My overall impression
June 23, 2011 performance of “Dreams from a Dead City” was a highly innovative theatre experience in the cellular matrix. Receiving a phone call as an audience member, while speaking to the actors onstage was eerie fun. The director instructing the audience to tweet during the show was a valiant attempt to connect to today’s young hipsters. Honestly, I only tweeted once because I was engrossed in the onstage performers, who did a terrific job. In the age of Iphones, Facebook and Youtube, is theatre relevant? Which was a message I gleaned from this new work, directed and co-written by the talented Joe Luis Cedillo. Or does each work of art, creation, invention die out when the next latest and greatest technology takes it’s place, like the computer programs played by the actors onstage? “Dreams from a Dead City” explores humans’ dependency on technology as slaves of the corporate system, which may just be leading us to our demise. I would like to see this piece fleshed out into a longer play that dives even deeper into socio-technological pathos, lending more clarity to the play’s ending.
