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Out of Body and Out of Mind

nytheatre.com review by Fred Backus
August 15, 2005

Obsessed with and overwhelmed by the onslaught of a technological revolution they were born too late to ever truly master, a group of thirty-somethings clutch their laptops like security blankets and desperately try to tread water. As “Charbroiled” he is the undisputed leader of his clan and one of the most influential figures in his universe, but in real life Scott (Zachary Buchanan) is not so much a failure as a nonentity, rooted to his computer for eight to nine hours a day. Chad (Matthew Kinney) is a self-proclaimed Internet celebrity who takes in and spits out factoids and infogarbage on his podcast like a running sieve, and Lisa (Julie Fitzpatrick) finds in the Internet the safety to cultivate relationships that are too frightening or difficult in the physical world. Things start to unravel when Scott summons ironic apparitions of obscure pop culture icons—musician Jeff Buckley (Matt Yeager) and Eponine (Julia Osborne) from Les Miserables—to convince him to commit suicide.The characters in Matt Yeager's Out of Body and Out of Mind are on the verge of a mental and emotional collapse, but what makes this play so surprisingly effective is that these are not crazy elements on the fringes of society, but only slightly exaggerated caricatures of what we as a society are chillingly degenerating into. The obsessions may be absurd just past the point of reality, but these characters come off as likeable, rational, and recognizable. Making the piece work is an excellent ensemble of actors—which includes the playwright himself—under the clear and effective direction of David Apichell.There are, however, uneven elements in both the script and the production. That Yeager and Apichell have chosen to focus on performance rather than design shouldn’t be a problem, but mixing real furniture with metal folding chairs that mark furniture seems unnecessarily sloppy and easily fixable. The Buckley avatar that appears is fun and intriguing, but the Eponine manifestation seems unnecessary, and their joint function in the piece is never really resolved in a satisfactory way. There is a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to tie them in at the end with a confusing and bizarre parallel plotline involving a twelve-year-old being inhabited by the spirit of her mother. I imagine it’s intended to mirror the projection out of the body into an online persona, but it still seems out of left field, and while Lindsey Broad delivers a great performance as Abby, how she really ties in with the other characters and their problems mystifies me.Still, for all its lumps, Out of Body and Out of Mind has enough moments of real brilliance to make it worth the time and money. The script may need some trimming and reworking, but Yeager has true insight into some of the implications of our gradual exchange of the physical world with an electronic one.