Playwright Kate Attwell’s “Big Data,” a two-act world premiere at American Conservatory Theater, sets right out to entertain.
A slyly amused, sardonic figure, M (played by the nationally lauded BD Wong), is explaining how researchers have learned, through various feeding protocols, to control the behavior of pigeons. His commentary is accompanied by a huge video projected onto the stage wall, a device (created by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson) used throughout the play to good effect in a variety of ways, including, at times, live feed of what is simultaneously being enacted onstage. It creates a visceral, Big Brotherish aura.
M, who appears throughout Act 1 in various, unnerving capacities, succeeds—at least judging by the laughter on opening night—in making the audience complicit in this little example of human-on-bird cruelty.
Attwell, though, has a particular, and serious, agenda: to dramatize the ways in which “surveillance capitalism” (a concept that she discusses in the theater’s very interesting program notes) holds us in a viselike grip.
Structured in two distinct, hour-long acts—a lightly humorous Act 1 offers a bit of a harbinger of what’s to come in the more serious Act 2—the play largely concerns an extended family: a married couple (played by Rosie Hallett as Lucy and Jomar Tagatac as Max), with financial, career and potential parenthood concerns; her gay brother, Sam (Gabriel Brown), and his husband (Michael Phillis), who have relationship issues; and Sam and Lucy’s parents (Julia McNeal as Didi and Harold Surratt as Joe).
The mysterious and seductive M drifts among the younger couples’ apartments in Act 1 and manifests as each character’s coaxing guide to their hidden, forbidden (maybe even non-existent) desires.
The tone changes in Act 2, when the couples arrive at Didi and Joe’s country home for dinner, stressed from the changes that have taken place in their city lives since Act 1 (as influenced by spookily intuitive M) and worried because the old folks haven’t been answering their phone or text messages. The change of tone is nicely represented by scenic designer Tanya Orellana’s homey, woodsy living-dining room in contrast to Act 1’s two spare and sleek city apartments where the young couples live.
Now, M is nowhere to be seen, and the only mystery in what has become almost a cookie-cutter family drama is why Didi has called them all together, and why she hasn’t been answering the phone.
Other than the clever device of the intrusive M, “Big Data,” which ACT commissioned from Attwell (in 2019, ACT staged Attwell’s brilliant, time-traveling “Testmatch,” set in England and in colonial India), there’s nothing much new here on the oft-examined topic of how our privacy is being invaded, our very thoughts manipulated in increasingly insidious, indeed inescapable, ways by technology.
The direction by Pam MacKinnon, with the clever use of video, is as smooth, the acting as strong, as we would expect from San Francisco’s flagship nonprofit theater, and the 21st-century reality that these characters are dealing with is a reality we all share.
But the characters themselves are thinly sketched, nor are their personal dilemmas especially intriguing or emotionally involving. Ultimately, Attwell’s ending feels contrived, inauthentic.
American Conservatory Theater’s “Big Data” runs through March 10 at Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25 to $130 at (415) 749-2228 or act-sf.org/bigdata.