When the Muppet-like Trekkie Monster sings "The Internet Is for Porn" in Avenue Q, people laugh. A recent audience at San Francisco Playhouse also laughed when a virtual-reality entrepreneur asks, "Don't you know that porn drives technology?" But it can only be a mordant laugh, considering the context in which it arises in Jennifer Haley's eerily disturbing play The Nether.
True to the human nature laid out by that Avenue Q character, as soon as someone invents the ultimate in immersive virtual reality, the big bucks are to be made in sexual fantasies that are unspeakable – not to mention illegal in the real world. Is there a point when imagined role-playing becomes so realistic that it crosses some amorphous line? That is the question at the center of The Nether .
Haley's play takes place in a not-too-distant future where Earth is environmentally blighted, but the Internet has graduated to a new technology known at the Nether, which provides some relief from a grey world. The opening scene takes place in an interrogation room as a detective from an unnamed agency and the creator of a Nether program known as the Hideaway spar not over whether he is guilty, but over whether there is anything to be guilty of. This may be the future, but the argument has been around for decades: Does pornography encourage acts of sexual predation, or give release to those who might otherwise commit it?
The difference, in this case, seems to be the reality of the particular fantasy, a point explicitly made as Nina Ball's wonderful set transforms from the cinderblock enclosure of the interrogation room to a storybook Victorian home. First we are in the parlor of what is essentially a VR pedophile bordello, when an undercover detective arrives in period attire before the set changes again to a young girl's frilly bedroom. Iris looks to be about 8 years old, and she is soon encouraging her undercover client to touch her in increasingly inappropriate ways. He is horrified by his temptations, though we gather that he is less squeamish on return visits. An axe is always available to the visitor if he wants to take his fantasies a step further.
Haley has constructed her play in a series of terse, tense scenes quickly moving among the locales in which the accused, known as Sims in the terrestrial world and as Papa in the conjured Hideaway, is the only constant character. Or so it seems until late twists turn the play into much more than it first seems.
Director Bill English's production is a tightly packed, sharply paced 80 minutes of increasing intrigue. As Sims/Papa, Warren David Keith is excellent as a sinisterly nonchalant character whose claims to be an emotionally detached businessman are increasingly undercut. Louis Parnell, as a hapless user of Sims' services, creates a strikingly sad character scooped up in the investigation. Josh Schell brings a kind of Mr. Darcy stateliness as the increasingly tempted visitor to Iris' bedroom, and Carmen Steele as Iris (who alternates with Matilda Holtz) projects an innocence that is coupled with a knowing determination. Ruibo Qian, as the detective, isn't at quite the same level as her fellow performers, and is prone to rushing her lines.
The Nether is by no means graphic, and any abuse that takes place at the Hideaway is only implied. But a queasiness does hover over the proceedings, no doubt by design, and that may require audiences to do some redefining of the notion of entertainment.
The Nether will run at San Francisco Playhouse through March 5. Tickets are $20-$120. Call (415) 677-9596 or go to sfplayhouse.org.
Josh Schell, left, as a new visitor to a deviant virtual-reality fantasyland, is greeted by the proprietor played by Warren David Keith in The Nether at San Francisco Playhouse. Photo: Jessica Palopoli