‘An Ark’ at the Shed Is All Headsets, No Heartbeat

Ian McKellen will not be present at this performance. That’s the gist of the email reminder you receive from the Shed before heading there to see An Ark, the “mixed reality” play written by Simon Stephens, directed by Sarah Frankcom, and brainstormed into being by producer Todd Eckert. Though the show is a slight 47 minutes long, it comes heavily padded with special circumstances. Coat and bag check is mandatory; you stow your shoes in a cubby before taking your seat in the red-carpeted space; and, of course, you wear VR glasses. (The nearsighted who haven’t worn contact lenses have to check their own glasses in exchange for a corrective version of the high-tech goggles, likely a dealbreaker for some theatergoers.) It’s a lot of fuss — not to mention a lot of money — to conjure the feeling of an event, something new and exclusive that’s letting us in on the ground floor. “Welcome to the world premiere of An Ark,” reads the program note by the Shed’s artistic director Alex Poots, “and the first play created for mixed reality.”

That seems unprovable. But more important, whether or not An Ark is a truly original experiment, its results are dispiritingly bland. Essentially, four prerecorded actors—McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel (known to Bridgerton fans as Queen Charlotte), Arinzé Kene, and Rosie Sheehy—sit in a semi-circle of floating chairs and talk to you for a while from inside your glasses. They aren’t characters so much as adjectives: Rosheuvel is warm and a little conspiratorial. McKellen is prototypically stately and droll, an old magician reading a bedtime story. Kene is bright and Sheehy more sharp and shaded, the only one of the group who seems over the whole thing.

What that thing is is never explicitly defined, but the premise is ancient enough to make itself apparent: These four are dead. So are we, but, it would seem, more recently so. “Don’t panic,” they tell us. “Don’t be scared.” It’s the third act of Our Town and we are Emily Webb — except that An Ark has no first two acts girding it up, and its boneless flow of dewy wonder over the little things that make up life quickly becomes banal where it should be bracing and ecstatic. “The sweet taste of pineapple juice. The plunge in your heart of a love story. The view of the horizon in the sky as the sun falls”; “old newspapers. A yellow silk shirt. Battered blue jeans. Green tea and mineral water”; “cherry blossom. Chocolate milk. Night terrors.” An Ark loves a list, and though that last one is improved by McKellen’s inimitable growly diction, the onslaught of earnestness starts to wear. So does Stephens’s commitment to the nebulous second person: “You come alive to the feeling of silk on skin.” Even Mary Oliver might need a break from this much wild and precious life.

It may be that Stephens erred on the side of cloying warmth because he knew that these images, these voices, were going to be packaged inside such a cool container. In his own program note, Eckert is at pains to demonstrate the humanity of the project: “An Ark is not a work of AI,” he writes. Instead of technology that “erodes the foundation of our shared experience,” he’s interested in “how we might utilize technology to expand the traditional forms of theater and film … to bring us closer to the truth of ourselves.” That sounds nice, but I’m wary, and not just because he said “utilize.” The experience of An Ark is, if anything, predictably insular. There you sit in one of several concentric circles of audience members, strapped to your chair by the wire from your goggles, with some absent British actors floating in front of you, their flesh rendered uncanny and digital, their eye contact direct but frictionless — you could boo or applaud or start texting your friend and it would make no difference to them.

The strangest aspect of the VR glasses is that you can still see your own environment — McKellen and Co. don’t hover in a void but rather overlap like holograms with the red carpeting, the chairs, your dimly lit fellow audience members. Is this what An Ark means in describing its reality as “mixed”? If so, it’s a depressing concoction. For stretches of the show, I found myself staring past the unreal actors at the real humans sitting hooked up to machines, their eyes all hidden. If we had all been watching the same video on our phones, no matter how moving the content, would the effect have been so different? Stephens’s script attempts to envision death in order to pay homage to life, but neither great mystery feels freshly illuminated by a project that invests so little in actual presence, actual vigor. When An Ark was done, a hesitation preceded dutiful applause. The woman beside me joined in but turned to her friend with a short, uncertain laugh. “What,” she asked, “are we clapping for?”

