The Experience Machine, a musical written and directed by Rylan Dean Hefner, was performed as a staged reading at the Cat in the Cream on February 7th. Hefner, a third-year Theater and Musical Studies major from Minneapolis, has been working on the show for most of her time at Oberlin, and the production was the culmination of her independent Winter Term project. The show follows a couple as they navigate their grief after their daughter’s death, as well as the rise of a new technology called the Experience Machine, which allows a person to live a perfect, but simulated, life.
The production was stripped back, with minimal props and blocking, and four actors onstage, with a fifth person narrating the stage directions. Despite its minimalism, the show created a large and realistic world.
One aspect of the minimalism was the instrumentation: only a piano and a violin. Halfway through, it was revealed that Corrie and Jenna’s daughter Emmy played the violin, and was thus symbolically present in some of the songs — a beautiful way to incorporate the music into the story.
Throughout, the writing felt real even in its smallest moments. The lead couple, Corrie (Rylan Hefner) and Jenna (Valerie Clelland) argued often, but clearly loved each other, and all their interactions were realistic.
Hefner is excellent at writing dialogue where the characters talk around a subject, but it’s still clear to the audience what’s going on, which often happened when Jenna and Corrie discussed their daughter’s death.
While the show mainly focused on Corrie and Jenna, it included some subjects outside of their relationship, such as news segments about the Experience Machine from the reporter Sherry Watson (Theresa Reisell) and their daughter Emmy’s best friend, Peter (Natasha Kometz). This kind of small-scale realism made it easy to extrapolate a world around the characters.
The character arcs were well-written, especially Jenna’s, whose was established from the beginning as someone who lives in the past, making her decisions more understandable. Still, some things felt a bit rushed, though — her decision not to plug herself in at the end simply because Corrie asked her to stay was confusing, since Corrie had been trying to persuade her to do so for most of the second act. Since the audience wasn’t given much insight into Jenna’s thought process, that moment didn’t land as well as it could have.
Overall, this performance was impressive and had tear-jerking moments. The discussion of technology and its role in our lives is important, and this production engages with the topic in a meaningful way. There are some story elements that could be tightened, but especially for its first performance as a work in progress, it held together well. I can’t wait to see where it goes next.
thecounterpoint.org 