Theatrical Malware: A Killing at La Cucina Crashes In Its Own Simulation

Vertigo Theater is staging A Killing at La Cucina from the 15th of March to 13th of April. The play, a Canadian original, is a genre-mashing mix up of mindware mystery, synth-crime and neuro-noir. The ambition behind the script is innovative, touching on murder mystery motifs that incorporate modern anxieties around AI, technological determinism and post-humanism. The play is centralized around Lucia Dante, an Italian investigator, with an inclination for tattoos, coffee and a Rubik cube. The play examines the implications of a world inundated by hyper-technologized desires, one where human identity and narrative structure is eroded through the displacement of presence by performance. It unabashedly eschews from drawing on some of the foundational tenets of the classic murder mystery genre, substituting deductive clarity for aesthetic and ontological dissonance. At a philosophical level, these themes are salient, tapping into our collective concerns of a world increasingly besieged by algorithmic structures. Where ideology was once seen as the battleground for the reclamation of human agency, technology is now seen as an autonomous force that bypasses ideology altogether, instilling control not through structures of belief but through imperceptible digital systems. Writers like Peter Zapffe (Norwegian Writer) and John Zerzan (American Philosopher/Polemic) see the world as becoming silently ensnared by technological capture. The wholeness of human life, for these writers, gives way to the fragmentation of disembodied existence, where the immediacy of pure human experience is substituted for complex systems of abstraction, dependence and control. Human representation is now only instantiated through posts, emails and uploads. True to George Berkeley's (Irish philosopher) statement, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”, a modern example of this would be - if a person lives a life but does not post about it, do they really exist? In the modern world metaphysical presence gives way to digital presence. I scroll therefore I am. The themes in this play are conceptually interesting and could certainly have become the threshing ground for the development of an interesting cross-genre product. Unfortunately, ambition and execution are two different things.

The play fully lives up to the existential implications of the modern anxieties it tries to represent, it is a body without substance, an empty act of existence. It is like, an abandoned gaming server, a theater of ghosts and hollow traces. If it was a postmodern piece that deliberately sought to alienate its audiences through the ironic act of staging what is essentially an empty production, then one could afford it some creative latitude. This, however, I suspect, was not the intention with which it was staged. We are either witnessing a very creative and deliberate demonstration of meta-irony and theatrical alienation or a play that had no centripetal vision. Nothing in the promotional literature around this play suggests that it was the former. Samuel Beckett (Irish playwright) famously suggested if audiences weren’t bored or disoriented by his plays, then he had somehow failed as a playwright. A generous interpretation of this production would try to read a Beckettian spirit in it. If so, like with Beckett's plays, one would expect to walk out of the theater still thinking about the effects of the play, lingering effects that provoke inner inquiry. This is though not the case, one does not walk out of this theater with any sense of inquiry. In fact, one walks out seeing this production as having unwittingly satirized itself, staging a product where meaning is simulated but never generated. The play embodies the ailing symptoms of the cultural conditions it seeks to examine.

In psycho-dynamic theory, this can be thought of as a sort of repetition-compulsion, the play re-enacts the cultural trauma it seeks to interrogate, without ever transforming it or giving us any insight around it. The performative motifs of the central character, Lucia Dante, embody none of the cognitive powers of the detective archetype that has become a staple part of our social imagination. Where Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes will use logical deduction and deep psychological insight to arrive at their conclusions, Lucia Dante uses only two reductive principles. Do the pupils of the interrogatee dilate when being interrogated (if they do, they are 'obviously' lying) and do they look towards the door when being asked uncomfortable questions (if they do, they are 'obviously' guilty). The complex ratiocination required to solve a crime is reduced to pop culture heuristics, weaponized like an Avenger's superpower. This is a parody of deduction, a lazy trope that strips the detective archetype of its fierce and penetrating intelligence. It is quite possibly one of the worst characters I have seen on stage in a long time, ill-conceived and designed to serve creative dispensations that are poorly constructed nor evidently subjected to any form of hypothesis testing. This is a classic case of vision hijacking process, and this production has done it at its own peril. No actor can play Lucia Dante, because Lucia Dante is a breathing cadaver, animated not by palpable intention, but by the empty gestures of affective signalling. She is the dark cultural emblem, par excellence, of a post-human dramaturgy - stripped of inner content, de-subjectivized to serve as a prop to conceptual excess. What results is an inability to theatrically inhabit the character. Like O.J. Simpsons glove, no actor could fit into it. As they said in that courtroom, if the glove does not fit, you must acquit. In this production, acquit the performer, not the creative vision behind the production. The other characters, played by one actor, had their moments, but it was a Sisyphean task, you could have 20 other characters on stage, none of them would be able to salvage the structural incoherence of this play.

The performers exhibited talent, a lot of it, but they cannot be expected to breathe in a vacuum. This is because this is a narrative built on atmosphere rather than an arc, and contrived abstractions instead of real action. The production has given into the temptation to stack themes like Lego - AI, murder, bereavement, surveillance, crime, betrayal, etc, without ever meaningfully connecting them to the suffering bodies on stage or building a cohesive narrative. This is why this production is equivalent to a body without organs, dramatic concepts float like rootless signifiers, isolated and inert, ultimately leaving its audience waiting for a resolution that has no impact. Sometimes this incoherence can work, absurdist writers like Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinto use incoherence to underscore that life is fragmentary, unresolved and eternally foreclosed from rational resolution - meaninglessness was a deliberate aesthetic for this movement, one that revealed the inner inconsistency of human language and thought. This was a deliberate movement that questioned the civilizational hubris of modernity. There is no such intelligence to be found in this production.

There is certainly an opportunity, at the cultural cusp that we are situated at, to see the algorithmic shaping of human perception as the final triumph of abstraction over experience, and in the spirit of the absurdists to explore themes around the psychological fractures and dissociative fugues resulting from algorithmic determinism, but the play by resorting to preposterous contrivances and symbolic cosplay, such as the character bearing tattooed scales (symbol of justice) on her hands (without connecting it to a significant backstory), reinforces the very worst of abstract storytelling and surrenders completely to its seductive banalities.

This play evokes a sort of theatrical nausea, leaving its audience suspended in a sort of aesthetic free fall. This is not Avante-Garde, this is vertigo camouflaged as desultory artistry. When the house lights come up, unlike the visceral alienation that the piercing irony of Beckett evokes, what lingers after witnessing this production isn’t any enduring sense of meaning. It’s motion sickness. This production is singularly unique in that it revels in its own unironical disintegration- so successfully, in fact, that it stages its own death in front of a live audience.

That being said, death is, possibly, too generous a word to describe what we see on stage.

Rating 0/10