date feels, then, like an anti-drama trying to become a drama. Another name for the play might be Two Characters in Search of a Desire.

On the trip uptown from Chicago’s Hyde Park to Humboldt Park’s Facility Theater to see Jake Flume’s date, directed by Ava Calabrese Grob, I killed time with one of my worst phone habits: browsing r/MyBoyfriendIsAI for mildly disturbing and entertaining stories of people’s relationships with their AI companions. The ugly images people generate of themselves and their LLM lovers; the way they swap tips on skirting various platforms’ guardrails so that they can get an AI to engage in sexual roleplay; their contentment with an utterly self-centered relationship where the AI spits their desires back out at them. It is like an awful, schlocky trainwreck, and I am at once horrified, bored, and captivated. I am certainly not alone—in the past year, many have written about their fascination with realms of online sex, from AI boyfriends to gooners to the proliferation of online porn more generally. date takes this curiosity from its native digital realm into the live space of the theater, positing, essentially: what would happen if characters who had been formed in these online realms of online sex walked into a first date IRL, and we could watch?  

date’s buzzy premise—both as advertised and as frequently mentioned by friends of mine who had already seen the show—is that it is a two hander between a guy named Charlie (Danny Tramantona) and a girl named Anna (Ilirida Memedovski) where, on their first date at his apartment, “he asks her to get in a cage, and she does.” The play describes itself as “an examination of degradation, pornography and what we show to one another,” and while this is true, it is much more, I found, about the internet and its mediation of subjectivity, sex, and desire than about degradation or pornography itself. From the moment I walked into the theater, it felt like a kind of virtual world. No screens in sight, sure, but the set was a perfect submission to r/malelivingspace. A bare and oddly color-schemed apartment with a washer-dryer, a hand-painted blue dining table with green leather chairs, a nondescript bed, a plastic-shelled microwave on a rickety stool-like table, and—most compellingly—scenic designer Daphne Agosin’s addition of a garish Chucky-the-doll painting right above the bed and a raw bulk box of Muscle Milk under the table. 

From the very first snippets of conversation between Charlie and Anna, it is clear that these are not “real” people, per se. They feel more like an exquisite corpse of internet tropes reanimated into glitchy personae. Under Calabrese Grob’s direction, the two characters speak in clipped sound bites and unnatural rhythms and move through the space with a stylized weirdness at times reminiscent of those AI actor videos like it is their first day on earth. Charlie cannot find a normal way to sit in a chair, putting his feet up at odd and uncomfortable angles to feign nonchalance. Both Charlie and Anna are choreographed to feel just a little bit out of sync, like they are two overlaid videos just a second off from one another, not quite in the same present. This stilted stylization is reflected in the script as well, which reads as though hastily typed into a chat window with inconsistent capitalization and lack of formal grammar.

There is little internal coherency to either character’s beliefs or dispositions. At times, Charlie could have walked out of Daniel Kolitz’s Harper’s much-circulated piece on gooner culture. Within the first 15 minutes of conversation, he tells Anna about “train[ing] your pubococcygeus muscle to cum without ejaculating” and how he wants to “to go so deep inside myself that i ruin my brain and spiritually kill myself.” (Compare to Kolitz’s description of a person named Fuji he meets on a gooner Discord who “spent months training his pubococcygeus muscle in order to climax without ejaculating” and argues that “if there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually.”) And at other times, Charlie ricochets to the reactionary opposite of the gooner, a manosphere alpha-puritan who preaches “no girls, no alcohol, no smoking, no party, no entertainment, no fast food or scrolling, no netflix, no negative people. Just training and networking and ice bath and meditate and exchange knowledge and new skills. and sauna.” Later, Charlie disavows his earlier gooner ambitions entirely, claiming he does not actually want to spiritually kill himself and just “heard about that on a podcast.” It is like he is trying out the menu of personae that the internet has put before him only to find that none of them really seem to fit. What he does want remains a question. Playing Charlie, Tramantona energetically swings between manic animation and a distracted ennui when any given item on the menu fails to deliver him from his inner vacancy. 

Anna, meanwhile, seems to be whatever the 2020s equivalent of a manic pixie dreamgirl is—in Charlie’s words at least, “my alix earle.” In case you, like me, are not on TikTok enough to know who that is off the bat, my friend and fellow play-goer Natasha helpfully painted this picture for me after the show: “blonde influencer dating football player on podcast on dancing with the stars basic bitch.” While I was fortunate enough to have a personal TikTok translator, date assumes its theater-going public is fluent in internet speak. In fact, it felt at times that the show assumed that its audience would prefer to be on TikTok instead of at the theater, which is perhaps why the play tries to achieve the same schizophrenic quality. date seems to find the liveness and collectivity of the theatrical medium insufficiently able to engage its audience, who it presumes to be internet-brain-addled past the point of attentiveness to something immediate and unfolding. While this rejection feels borne of despair rather than outright disdain for theatricality, the effect, nevertheless, is a live performance that continuously strives to disassociate itself from its own medium. 

