On & Off Broadway

‘Privacy’

Review by Elyse Trevers

Posted

After 9/11 it became commonplace to go through security screenings before boarding planes. Now we even have to open our knapsacks and pocketbooks before going to a Paul McCartney concert or watching the Mets play. Complete strangers look through our things and sometimes pat us down. There are cameras on every corner “protecting” us as they monitor our lives. How much of our privacy are we willing to give up for our security? How much of our personal lives are we willingly and sometimes unwittingly sharing when we interact with technology?

These and other questions are tackled in the provocative new play Privacy at The Public Theater. Starring Daniel Radcliffe as The Writer, Privacy engages the tech-savvy audience members immediately with placards in the seats in front of them. With instructions like that of an airplane, they are told to fully charge their phones and leave them on. If like me, you feel lost without your smart phone, this is somehow comforting. Privacy is immersive, interactive theater but only if you have a smart phone and if you choose to be involved.

The Writer has just ended a relationship and now feels disconnected from society. He needs help to interact and gets counseling from professionals. The Playbill offers a bibliography of experts and notables who were interviewed for the script of this play and whose words appear as dialogue in the show. A small group of talented performers, including Rachel Dratch, Reg Rogers, Michael Countryman, Raffi Barsoumian and De’Adre Aziza play multiple roles.


The mostly young audience really connects with the character and the subject matter as he works his way through the mires of the technology, which connects and invades our lives. At intermission, I noted that almost everyone checked his/her phone.

Privacy illustrates how technology can keep us from having true interactions with people. The Writer, having moved to N.Y., doesn’t have to leave his new apartment; he merely contacts Amazon. Facebook, Google, Uber and Amazon get a lot of free advertising.

People use Facebook to connect yet that same app can invade our privacy and reveal too much. Then there are the unknown insidious things, when our phones trace our whereabouts through the GPS and location services. If you are more important, the government can watch you. The show includes a sympathetic brief video of Edward Snowden. Of course, there are other issues for ordinary people like hacking and spam. It can be a fine line as almost every technological interaction we make seems to leave a trace. “We are all just leaking,” pronounces one character.

Intricately woven into the play is dialogue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “O, brave new world that has such people in’t!”

The show is a cautionary tale. Despite everything scary, it was totally engrossing. It uses technology to involve the audience and we are asked to share from our phones if we choose to do so. Privacy might make one hesitate before using devices, yet as we left the theater, we all turned our phones on. What about the lessons we just learned?