Review: THE LAST SHOW ON EARTH at ERA

It’s a wildly exciting, brilliantly off-beat and imaginative evening of exploration into an echoingly deep topic that has teased philosophers and divines for millennia.  In our days that topic teases the brightest brains in physics and astrophysics.   It’s eschatology—the study of the End of the World!

Lucy Cashion’s ERA company has opened The Last Show on Earth at the Kranzberg.  This profound and hilarious piece was written by Joe Taylor, Cashion’s long-time collaborator in ERA projects.  Cashion is a young professor at St. Louis University, and her ERA company has been presenting truly experimental theater for a dozen years or so.

We enter the theater, we see four desks with venetian blinds between them and the audience.  Actors at the desks occasionally peek through the blinds at us.  (Well, we will be watching them all night.)

Now deep science is not unheard of on theatrical stages.  Some years ago Michael Frayn (of Noises Off fame) wrote Copenhagen, a play about nuclear physics and those human geniuses immersed in it.  Well, playwright Joe Taylor, in an illustrated curtain speech, describes what we’re about to examine:  the history and final end of all things.  In the gazillions of years between the Big Bang and the Heat Death of the Universe (where all is luke-warmish and no thermodynamic activity is possible) human existence is an insignificant speck.  We WILL go extinct! 

But here we are, engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Artificial Intelligence.  AI is designed to mimic in silicon those electron tricks which dance around the neurons in our biological brains.  Is it possible that “human” thought in AI could long survive the extinction of us humans?

The cast is full of ERA veterans.  Ashwini Arora, Will Bonfiglio, Maggie Conroy, Miranda Felix, Marty Rubright, Rachel Tibbits, as well as playwright Taylor himself.  An on-stage duo, Sam Golden (keyboard, guitar) and Dustin Sholtes (percussion, melodica) keeps things lively—and sometimes chaotic.  Joe Taylor occasionally plays the keyboard.  He also composed the music.

As in all ERA productions there is a strong element of movement—even dance.  Even the frequent movement of furniture is carefully choreographed—sometimes slow and mysterious, sometimes rushed and frantic.  There is a chorus line. 

Bright dabs of mockery and satire splash around.  There is a law firm where not only the partners, but seemingly every employee is named “Murphy”.  There is a fiercely sharp satire on gun advocacy in a skit where a roaming tiger has eaten a number of middle school kids.  To anyone urging better tiger-control the die-hards cling to ‘tiger rights” and claim “the answer to a bad tiger is a good tiger!”

In one disturbing scene we see one woman consoling another who has experienced a family tragedy.  Their deeply touching exchange is gradually drowned out by a rising chorus of the robo-voices of self-checkout devices bluntly demanding “put the item in your bag”. 

There is much use of projections.  Video cameras are brought in from time to time so we see actors simultaneously live and in projection—sometimes in an endless line of reflected images. 

A number of other performers appear in the marvelously produced video segments, which are also the work of Joe Taylor.  These take us to the mythical town of Parson Mills, of which Will Bonfiglio is the buoyant, smiling mayor.   We see the downtown with its cute baby shops, we see the wonderful new water park.  These are done superbly—as if on a Hollywood sound set.  We see very tempting commercials for Waiting for Godot: the Musical.  One wonders if Mr. Taylor might have used AI to help him with these “deep fakes”.  (Talk about sleeping with the enemy!)

There is a great heap of talk, overlapping talk, a monologue that pours out so fast it would put the Modern Major General to shame.

There is insanity, there is inanity, but throughout there is some deep thought underneath.

As the universe ends the stage is stripped, all is swept away, rugs are taken up, pictures ripped down.  Maggie Conroy delivers a strange, ethereal goodbye monologue. 

And then we find ourselves among artificial humans at a – what?  A cocktail party?  They flounderingly attempt to behave as humans.  They try to play charades—but they all already know the answer.   A stand-up comic explains the mechanism of a joke.  It’s as unfunny as Freud’s chapters on humor, but her robot audience dutifully laughs.

Every member of the cast shows utter commitment to the play and remarkable discipline.  That’s another recurring trait in Lucy Cashion’s work.

If you enjoy stepping beyond mere entertainment or sentiment in a play, you should not miss ERA’s production of The Last Show in the World.  It plays at the Kranzberg through September 26.