People are constantly inundated with information, making it hard to make and sustain connections with others. Caryl Churchill’s show “Love and Information” explores how difficult it can be to form relationships in a digital world.
The University of Arizona’s School of Theatre, Film and Television will present the play from Thursday, Nov. 20, to Sunday, Dec. 7, in the Tornabene Theatre.
Generally, the school puts on four productions each school year. This spring, they will be presenting the jukebox musical “Jerry’s Girls” and the play “Almost, Maine.”
“Love and Information” was directed by associate professor Greg Pierotti.
He is the co-writer of “The Laramie Project,” “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later,” “The People’s Temple” and the HBO teleplay “The Laramie Project.”
He has worked as a playwright, dramaturg and director for companies such as Berkeley Rep’s the Ground Floor, Sundance Theater Lab and Maison Dora Maar. As an actor in New York, he worked extensively with the Tectonic Theatre Project.
“Love and Information,” which blends live performance and film, is a collaboration between the school’s theater and film programs.
Pierotti said like Churchill’s other plays, the show is very experimental.
“She’s been writing since the ‘70s, and she’s written over 50 plays. Every one of them is very, very distinct and different in its form and its style,” Pierotti said.
The show challenges audiences because it is not presented in a conventional format.
“There’s no coherent throughline of story. It’s just these little tiny pieces of information, one after the other. Sometimes, the shorter scenes are even more challenging because you basically have 10 seconds of stage time to create this really strong impression…Some of the more what we would call ‘conventional scenes,’ which are three or four minutes long, they’re graspable because they have more of a conventional theatrical shape about them,” Pierotti said.
The show is filled with humorous, relatable moments. There are also scenes that explore scienctific, mathematical, philosophical and psychological concepts.
Pierotti said the show has challenged the actors because many of them haven’t done this type of postdramatic theatre.
“Its main point isn’t to dramatize stories. It’s to conceptualize ideas and create a performance experience in real time that’s shared between the audience and the performers,” Pierotti said.
The show is also different because of how it centers language instead of emotion.
It is heavy on technical elements such as costumes, projections and sound and lighting effects.
The production is also very actor-driven.
“When we do transitions, it’s not like stagehands come out and move things around. The actors do everything. They change costumes onstage. They move blocks around. They reset their own props,” Pierotti said.
Pierotti said they wanted to make the show accessible for audiences while maintaining the strangeness and uniqueness that make it special.
The play has 56 scenes and 108 characters, who have no names or genders. This allowed for inclusive casting of actors of different backgrounds.
“None of them repeat. They only appear one single time and never come back. The play is called ‘Love and information,’ and that’s what the play does. It’s this onslaught of information, these little, tiny scenes….When you get the play as a director, and you open the play text, there’s not even names. There’s lines of dialogue on a page, and you can distribute them any way that you want,” Pierotti said.
Directors are given a choice on how many scenes they want to do.
“At the end of the play, there’s a section called random scenes. You can either include those scattered anywhere in the play if you like, or you can choose not to perform them. We are doing seven of the random scenes,” Pierotti said.
The play is divided into seven themed sections, with eight scenes in each.
“As a director, it took some time thinking about them and working with them to understand what each section was about. I’ve actually added a little director’s note for each section so that audiences can look for these themes. They’ve very, very subtle. It’s all about different types of ways that information acts in our lives. So, one section is about misinformation. Another section is about one set of information that’s understood completely different by the two people in the scene. There’s another section that’s about needing or seeking information,” Pierotti said.
The show delves into how people find empathy, intimacy and meaning in a world filled with constant noise.
“Really, the theme of the play is how we find love, human connection and humanness in our lives when we’re in this world that’s just barraging us with sets and sets and sets of information endlessly flying at us… Even though it’s this unusual experimental play, it really does show us a little slice of how life actually is for us on the day to day. We are now living with so much information overload,” Pierotti said.
The design team is made up of faculty members and students, including student lighting and sound directors.
The show allowed for interdisciplinary storytelling. Film and television and theater students worked together to create the filmed scenes, which appear at the end of each section.
They filmed everything on campus using green screens and composited images in later as part of the editing process.
“We basically filmed seven scenes, some short and some longer, in two days. That’s a lot of film work to fit into two days. We were working on this very attenuated timeline,” Pierotti said.
A number of students involved in the production are going for the school’s new live and screened performance degree, which combines theater, film and television.
“One of the reasons I was excited about this particular play is that we have a diverse group of students in the live and screened performance program. This allowed me to cast a large cast and also to cast a wide variety of people. There’s no particular genders for the roles. There’s no particular races. There’s no particular ages. We have a cast of 14. It’s these 14 people just weaving in and out of these different scenes. They all play multiple roles,” Pierotti said.
The production also has students from the musical theater and theater studies programs, which are no longer being offered to new students at the school.
There is one dance major in the show.
The production is being dedicated to three UofA students who recently lost their lives, Josiah Santos, Sophia Troetel and Katya Castillo-Mendoza.
Santos was majoring in theater and was very involved in the school’s acapella group and Charles Darwin Experience improv group. He also wrote a number of plays and was featured in the New Directions Festival.
“He was a vital part of the community and certainly was very, very close with many people in the cast. That’s been the toughest part of the rehearsal process for us is coping with that loss while we’ve been making the work that we love and that Josiah loved… It’s been hard some days. It’s been hard to keep going. We canceled a few rehearsals at the time, but then we had to keep moving forward. It was the students themselves who were like, ‘This is what Josiah would have wanted. Josiah would have wanted us to make the work because he loved the work.’ They really have used their work on this production as a way to remember and honor him, which I find incredibly beautiful,” Pierotti said.
In honor of Santos, they are collecting nonperishable foods for the campus pantry. Collectible bins will be available in the lobby of the theater.
They need items such as cereal, peanut butter and jelly, baking mix, canned meat, pasta, rice, canned veggies and beans.
University of Arizona’s School of Theatre, Film and Television’s production of “Love and Information”
WHEN: Thursday, Nov. 20 through Sunday, Dec. 7
WHERE: Tornabene Theatre, 1025 N. Olive Road, Tucson
COST: $35 for adults, $33 for seniors, military and University of Arizona employees, $5 student rush tickets available for high school and college students
INFO: eam.ticketmaster.com/uacfa