Post-FringeNYC: Viral

Just a quick note about Mac Rogers's show Viral. See it!

He wrote the truly wonderful Universal Robots that was included in the same Plays & Playwrights anthology as Antarctica. I don't say this a lot about my contemporaries, but he can really fucking write. His dialogue is magnificent. His ideas are creepy and weird without any sort of overplaying of his hand.

It's about three people who are sexually aroused by watching people die - not by watching violence, but by watching the life-force leave the body. It reminded me a bit of J.G. Ballard's Crash, a serious examination of a sexual fetish that I'm not entirely sure exists and is the blackest of black comedies. The acting is just lovely too, Rebecca Comtois (pictured above, with Kent Meister and Matthew Trumbull) particularly stood out to me.

Note to Manhattan Theater Club and Playwrights Horizons: many of the plays you've been producing in recent years have been embarrassingly bad. Really. There are other American playwrights besides Itamar Moses and Christopher Shin. Promise.

Viral
Gideon Productions
The Soho Playhouse
15 Vandam Street
Sunday, September 27, 6pm

(photo: via viraltheplay.com)