UNREAL LIFE

"Russian Troll Farm" lands Off Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

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.