loves and doesn’t love him. She can’t and can deal with his cheating. She is torn and yet somehow made more whole by him.

Written when Lispector was 26 this first novel shook the Brazilian literary world. It has since been translated into dozens of languages. This translation is sheer magic exposing both the hard and soft tissues of a woman’s life. The audience was rapt in the subtleties of acting bringing personal truths onstage.

“Near To The Wild Heart” is a prime example of how difficult literature succeeds on stage. Powerful and meaningful, showing us the heart and mind of well rounded characters. It’s a must see for seekers like me of refined drama.

There’s a gem of a theatre on the UWS that seems more likely at home in the experimental core of the East Village, or even the edgy hinterlands of north Brooklyn.

Like the magical Brigadoon, New Stage Performance Space appears on the radar for a brief moment every spring to bring a little bit of Lower East cool to the Upper West. Balancing classic avant garde ingredients with the careful precision of a master pâtissière concocting the perfect Baked Alaska, director Ildiko Nemeth works a script and cast into a production that showcases her signature style in every new tale.

New York.This year, Nemeth has Falk Richter’s Electronic City on the menu, as translated by Marlene J. Norst. Narrated by the voice of Siri—or maybe Alexa… or is it the crosstown bus?—E.C. (who has time to spell things out these days?) follows modern everyman Tom as he navigates the homogeneous world of airport lounges, conference rooms, and expat apartments around the globe that are all named “Welcome Home.” Tom is “always arriving, never leaving.”

And then there’s Joy, the long-distance girlfriend that Tom met somewhere, #LivingHerBestLife, a never-ending string of temp jobs, “a million disconnected punchlines but eventually you lose track of what you’re laughing at,” or, as Joy puts it, “a sea of numbers churning under a hurricane sky.” The lives of Tom and Joy are interesting enough: a pair of fast-paced banalities that “don’t have a plot, only a succession of ever-recurring events.” It’s not the story here that’s entertaining, but the delivery: a highly-choreographed amalgamation of speed skating, robot dance, screen saver animations (by Eric Marciano and Hao Bai), calisthenics, stop motion, a slo-mo fight scene, witty jokes, computer icons and drum ’n’ bass that, wrapped together, reminds us of The Matrix, Enemy of the State, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and, more recently, an episode or two of Love, Death & Robots.

Delivering an operatic chorus of “fuck’s” and wearing perfect cookie-cutter black costumes (by actor Brandon Lee Olson) that make last year’s Rechnitz outfits seem colorful by comparison, the ensemble features Beth Dodye Bass, Tatyana Kot, Bjorn Bolinder, Maciej Bartoszewski, Rikin Shah, Chris Tanner, Olson as Tom and Jeanne Lauren Smith—whom we last enjoyed in In The Bleak Midwinter—as Joy. Electronic City is the perfect play to showcase the cast’s talents and Nemeth’s style, and makes us wonder: has technology made humans so obsolete that our survival instinct has turned us into robots ourselves? And, if there is no room left for individuality, can we at least find authenticity and connection in the empty void of it all? And what about the “L” word?

Check out this little taste of LES theatre on the UWS, then come back and let us know how much you enjoyed Joy’s World of organized chaos, gossip TV and terrorists in the system. Whether you’re excited by what New Stage brings to the neighborhood or believe that avant garde theatre should stay downtown!

BOTTOM LINE: A commentary on global capitalism, the highly stylized, expressionistic Electronic City is about human connection and isolation. Electronic City is not a play in its traditional sense. It’s stylized from the very first moment—in its aesthetics, structure, and means of storytelling. The two main protagonists are introduced separately: Tom (Brandon Lee Olson) and Joy (Jeanne Lauren Smith) are each trapped in boomerang-like loops of a nightmare-scape. Tom bounces from one hotel room to the next, always on the go to the next meeting, the next destination, his briefcase becoming a security blanket for someone whose worth is defined by the meetings he’s attended. Meanwhile, Joy is in a constant battle with the register at work, unable to communicate meaningfully with technology.

But we don’t quite discover the two characters’ connection until Joy makes an attempt to contact Tom, albeit without success. The two storylines, presented parallel to each other, occur in relative isolation, but indeed they are connected—by various forms of technology, social media, and a shared history. Later on, we discover how they meet, and see their longing for each other. As Tom and Joy, Olson and Smith narrate their characters’ points of views in a liminal space without interacting with each other or with the chorus members, who in turn complete the story with more expressionism—along with abstract visual projections, the chorus provides both choreography and a kind of vocal orchestra that adds more atmosphere than discernible information. Adding to this highly stylized nature, all performers wear a uniform—black pants and shirt, and a black bobbed wig. The one exception is Joy, who’s in a yellow blazer, something echoed by one chorus member (Maciej Bartoszewski) as he stands in for her while Smith stands aside to narrate Joy’s story.

