Song About Himself by Mickle Maher (review)

A small pool of light came up on Carol (Diana Slickman), a tired woman in nondescript clothing who clutched a clarinet, stared straight ahead, and spoke into the space before her: “I [Coughs nervously, mumbles, coughs], I am here.” But where was here? The question has competing answers—online, on-stage, in language—and the tension among them animated Theater Oobleck’s performance of Mickle Maher’s play Song about Himself.

We soon surmise one answer: Carol is online. We see her whenever she is logged on to an imagined social network called YouSpake, of which she seems to be the only human member. Like Carol, we are strangers in this place at first and must learn its unfamiliar language and idiosyncratic rules. In this dystopian future language as we know it is all but forgotten, having been degraded over years by the din of empty social chatter on the internet—or “the Weed,” as it is known here. An artificial intelligence created YouSpake as a refuge from the Weed and its “ocean of decayed babble” in order to find and foster that rarest of commodities, a reasonable human voice. Carol is the only person she knows who can speak relatively clearly; she found her voice, we later learn, by obsessively watching a program called Song about Himself, dedicated to the few remaining traces of a poet whose name is lost to history. The poet is Walt Whitman, a figure who shares Carol’s yearning for human connection and her hope that language might enable privileged contact. Carol’s speech abounds with Whitmanesque echoes—she calls to “all you who would with healthy welcome speak and embrace me”—and Maher composed the entire play in an original form of ornate verse derived from Whitman’s. Carol holds a clarinet throughout because in order to access this unique social network she is required to improvise music so as to prove her humanity. YouSpake is “made safe by Jazz.” Carol’s only company at first is Host/Hostess (Colm O’Reilly), a polite and endearing computer program who presides over the space. Speaking at first with a slightly artificial cadence that signals his or her distance from humanity, Host/Hostess encourages Carol not merely to “Back and Forth” (to converse), but also to “Lengthy Post,” to rediscover the lost art of narrative storytelling. The two are joined later by Tod (Guy Massey), another voice striving for connection whose presence sets in motion a love triangle of sorts. Although Host/Hostess’s behavior grows steadily more human over time as he/she learns to lie and even to sing a bit, Host/Hostess remains jealous of the growing bond between Tod and Carol. The second half of the play tracks their quest to meet each other offline.

Colm O’Reilly (Host/Hostess) and Diana Slickman (Carol) in Song about Himself.

Carol yearns for an elsewhere, but she is only visible here. This raises a second possible answer to where Carol was: onstage. She was there in front of us on a bare, black circle of floor, ten paces across, surrounded on all sides by an intimate audience of about 150 people who remained partially visible to one another whenever the space was lit by Martha Bayne’s restrained lighting. Four narrow aisles facilitated entrances and exits through the audience. An embodied social medium, theatre, depicted a disembodied one, YouSpake, and in the process highlighted theatre’s virtuality, its capacity to couple here and now with nowhere and never. The place had no identifying features, the muted costumes looked like mumbling, and composer Mark Messing’s spare soundscape gave the calculated impression of formlessness. The actors made no eye contact with one another until the final scene. Together, these choices revealed how theatre, so often defined by presence, can also be like the Weed, “a thing of loss and changing.” Like Whitman, who said “I help myself to material and immaterial,” the performance flouted the...