"An Ark" Imagines the Afterlife; "Data" Imagines a Corporate Hell

"Before you enter "An Ark," a "mixed reality" performance at the Shed, you check your coat and, more oddly, your shoes. Contact lenses are recommended. Inside, there are three concentric circles of chairs arranged on a red carpet and, overhead, a white globe resembling a hot-air balloon. A docent explained that, through my virtual-reality headset, I would see four more chairs-and, ideally, they shouldn't float. They did float, so she adjusted the tech."

"What followed was forty-seven minutes of an existential monologue by the British playwright Simon Stephens, chorally divided among the quartet: two twinkly elders, played by McKellen and Golda Rosheuvel; a young woman, who seemed skeptical and hostile and therefore more relatable, played by Rosie Sheehy; and a young man who was beatific and then melancholy, played by Arinzé Kene. The gist was that I had died and was being welcomed to the afterlife, via an orientation that required the characters to list details of my life, or someone's life-or really, everyone's life-beginning at birth. "You'll want to tell people about the things that have happened to you in here," one mentor said, earnestly. "They matter," another said. Mostly, this meant a litany of sensations ("Cherry blossom. Chocolate milk. Night terrors") and stoner insights: "It is impossible to waste energy. All you can do is pass it on.""

Two plays stage technological anxiety through immersive and mixed-reality theatrical techniques. An Ark at the Shed requires check-in of coats and shoes, contact lenses, and a V.R. headset; seating is arranged in three concentric circles beneath a white globe. The headset generates four holographic figures—Ian McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel, Rosie Sheehy, and Arinzé Kene—who deliver a forty-seven-minute, chorally divided existential monologue framing the viewer as newly dead and recounting sensory memories. Technical glitches appeared but the V.R. ran efficiently. Direction favored earnest meditation over spectacle, and the monologue's litany of sensations and aphorisms sometimes failed to sustain full engagement.

Read at The New Yorker