Immersive Space, Digital Intimacy

Is it possible to speak of a dating genre: a form with narrative conventions, thematic preoccupations, a recognizable style? Of course, dating and its antecedents—courtship, mating rituals, what have you—have long been standard fixtures of romance genres. But within such traditional romance narratives, dating is never the main event. Most often, dates are merely necessary preliminaries in a trajectory that steadfastly bends towards heterosexual marriage, and the pleasure of the dating narrative is inextricably tied to the anticipation of this guaranteed “happy ending.” But if we shift the grounds of representation and focus on dating quadating, as an end in and of itself—what new possibilities of performance and form emerge?

Culturally speaking, dating is no longer viewed as a brief, rosily orchestrated interlude in the lives of the young and more-or-less virginal. As we recognize dating as something that many kinds of people are doing for greater lengths of time, we also grow more uncertain about what it is exactly. A great deal of alarmist commentary presumes that dating practices are altering rapidly, in concert with major social and technological changes. It’s a cultural truism that The Way We Date Now is a particularly trenchant manifestation of contemporary mores under pressure.

In recent decades, episodic television has emerged as the medium most willing to take up and make innovations toward a dating genre. The formal constraints of ongoing serialized narratives—the need for shorter, stand-alone arcs and guest stars—mean that it is often convenient and desirable for protagonists to wander aimlessly in the dating jungle for seasons on end. Monogamous coupledom remains the dominant endgame, but it’s rarely one that goes unchallenged, and the journeys leading there have gotten bleaker, shaggier, more audacious in their formal experimentation. There’s a real darkness at the heart of this nascent genre. (While Sex and the Cityis generally cited as the first wave of this movement, contemporaneous and more recent examples can be found in Will and Grace, Girlfriends, The L Word, How I Met Your Mother, Hello Ladies, Looking, and Sex and the City’szeitgeist-driving, think-piece-inspiring little sister, Girls.) Its protagonists win our sympathy with their put-upon incredulity, and their profound agnosticism as to whether the whole dog-and-pony show is in any way worth it. Their strength lies in their endurance and clear-eyed vulnerability: when they are knocked down they get back up, no matter how grievous the pain or humiliation. Their picaresque dating escapades usually play out against the backdrop of a funhouse mirror New York, oddly set-dressed and clean, but swimming with walking personality disorders. A precarious balance of cynicism and rosy optimism, fantasy and a pragmatic realpolitikcycles through endless permutations of elation and heartache.

Yet there are formidable challenges to realizing this dating genre onstage. A live performance presupposes a high degree of “eventness.” If we witness a series of couplings and uncouplings on the stage, we expect more of an ideological or thematic design behind it. This point can often be nasty, punitive, simplistically cynical: all this getting together and splitting up must be in service of some larger truth, usually about the hypocrisy of sexual mores or the delusional nature of our romantic ideals. Such plays (Patrick Marber’s Closer, to name just one example) certainly aim for a more difficult (and, by extension, truer) representation of sex and love, but the need to underscore constantly the various theses they seek to advance often produces something just as hollow and clunky as any big-budget rom-com.

Can any evening of live theatre present the strange peaks and valleys of contemporary dating, somehow evoking both the banal and the bizarre, the romantic and the cynical? This is the ambition of Play/Date, an immersive theatrical event conceived by Blake McCarty and directed by Michael Counts, which portrays a wide and juicy slice of the New York dating scene in highly schematic, but often engaging...