Warning flags go up when a theatre opens its doors several minutes after the scheduled showtime and the performance still starts 15 minutes later than that. This is especially horrific when the audience is forced to listen to Frank Sinatra singing Burt Bacharach during that unexplained time, and the tiresome crooning has nothing to do with the play in the first place.
There are a heap of warning flags in this piece, from Virtual Adventures' virtually adventureless lack of a set to lighting so badly designed that people are often talking in total darkness. Then there's the program, which credits a music director and original score when there isn't any music except the ensemble's badly staged and clumsily executed series of opening moves--oh, and the character of a nightclub chanteuse supposedly gearing to sing the blues, which then turns out to be a wrenchingly bad rendition of Over the Rainbow.
It's hard to understand what made Company of Angels want to open its season with this world premiere, as this play isn't even ready for a premiere in Downers Grove, Ill. The premise of playwright/director Jamison Newlander's frivolity has something to do, it seems, with his interest in the "boundless universe of virtual reality" coupled with his love of old movies. Shortly after seeing Casablanca, he writes in his program notes, "this crazy feeling" overcame him. "I wanted to write Casablanca. I actually became depressed when I couldn't." So he created the character of Riff-Cat Polito dot.com Private Investigator on his computer laptop, and the odd obsession grew into this play. Sadly, it wasn't accidentally deleted.
The acting here is not much better than the script, even from Paul Jerome as Riff-Cat, an actor who has exhibited the ability to be far better in several past L.A. productions. Jerome continually pronounces his fatuous lines with a bizarre halting delivery, as though he has no idea whatsoever what the next word should be, and takes copious breaths mid-sentence that seem to cry out, "What the heck am I doing here?" Like his character, he gives every appearance of wishing he were at his "Miami Beach website drinking virtual pi単a coladas."
What Newlander has accomplished curiously resembles kids playing cops 'n' robbers through the world of the Internet. He writes that his consuming desire was to "make a piece of theatre that could energize a new generation," but unfortunately his play would instead make some of us who see it want to bolt for the exit, go home, and run over our computers with the family SUV.