With its technical design, Electronic City successfully evokes the sensory overload its characters experience, making the few quiet and genuine moments poignant. As Joy, Smith is a standout in portraying a sympathetic character with nuance and gravitas in an otherwise somewhat confusing tale of modernity. The chorus members’ commitments are also impressive: Bjorn Bolinder’s delivery of the play’s abstract text provides the necessary clarity to process and follow the story, and it is a delight to watch Chris Tanner transform himself with ease into a whole array of recognizable personalities.

I commend the ambition behind Electronic City. Certainly, a commentary on the evils of global capitalism, and just how helpless individuals are before such a force, is extremely relevant.

In a tale as old as FaceTime, Electronic City pulses with potential as a dynamic dystopian mash-up where LED, KLM, EDM and “news” of J-Lo’s CVS H20 all vie for our short attention spans. Art imitates and pixelates life, and a co-dependency on little screens leads to big problems for Joy (Jeanne Laurent Smith) and Tom (Brandon Olson), a disconnected but determined couple whose relationship status can best be described as “buffering.”

The exposed red and black pipes creating a dark web across the low ceiling of the New Stage Performance Space are an apt environmental parallel for the narrative that’s spun from Falk Richter’s timely and tech-saturated script, translated by Marlene J. Norst. As the house lights fade but not entirely to black, we see that the the world is flat. Light glows from two sources: parallel airport “landing strips” leading from the audience toward upstage, and our cell phones just before they dim.

As Director Ildiko Nemeth challenges our notions of space (measured in gigabytes) and (screen) time hungry for our eyes, she delivers a frenetic e-story across a backdrop of globalization. As walls of tweets, texts, Instagram posts and WhatsApp status updates divide rather than connect us, we are no longer consumers of technology; technology consumes us. Hao Bai (Projection Designer) and her creative team personify the medium is the message, and that message can be maddening.

Joy tells Tom, “Tuesday week I’ll be in Amsterdam for seven hours at Terminal 4 right beside Gate 65, I’ve looked it up and you’ll arrive that evening from Madrid and fly on to Toronto, if you could perhaps fly via Amsterdam rather than Brussels and just take a connecting flight a bit later, then I could arrange my shift so that I could take my break exactly between 11:00pm and 11:30 pm and then we could get together in the KLM lounge and finally talk ‘live’ with each other again, I’d really just like to lay my head on your shoulder again even for a moment.”

Good luck with that. Tightly-wound Tom is sleepless in Seattle, manic in Melbourne, and torqued in Taipei. He slowly spins out of control, desperately trying to process the processes that fuel his fugue: (Bjorn Bolinder) “…the staging of world politics: the production of pictures, marketing and the war, all uncontrollable processes together produce an uncontrollable system, which, in the final analysis, can no longer be represented by a picture or a story since it is itself picture and absence of narrative, if you see what I mean.” Tom: “Yes, indeed I understand that, I understand that perfectly.”

We’d like to believe him, but how is that even possible when he faces this semantic saturation: “Connect collect delay, flexible workforce, flexibilise, re-engineer, reconstruct, re-educate, reinforce reduce re-measure, reassure redirect reconfigure, downsize download, outsource out-task, downed by downers, upped by uppers.” Desperate to join him is J-O-Y,  whose own identity is so fractured that it’s divided among three separate name tags. She, like Tom, is simultaneously tethered to and terrorized by technology. When flummoxed by a malfunctioning digital scanner, she asks in a panic, “How do you do that manually?”

Maybe with a little help from their frenemies. Augmenting Tom and Joy’s surreality is an eclectic ensemble of androgynous citizens who morph from a chatty G(r)eek chorus into formations: marionettes, pedestrians, a news crew and gym members. Their level of freneticism makes Kander and Ebb’s “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup” taste downright decaffeinated. Clad in all black, the group shape shifts in choreographed chaos, each of them bringing their own distinct flair for roles-beyond robotic. Tatyana Kot glides effortlessly as a Roomba-llerina.

If there’s a snake in this garden of gadgetry, it’s the enigmatic, Dali-mustached Chris Tanner who pops up frequently with social commentary and deconstructive criticism. When Joy wanly attempts to make sense of her wavering status as “A sea of numbers under a hurricane sky,” Chris rejects it: “Yes, Joy, lovely, but could we have it a little more factual perhaps? After all we do want a few facts too, not just pretty pictures, don’t we? We’re the ones responsible for the metaphors. You just deliver the material and we’ll make something out of it, OK? Thanks all the same, Joy, but believe me, we’re really better at it.” He’s so sinister, we believe him.

Joy and Tom stand at a crossroads facing an ultimatum: manipulate technology or be manipulated BY technology. On one level, Electronic City may seem like a gamified Metropolis for millennials; lyrics quoted from The Eurythmics seem almost nostalgic. But anyone who has lost their phone, forgotten their PIN or been foiled by an Ikea assemblage project will identify with the feeling that sometimes, even with geolocation, we’re all still lost.