Imagine a matchmaking app for theatergoers and plays. Would you reflexively swipe left if a piece's profile included the word "experimental"?
That's the same insecure rush to judgement that keeps many folks who use Grindr and Tinder from ever meeting up in person, driven to anxiety by preconceptions.
It's the sort of reaction that might keep you from stepping out for an evening to see playwright Nanako Winkler's beguiling "Thirty-Six."
The work's world premiere production at Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage has extended its run through December 29, due to popular demand. Perhaps you can be swayed from your deep-seated prejudices by peer pressure? Well, friend, I kindly suggest you pull up your big they pants and extend yourself. "Thirty-Six" is experimental theater that yields positive outcomes along with provocations.
Definitely? Not.
When Jenny (Lauren Andrei Garcia) makes a Tinder date with David (Soren Santos), she's looking for a lusty, unemotional hookup. But when they meet in a bar just a stone's throw from her place, he indicates a desire to hang out, talk, and get to know each other.
Soon, he's nose-deep in vagina. Later, she's angrily spilling her guts about abusive exes. Sometimes, people aren't sure about what they want, when they want it, or from whom.
Winkler was most certainly uncertain about what would happen between these characters when she began writing this play. She was building on the bones of a formal thought experiment conducted by a group of academic psychologists and featured in a popular New York Times article, "The 36 Questions that Lead to Love."
The study examined the extent to which a sense of emotional intimacy could be induced between two individuals, regardless of their pre-existing similarities and differences, by having them answer a specific series of questions designed to drive increasing openness, from "What would constitute a 'perfect' day for you?" to "Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?"
Shared questions
In the play, Jenny and David move through a single evening of exchanging answers to the study's questionnaire as a third character called Stage Directions (How's that for experimental theater?), played with quirky nonchalance by nic feliciano, provides narrative description as to their movements and whereabouts.
Getting to know each other proves a challenging creative process for the newly acquainted pair (I imagine that a playwright's development of her characters has a similar strangeness and vulnerability to it). To a certain extent, like any of us in such a situation, they're groping in the dark.
Or, in the case of "Thirty-Six," groping in eerie, echoey whiteness. Director Michelle Talgarow has worked with the outstanding design team of Randy Wong-Westbrooke (set) Spense Matubang (lighting) and Alex Fakayode (sound) to create an evocative abstract space, simultaneously suggestive of smart Apple packaging and a soulless vacuum.
As theatergoers, we can't help but feel empathy for the palpably human characters making their way through this familiar, often chilly world. They're trying to define and protect themselves as individuals, but also yearning to connect.
But how? To wrestle with the existential, embrace the experimental.
'Thirty-Six,' $15-$40, through Dec. 29 at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley
www.shotgunplayers.org
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