Spring 2011 Guide: Log In, Drop Out

Dark secrets lurk under manicured lawns in the nameless, cookie-cutter, all-American town of Jennifer Haley’s Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, being presented by the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training this February. Secrets like those of any other idyllic suburb: alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, loneliness. Life stinks – but there’s a psychedelic diversion that keeps it interesting.

The neighborhood teens are hooked on Neighborhood 3 – a MMORPG or massively multiplayer online role-playing game. This diversion blows their minds. Hunchbacked from hours of play, they avoid parents by escaping into Neighborhood’s virtual world, where they can exist as muscular, seven-foot-tall men-at-arms. Wielding lethal circular saws and golf clubs, they now call the shots and exact gruesome revenge. But as they hack away at zombies, the boundaries of the game shift. In a twist that blends online gaming with Hollywood horror, Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom plunges into uncharted theatrical territory.

Like in Wes Craven’s horror film Nightmare on Elm Street, where harmless dreams become lethal nightmares, the safety of “it’s only a game” collapses for Haley’s teens. Reality folds in on itself as dying animals – mutilated in the video game – turn up on people’s doorsteps and zombies start to resemble the teens’ mothers and fathers. Has the outside world been sucked into the game; or, has the game bled out of the computer and into the world? And on which side of the screen does the audience sit: inside, outside, or both?

Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom mirrors MMORPGs. Walkthroughs, which are crib sheets for defeating MMORPGs, serve as the connective tissue between scenes; avatars, online projections of players, appear throughout the play. Guided by these elements, the audience experiences the shifting boundaries of fantasy and reality with the characters. These permeable boundaries don’t just exist on stage, however; they are inspired by chilling events in the real world.

In 2004, a fourteen-year-old boy was beaten and stabbed to death by a seventeen-year-old with a claw hammer. His assailant claimed he was copying Manhunt, a game featuring a pill-popping serial killer who brutally offs his enemies. Unlike movies that merely show acts of violence, games like Manhunt let the player commit the violence in a replica of the world. For the seventeen-year-old, this virtual mimicry inspired real-world actions. His crime inspired Jennifer Haley.

Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom thrives on the confusion that happens when the virtual world smashes into the real one. A story about troubled American families gets spectacularly twisted when they collide with computer technology. For the residents of Jennifer Haley’s Neighborhood, it’s going to be one hell of a bang.

Joseph Pindelski is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.

Spring-2011-Guide