wanted a pillbox, ended up with a plastic bag
By Daniel Dannery (Venezuela)
Translated and directed by Mary Ann Vargas
Generating relationships online… it’s child’s play.
Digital society is driven by ambivalence and anxiety. Worlds we strive to belong to escape us, like water slipping through our fingers. Worlds made of pills, of tracks and plastic bags. Worlds of labels, stilettos and shopping trolleys; of suicides and collectives. A metaverse.
If ambivalence is a problem affecting the psyche, are we a sick society? It may be that ambivalence, that open door to thousands of other doors, has generated, is generating, an acute fear of the future. Too many open doors, too many pending decisions to be made or discarded. And yet, if this multiverse is a range of infinite universes, why the anxiety? We know that someone else, just like me, is living the life I’m not living. And this is happening because social media is generating the market of imagery that I’m consuming. Will the desire to live the life someone else is living, in an alternate universe, generate anxiety?
wanted a pillbox, ended up with a plastic bag dares to make tangible the disembodied quest for connection experienced by a global community of anonymous online users. Although written in Caracas in pre-pandemic times (2018), the piece’s explosive quality expands in translation, generating a myriad of scenarios, encounters, and disencouters. Multilingual interactions – linguistic, performative, experiential – written, and translated, to come to life on stage, in complicity with the audience.
All plays at #OOTW2022 will be presented as rehearsed readings.
Pictured: the cast of The Therapist, Out of the Wings 2021.
