INTERVIEW: New play ‘Scarlett Dreams’ is ‘virtually’ engaging
Photo: Scarlett Dreams stars, from left, Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Caroline Lellouche. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by The Press Room with permission.
Scarlett Dreams, a new play starring Brittany Bellizeare, Caroline Lellouche Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Borris Anthony York, is currently being staged at the Greenwich House Theater in New York City. The show, written and directed by S. Asher Gelman, feels pulled from a technological fever dream and inspired by the new virtual relationships that populate the world, especially after years of living in lonely quarantine during the pandemic.
In the play, Milo and Liza are siblings about to launch a virtual fitness program, but before the public gets hold of the technology, Milo’s husband, Kevin, gives it a whirl. What transpires is profound, engaging, scary and telling. Kevin becomes connected emotionally to his virtual trainer in the fitness program, and he begins asking himself what’s real and what’s not, according to press notes.
“For me, this is my return to New York theater after five years,” Gelman said in a recent phone interview. “I feel ready for this. I know we’re also opening during an impossibly busy season, so there’s a lot of competition out there. For me, it’s about creating the best thing we can, and hopefully a bunch of other people will see it and enjoy it. I’m really excited. I’m in love with the fact that I get to do what I love everyday and surround myself with people who are just an absolute joy to work with. I consider myself quite blessed.”
Gelman, perhaps best known for the play Afterglow, which had a healthy run off-Broadway and recently in London, began his venture into the creative arts as a professional dancer. In that position, health and fitness were everyday occurrences, so much so that he often took them for granted. He called working out essentially his “9-to-5” as a working dancer, but then that began to change when he moved toward theater.
“Then suddenly [fitness] was something that I had to do,” he said. “It was something I had to add to my day, and I had never really understood discipline. I never understood this concept of doing things not because you enjoy them, but because you know they’re good for you even if you don’t enjoy them. And I sort of made my health and fitness like other people’s responsibilities, like it was outsourced. I would hire a personal trainer. I would work out with him for an hour and then do nothing for the next 47.”
When the pandemic hit, his trainer asked him whether he wanted to continue in a virtual setting. Gelman, with a laugh, answered quickly: “Sure don’t.” This led to the playwright spending time at home, like everyone else, walking back and forth from one horizontal surface to another. “I just got to a point where I really did not like the way that I felt,” he said. “I didn’t like the way that I looked, and then a friend introduced me to virtual reality fitness.”
This voyage into virtual reality fitness coupled Gelman’s desire to work out with his love of video games. He became enamored of the opportunity to work with a virtual trainer and feel good after exercising.
“I found a thing that I loved, and I found a way to give myself discipline and a way to incorporate physical activity into my day,” Gelman said. “I got really into it, and I started to form what in hindsight I realize became a parasocial relationship, this one-sided relationship with my favorite trainer.”
This trainer started to matter to Gelman, even though it was a one-way relationship. She was a friend to him, but he was a stranger to her. This led Gelman down a rabbit hole of thinking, and inspiration for Scarlett Dreams soon followed.
“I found myself with these really complicated and complex thoughts and feelings,” he said. “I knew that I did not have a real relationship with this woman. I saw her in front of me almost every day, but she didn’t see me, very one-sided. … Then I realized there’s something here. I think there’s a play here to explore this feeling. I know especially now when it comes to our relationship with social media, so many of us have these parasocial relationships. We know sometimes quite intimate details about people who have no idea that we exist, and we feel connected to their lives in a very strange way that we just didn’t have before.”
He added: “That was the impetus for the first version of Scarlett Dreams, which was about three years ago. It was mostly about social media. I still felt like there was something missing from the play. I felt that there was something else, and then I shelved it for a moment. Then I saw two articles, kind of back to back. One was about this influencer who had essentially licensed her likeness to an AI chatbot, and you could talk with her AI chatbot for $7 an hour, which was wild to me. She was making a ton of money off this. That, paired with this other article I read about, there’s this app … basically it creates AI companions for people, and people were forming really intimate relationships with these AI companions that included a sexual nature of these relationships. Then the app changed the algorithm slightly, and essentially these chatbots now started getting really coy when their people wanted to engage in sexy time. And it was devastating to these people. Initially I think a lot of people read that, and they’re like, ‘That’s ridiculous. Why would people get so attached to a computer program?'”
Gelman understood the feelings because, in his opinion, the world is living in an age of unprecedented loneliness. Community-based living has been supplanted by individual living on the internet.
“We don’t have a sense of community,” the playwright said. “We can find our community online. It prevents us from adapting to our community because before you had to find things in common with the people around you. You would have to adapt yourself. Now you don’t because there’s someone on the internet somewhere who feels exactly the same way you do and validates everything that you say, think and believe, and so now these physical communities have turned into online communities. But we are social animals. We need physical community. I see so many people turning to the internet, and social media in particular, to fill that void, and it doesn’t fill it. Ultimately that’s where Scarlett Dreams comes into play. It’s this idea of exploring our relationship with technology, how it affects our relationships with ourselves, with each other and ultimately with reality itself.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Scarlett Dreams, written and directed by S. Asher Gelman, is currently playing at the Greenwich House Theater in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
