Theatre has become a slow art. It takes time to write a play, and then additional time to get someone to produce it; no wonder, then, that current events are most likely to show up in cabaret and standup. (Political theatre's version of super-timeliness tends to be, like, the past five years.) And drama requires a certain slowness from us, too. You can casually wander out of a movie, pause a television show, check social media as you read a book, or-I don't know-knit. But the scant hundred minutes of Sarah Gancher's Off Broadway play "Russian Troll Farm," for instance, have to unfold in the molasses time of unadulterated, undistracted viewing. Luckily, that fight for our scattered attention, and even the topical delay, can become part of the show itself.
Gancher's "workplace comedy," now at the Vineyard Theatre, is set during the six-month run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, and dramatizes Russian cyber interference by the Internet Research Agency, in St. Petersburg. For years, the real-life Russian company used bogus social-media accounts to sow fake news and real division, apparently manufacturing millions of tweets' worth of institutional mistrust and norm-eroding nastiness. (In Gancher's play, we hear a supervisor exhorting her underlings to normalize the word "pussy" to diminish Americans' shock at Donald Trump's hot-mike vulgarities.) Despite the intervening insurrections and invasions, the world of "Russian Troll Farm" doesn't feel that distant. Perhaps you recognize the still constant drip of conspiracy theories in your own feeds, or maybe you saw this very play, which aired online during the pandemic shutdown, just before the election in 2020.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 26, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 26, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
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THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
THE WORLD OF TELEVISION CASTOFFS
REALITY-TV CONTESTANTS ARE BARELY PAID, AND THE EXPERIENCE CAN FEEL LIKE ABUSE. SHOULD THEY UNIONIZE?
SHOUTS & MURMURS IDENTIFIED
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