Bobby Silverman, my nemesis, Where has our youth gone?

I've been out of touch.

I suppose changing my e-mail address every 3 years doesn't help. Despite my best efforts to inform my friends and enemies of the best ways to communicate with me, inevitably, a few people slip through the cracks. So when my dear friend Patrick McCaffrey (the irresistible, the ever-loved) sent me an e-mail saying:

Dear Friends/Colleagues,
I'm sorry if I have been out of touch in the past few months and I hope you are all well. As you know, I am the last person to send (or appreciate) mass emails, but I have decided to make an exception.

I'm involved in a show that I'm very proud of and I hope you are able to make it. The evening is the brainchild of my good friend Robert Saietta from the International WOW theatre company and we have been working on it for over a year.

It is an extraordinary piece of theatre. I hope you can make it.
The first beer is on me.

I almost screamed. Patrick, was alive, still in NY, and doing a show? With my former arch-nemesis Bob Saietta/Silverman?? And why hadn't I already received a gazillion e-mails from Bob?! I bought a ticket on-line immediately and looked forward to the show all week.

It was at the Brick, their annual summer festival, which this year was dubbed The Pretentious Festival. Bob's show was called Yudkowski Returns! (The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Dr. Eliezer Yudkowski). At this point I should maybe talk about why Bob was my long-time nemesis.

I met him a long long time ago, as the high school mate of a then-boyfriend. We ended up doing a gazillion plays together, much to my dismay, and I even survived my worst nightmare come true -- to be living with Bob in a foreign country. Why, you ask, why such a violent reaction against another human being? Well, because Bob embodied the exact opposite of me in every way. Whatever I was, he was diametrically the opposite, in my mind. I like to think of myself as clean, graceful, independent. Bob... well, he was sloppy. He spilled a full cup of coffee in the rehearsal room at EVERY REHEARSAL WITHOUT FAIL. He was inappropriate. He sometimes exposed himself during physical improvisations. Many times he would resort to 3rd grade tactics of grossing out the girls. He talked to himself. He was asthmatic, but he rolled his own cigarettes and tried to smoke them. For about 5 or 6 or 7 years I couldn't stand him. Like, literally.

But a funny thing happens I guess, when you know someone and their work for a long time. With some time and distance between us now, I have a great fondness for Bob -- call it nostalgia, call it delusion -- but I see all the things he has that I lack. He is paranoid, yes, but he is sweet. He has a twisted and delightful sense of humor. There is something about Bob, his seeming help/haplessness (maybe related to his Upper West Side Jewishness) that inspires a gush of compassion and love.

So, Bob's new play had much in common with many of his other plays; protagonists trapped or somehow in self-imposed seclusion, apart from the rest of the world. In this case, we begin in a kind of horrifying self-help or motivational instruction event -- a charming assistant introduces the entrance of (cue the cheesy music...) Doctor Yudkowski, played by Patrick, who exudes all the charisma and appeal that Tom Cruise should have had in Magnolia. The Doctor is here to help us, to enlighten us. He asks us what troubles us -- and we name our fears: career, money, fear of insects. He invokes our deeper fears: War. Disease. Death. What if we ended the war in Iraq? Wouldn't there be another war to take its place? What if we could end the AIDS epidemic? Wouldn't there be another more powerful and devastating disease to take over our world? We need a solution to end all our fears, one answer to all of our problems, and that answer is: THE SINGULARITY. The idea that all of our concerns will soon be answered by artificial intelligence that is so much more superior and intelligent than its creator. (I learned later that his is actually a real "school" of thought, a kind of anti-religion for technology worshippers. I also learn that Yudowski -- with a "y" -- is also a real person.) So here is Dr. Yudowski, holed up in his room in Brooklyn, which he shares with his lovely assistant - girlfriend, actively seeking out the answer to all of our life's problems.

Meanwhile, all this fascinating techno-philosophy is interspersed with self-conscious scenes from a relationship. The disintegrating romance between Dr. Y and his assistant/girlfriend are portrayed in snaps of their mundane conversations about ordering Chinese food and paying the rent -- and in the end, escalating to a fight after which they watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dr. Y enacts and re-enacts his break-up over and over again. If you expect love to be a wild passionate fiery affair, will you be able to recognize it when it appears as calm and comfortable? Dr. Y voices the root of his troubled mind at the beginning of the play: he believes in the world's ability, even humanity's ability to change. But he's not so sure about his own ability to change. So he stays in his room and ponders singularity and replays the scene of his girlfriend walking out on him, over and over. And we begin to wonder... this singularity which is supposed to save all of humanity -- is it perhaps the terrifying truth that we are in fact already embedded in a singularity as individuals? We trap ourselves in our little boxes, and any attempt to share that space with anyone else is a mere charade?

The show had some rhythmic clunkiness, though clocking in at an hour, and with free warm beer. It's supposed to have another run at the end of July -- I'll def be there to glean more wisdom from Dr. Y.