Conspicuous Consumption, Getting More Conspicuous Onstage

Instagram was not but 5 years previous in April 2015 when two Iranians barely out of their teenagers died in a lemon yellow Porsche Boxster GTS that veered off a highway and slammed right into a tree.

However in “Wealthy Children: A Historical past of Procuring Malls in Tehran,” a play written by Javaad Alipoor, the photo-sharing app would possibly as nicely have been a historian making a report of privilege, an archaeologist rooting via the trash of the previous.

And, now, a theatrical machine. “Wealthy Children,” a part of the Public Theater’s Underneath the Radar Pageant, makes use of a fictional Instagram feed to inform the actual story of Mohammad Hossein Rabbani Shirazi, who owned the flowery automobile, and Parivash Akbarzadeh, who was driving it too quick. Whereas listening to the story as narrated by two actors, viewers members are instructed to swipe on their telephones via a photograph path of events, swimming pools, drug toots and buying journeys that rewind the minutes, hours, years and ultimately millenniums main as much as the crash.

As that format suggests, “Wealthy Children,” which originated as a dwell stage manufacturing on the Edinburgh Pageant Fringe in 2019, is extra within the large sociological image than within the characters themselves. Hossein (Alipoor) is sketched in major colours because the feckless princeling son of a revolutionary hero, who now builds high-end buying malls; Parivash (Peyvand Sadeghian) will get a barely extra nuanced portrait as a fatalistic opportunist marking time with Hossein, although he’s engaged to a different lady. What brings them collectively and results in their tragedy is just not love and even recklessness however a illness the play diagnoses as late-capitalist consumerist mania.

Oddly, that’s additionally the illness infecting everybody in “Espíritu,” an Underneath the Radar providing from a very totally different aesthetic universe. A symbolist collage created by Teatro Anónimo of Chile, “Espíritu” tells no discernible story, provides no historical past and includes no technological annotation. Even so, we come to know that the assorted characters wafting via its assortment of brief, ripe vignettes (the play is lengthy sufficient at 32 minutes) are miserably unfulfilled, determined to discover a sense of objective, as if it had been one thing you can purchase at a bodega if solely you had the money.

Although there may be not a second within the earnest, theatrical “Espíritu” (written and directed by Trinidad González) you’ll ever confuse with a second within the slick, cerebral “Wealthy Children,” that doesn’t imply they don’t have anything to say to one another. In one of many “Espíritu” vignettes, an entitled wealthy character not in contrast to Hossein yells from his window at a younger lady on the street who makes the error of standing close to his automobile. She is trespassing in his mild, he says: As a result of it comes from his condo, it’s his “non-public property.”

In one other vignette, an inconsolable lady screams on the feckless musician who provides her love however can’t present something she really wishes. If the ethos of manic acquisitiveness has lowered her to wailing, “I desire a automobile,” his rejection of that ethos has remodeled him, she says, “right into a clown.”

The main focus of “Espíritu,” which additionally incorporates a park bench vigilante, a sweaty tangoist and an unidentifiable creature with a head made from purple stocking, is squarely on the clowns, not the maniacs. It begins with the three actors planning a revolution they’re grandiose sufficient to think about in poetic phrases — they will lure the world’s evil in a bottle and eliminate it — however are literally too feckless to hold out. “Espíritu” asks what position they, and by extension the theater, can play in change-making: If artists are engaged in purely private expression, how are they higher than the mad shoppers they mock? Isn’t buying their private expression?

Instagram would have you ever assume so, which is some extent “Wealthy Children” makes in each content material and format. The narration of Hossein and Parivash’s story is rarely as vivid because the lurid images assembled as an example it. The automobiles, the watches and the magnums of Champagne are merely trendy methods of doing what Thomas Gainsborough did (because the play factors out) for class-conscious 18th-century Englishmen in work like “Mr and Mrs Andrews.” They make wealth seen, not solely to others but additionally to the rich themselves.

For all the intelligence on show, I started to really feel that “Wealthy Children” — created by Alipoor and Kirsty Housley, and directed by each — was doing one thing related. Not a lot with its complicated tech, which has an expressive objective. Thumbing your telephone whereas watching your display screen whereas studying the Instagram captions whereas listening to them spoken by actors, not at all times in sync, you’re pressured to expertise the type of oversaturation that (the play argues) helped derange the “aghazadeh” technology of privileged post-revolutionary Iranians.

However in its many overlays of historic and even geological info, “Wealthy Children” traffics in a mania associated to the consumerist one it diagnoses: info mania. In a sequence of throat-clearing introductions that eat up almost quarter-hour of the hourlong presentation, we’re advised that what we’re about to see is a narrative not nearly Hossein and Parivash but additionally about civilizational collapse, thermodynamics, the character of narrative and “the billions of tiny choices that make up historical past and get us right here.”

“All the pieces is about every part,” Alipoor defined in a post-show dialogue.

True, however maybe a tighter edit would have made one thing extra absolutely about one thing.

I had the alternative drawback with “Espíritu,” which solely appears to be about something within the moments when the wonderful actors (Trinidad González, Matteo Citarella and Tomás González) are given actual drama to chew on. The supposed poetry of the extra summary scenes, at the least as rendered within the English subtitles, verges on passé, and the staging, although filmed, is stagy.

But I worth the best way “Espíritu” tries to handle the aim and form of theater in a viral pandemic and likewise an ethical one. Like “Wealthy Children,” it sees the issue of hyper-consumption as existential, in a approach that Gainsborough, from the far aspect of a number of financial revolutions, didn’t. For playwrights who aren’t content material to color fairly footage, Romeo and Juliet simply don’t lower it anymore. That’s too dangerous, however in a world importing greater than 500 million Instagram tales a day, timelier topics of tragic love tales may be Rolex and Perrier-Jouët.

Wealthy Children: A Historical past of Procuring Malls in Tehran
By Jan. 17; publictheater.org.

Espíritu
By Jan. 17; publictheater.org.