CARE FOR A HELPFUL BRAIN IMPLANT??
                        New Play Examines Ethics, Conflicts
                                              By Carol Benet
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area theater
                                                                 Weeks starting April 1, 2011
                                                                 Vol. 13, No. 85
        The new play “Wirehead” at the SF Playhouse is a provocative examination of ethics and competition involving a brain implant making people smarter, and their lives better. Would we use it? Should we use it?
            How does this tiny San Francisco theater present such a string of provocative and important plays time after time?  Bill English and Susi Damilano---founders, directors, set designers and chief bottle-washers---are responsible for most of it, with their casts and tech people meriting added plaudits.
            Their current show Wirehead is yet another hit.  . Written by Matthew Benjamin and Logan Brown, the play premiered in LA where it won many critic awards.  This is its second premiere (an oxymoron? Perhaps!).
            Wirehead is about junior MBA staff members in a firm of financial investors and analysts.  They are about to back a Chinese incubator company that has created a special device, a brain implant,  to make people super intelligent and to make life better-- “a viagra of the mind.”  The action is narrated by RIP (Scott Coopwood), a DJ, social commentator, ombudsperson who is placed above in a cubicle so he can see and comment on everything -- like a Deus ex Machina.
            Adams (Craig) and Destry (Gabriel Marin) are frantic when they find out that their rich kid assistant Hammy (Cole Alexander Smith) has leaked the information, information that they hoped will make them all rich and famous. Upon implanting the device, Hammy has a hyper-expanding experience.  He is so overactive that he becomes dangerously out-of-control. The two girlfriends of Adams and Destry (Madeline H.D. Brown and Lauren Grace) are also part of the action and serve to elaborate the actual problems that ensue when such an implant is used. 
            The play raises many questions.  If such an implant were available, would we use it? Would we have our kids implanted so they would be supersmart? Would investors benefit from it?  There are so many ramifications of this kind of thinking and relevant possibilities today that whatever is the next great thing in science may just attract an audience.  Think of childless people searching the Ivy League newspapers for sperm and egg donors.  
            Susi Damilano directs this talented group.  Bill English created a perfect set for the swish VC office. There are Talk Backs after many performances with their own impressive casts of characters: Stuart Russell of the Computer Science Department at UCB, Adam Gazzaley, neuroscientist at UCSF  Michael Vassar president of SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) and more. 
            Wirehead runs at the SF Playhouse through April 23.  For info: go online.

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        © Carol Benet 2011
        Carol Benet is a regular theater reviewer for artssf.com.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) focus on theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, and a few departures into books (by authors of the region)as well.
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