My overall impression
Last year, one of my two favorite pieces produced at the Fest was It’s Important to Leave, As Well, the debut piece by Joshua Morrison and an intricate and beautiful examination of the way that art can operate as both a way to mark distance between people, a barrier to hide behind, and a way to bring people together on both intimate and broad terms.
Yoshiba carries some similar themes, and while I feel the production is a bit more raw than last years show, it loses nothing in terms of theme, cleverness, and strong performances from great actors.
Whereas last year used art as it’s proxy to human interaction, Yoshiba uses the ever-popular debate about technology as it’s macguffin, and does it to great effect. In much the same vein, it explores in a clever and original, but still very human way, how technology allows us to be apart from one another and questions if it can still be used to bring us together.
As the show follows a frazzled and largely disillusioned paralegal, played with terrific humanity and believable frustration by Annie Wolfe, who has been assigned to a case involving customer complaints to the computer company To… um… YO-shiba, she enters into the lives of, and provides a form of intervention to, people whose interpersonal lives have somehow gone a bit awry, in a way that is tied to, though not necessarily CAUSED by, computer technology.
The characters are all given unique and interesting voices, and the actors assigned to them (Tracey Collins, Joanna Fernandez, Darren Mangler, Sean Fitzgerald, and Josh Green) all bring their characters to life in impressive ways. I particularly enjoyed the slightly maddened but ever-sharp boss Collins plays against Wolfe’s reluctant employee.
Beyond just the characters, the circumstances (inspired by actual customer complaints parsed through by Morrison) that are built upon by the playwright are cleverly tailored to bring up unique and interesting points about how we deal with one another, and the responsibility we have to own our faults and not shift them off onto whatever convenient scapegoat might exist, be it our jobs or our families or our computer. As tempting as it might be to say that our technology isolates us, shackles us to convenience until we’re unable to extricate ourselves, the fact is that we isolate ourselves, that we seek out excuses to push away the often painful and complex relationships that fill our lives.
It’s not the fault of your iPad that you didn’t talk to that girl. It’s not Reddit’s fault that you spent eight hours browsing instead of finishing that draft. Our tools do not use us, we use them, for better or worse, for one purpose or another.
That said, I need to shut down my browser. I need to call that girl. I need to finish that script. Maybe one more hour. That cat video looked pretty funny. I’ll just check Facebook right quick. Just right quick.