For those who love extreme sports and experimental theater, January in New York is a cold, wet, high-endurance paradise: It’s festival season, and right now Under the Radar, Prototype, and the Exponential Festival (among others) are at their height, with shows that range from a resurrected Richard Foreman opera (delightful, demented, full of ducks) to a mash-up of Jaws and To the Lighthouse. After that evening at the Shed, it struck me that I’ve seen several festival shows in much smaller rooms that take up many of the same concerns as An Ark — some even using similar techniques — with much more pluck and vibrancy.

In a converted upstairs office room at Target Margin’s warehouse theater space way out in Sunset Park, Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge’s gorgeously textured, totally trippy blend of monologue and bizarro dance theater, The Mushroom (part of Exponential), also asked us to take off our shoes to witness something not quite human — but here, the space pulsed with color and sensation, a living forest floor of warm, weird organic energy. Calonge choreographed dancers so wrapped in layers of found and combined materials — scrunchy yarn and drippy fringe, crinkling plastic and proboscis-like pool noodles — that their human forms disappeared. They were spore-producing blobs and wiggling pupae, creatures of mycelium that bloomed and receded; merged and reproduced and rejoined the soft, mutating understory. Sherwood wrote and designed the production, and all her crocheted tentacles and undulating, diaphanous fruiting bodies did more to bring human vitality and human decay into the room than any gesture in An Ark. I won’t soon forget an enormous slug — a dancer zipped up inside what looked like a huge brown Ikea bag — scooting by me, slow and squishy and facelessly amicable, on its way toward an exit in the shaggy curtains that lined the space. Now that was wild and precious.

Adrienne Swan and Nicolas Noreña in The Mushroom.
Photo: Lee Rayment

Meanwhile, at Under the Radar, life’s ephemera received compelling consideration in both 2021 — created by Cole Lewis, Patrick Blenkarn, and Sam Ferguson — and in the “Worker’s Lunch” that was forced to take the place of 12 Last Songs, the epic interview-based meditation on work and community that was to unfold over twelve hours at La MaMa. 2021 used live video-gameplay, a cardboard box of a real dead man’s personal effects, and an AI model built by the team to reimagine the final days of that man — Lewis’s own father, a Canadian army vet who moved to the U.S., embraced Trumpism, and spent his final weeks with both pancreatic cancer and COVID, hallucinating and living in his car after countless failures of the system. As with An Ark, pixelated worlds, mixed “realities,” and questions of what small objects — and what, if any, moments of dignity — a life leaves behind sat at the heart of 2021. Here, however, specificity of character superseded generality of sentiment.

Ironically and upsettingly, 12 Last Songs had to be cancelled because of the same disastrous politics professed by Lewis’s father. Many of its performers, without explanation, couldn’t get visas. Still, the last-minute pivot performed by the show’s makers and presenters was full of rangy, generous spirit. All 30 New York workers who were set to be interviewed as part of the performance (from a doorman to a midwife to a guy who rents out bouncy castles) were instead invited to lunch on stage at La MaMa, along with dozens of audience members. Full disclosure: I was going to be one of those workers. Instead, I took my partner and our baby to that lunch. We chatted with the doorman, ate hummus and pita, and slid down an inflatable slide set up by the bouncy-castle guy — a proud Bronx resident, Giants fan, and grandfather of eleven who said he’s never leaving New York.

Long tables were covered in slips of paper with simple printed questions: “What song do you want played at your funeral?” “Do you have what you want?” “Do you have what you need?” “Is life how you imagined it would be?” Strangers chatted over these prompts and members of the show’s team conducted a handful of shortened interviews. “This is not 12 Last Songs,” they told us at the beginning — but it wasn’t simply a memorial either. All about the minutiae of life and labor, the project is anything but dead. Its curiosity and integrity shone through, celebratory and unkillable. For now, it’s just our loss not to experience it in its fullness.

An Ark is at the Shed through March 1.

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