Zoom is disarming and invasive, says American Conservatory Theater’s “Communion.” Just look: On view in the show is the actual home of actor Stacy Ross. In the before times, she was a fixture on the Bay Area’s most august stages; now she’s the humble occupant of a small, wood-paneled room with a pile of picture frames and a pegboard full of pliers, scissors, other tools — the appurtenances of her real-life day job.
All audience members are displayed in the interactive online world premiere, too, along with their melanges of wall art, their pets wandering into the frame.
If the instruction to turn cameras on forces a kind of intimacy, the play also acknowledges that Zoom, the videoconferencing and chat platform created in San Jose that has grown in popularity during the pandemic, is isolating, stifling and disorienting. Theater lifers might even call it the antithesis of their cherished sweaty, palpitating art form.
And yet, playwright Christopher Chen suggests, there’s dramatic juice in that tension between the lonely and the exposed, enough juice for an experiment in form, to create a kind of theater that plays to the exact features and bugs of one particular video chat service, with its breakout rooms, its speaker and gallery views.
The result, which I saw Wednesday, June 2, initially seems a banal, aimless and didactic commentary on the past year. Ross, speaking apparently as herself, tells us she’s “done a few readings” on Zoom in a year marked by “profound isolation.” She leads the audience to sing tones together and invites responses to prompts sent in advance: “In one or two sentences, can you describe a guiding principle you have?”
But hang tight. Chen, the schemer and San Francisco native behind“The Hundred Flowers Project,”“Caught”and“You Mean to Do Me Harm,”writes plays that continually pull back their own curtains, revealing not just their own mechanics but also something raw and yearning in their author and maybe something in his audiences, too.
ACT has asked critics not to reveal the mainspring of “Communion,” but it’s safe to say that part of the show’s concern is the deceit that underlies all theater, where artists and audiences who know, intellectually, that what’s before them isn’t real make a pact together to go along for the ride anyway. “Communion” seeks to expose that lie and see if we’ll keep believing; it wants to say to our faces, “This thing Stacy Ross is doing, talking about her life as an actor, isn’t real. Now, do you still believe it’s real?”
If Ross, under the direction of Pam MacKinnon, occasionally seems like she’s still playing to the rafters, with the wide scope of a Shakespearean tragedian, often she finds an unvarnished register that’s right at home in Zoom. In this medium, when an actor lets half-thoughts and hesitations fly, not hiding but honoring the spontaneous impulses to slouch here, exhale there, you can’t help but lean in and hold your breath.
“圣餐”并不试图抓住观众a “gotcha” moment, to call its spectators dumb or compliant, though shadings of those feelings might give a prickly but agreeable edge to your experience. Rather, the show celebrates that we can still believe and commune against the odds, even when we’re told not to. There’s something magical in us, it says, that makes us keep reaching past Zoom’s disconnects and a playwright’s wiles.
M“Communion”:Written by Christopher Chen. Directed by Pam MacKinnon. Through June 27. One hour, 10 minutes. $41-$55.415-749-2228.www.act-sf.org