In migrating online personae into the theater, date somehow manages to make them seem even less tangible. Anna’s twist on the Alix Earle girly is case and point. Earle is particularly well known for striking the perfect balance between relatable, aspirational, and being able to sell out basically any product she pushes as an influencer. Anna adopts this same disposition:

But unlike Alix Earle, with her firmly heterosexual public image, Anna is happy to cash in on whatever persona du jour or form of social clout comes her way. She later reveals her one and only ex is a girl named Emily, and suggests that “everyone is a little bit bi,” as if moving into the heteropessimist internet sphere where to be cool, or at least not cringe, you have to be willing to performatively disaffiliate from (exclusive) heterosexuality. Most tellingly, though, she responds to Charlie’s abrupt question “has anyone told you that you look trans” with a simple “thank you,” followed by a bragging declaration that “one time i got posted on a catfishing website and four and a half thousand people argued about if i was real.” For Anna, “trans” signifies a cusp of realness whose ambiguity is only profitable to her persona. It draws people to her and makes her an object of discourse, desire, and fetish, but she also always has recourse to the physiological evidence of the “realness” of her body unmarked by transition. Anna treats “you look trans” as a compliment because it means she is managed to achieve a kind of e-girl sexiness that perfectly toes the line of reality and fantasy. Importantly for her—unlike, say, for a trans woman—to be so hot your realness is called into question is uncomplicatedly positive. She is both straight and cool, relatable and aspirational, real and fantastical, everything anyone could want and nothing substantial at all.

Anna’s own desires, rather than just her desire to fulfill the desires of others, are as absent as Charlie’s. Ilirida Memedovski’s restrained performance as Anna was reminiscent of an internet influencer’s fakey friendliness and seductiveness combined with an exhausted, dissociated quality that lurked under the surface. It is hard not to wonder why Anna is continually along for the ride with Charlie, but the spiritual resignation underlying Memedovski’s over-choreographed hot girl persona offers a clear, if depressing, answer: she is so far away from knowing what might be pleasurable or comfortable for her that it is hard to muster even the desire to leave the apartment or, later, the cage. 

Both Anna and Charlie are, then, two not-real-people trying to find something to want throughout the course of the play, trying to become more real by finding an immanent desire. This is a peculiar dilemma to stage precisely because it is antithetical to most acting methods and processes which begin with identifying a character’s desires: what does your character want, and how are they going to get it? How does it affect their relation to other characters and the dramatic circumstances? date feels, then, like an anti-drama trying to become a drama. Another name for the play might be Two Characters in Search of a Desire. But unlike Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which stages the quandary and tension that arise from the dynamic interplay between liveness and scriptedness in the theatre, date merely circles an already-doomed theatrical world. There is not an open question about what live performance can do for subjectivity flattened by internet culture—it is all humans in AI roles who flop in the face of performance. When I spoke briefly to Flume after the show about his reflections on the rehearsal process, I was struck by the genuine surprise he expressed at how date‘s actors “really committed” to animating the characters. Is a committed, deep-diving actor not everything a playwright hopes for? But then, perhaps this surprise at actors’ vivacity makes sense for a playwright who already decided his actors’ (and characters’) task was impossible, that there is no way to make live or living the flattened, broken detritus digital media has made of our lives.

That does not mean that they do not try, though. Charlie and Anna cycle through the theatrical strategies they have at their disposal to find something to desire, trying to create a circumstance which makes something happen—or at the very least create a satisfying role for them to play for one another. The first of these strategies is following tried-and-true scripts of heterosexuality in the most literal sense. Charlie and Anna start the play by meandering through the kind of classic, vapid first-date dialogue one might expect: do you have roommates? What do you do for work? “Do you have any goals?” Quickly this devolves into an absurd slush of Q-and-A that, in the production, Charlie tries to literally get off on, as if hoping the rapid fulfillment of the first-date script and the cumulative “Yes’s” of two people trying to please one another will be enough to bring him to completion:

And it almost works, too, until Charlie accidentally asks a question Anna already answered, leading to the first “No.” The second Anna tries to assert a consistent fact about herself, in other words, rather than simply “Yes, and”-ing, the pleasure dissipates. I found myself thinking, during this opening sequence of hackneyed dialogue, of the production’s opening image: Charlie and Anna standing and waiting as a plate of spaghetti and meatballs rotates slowly in the microwave. They are warming up pre-made food and hoping it will serve as the dinner over which connection will happen, almost literally reheating nachos, failing to make a prefabricated, generic script of desire work for them. On the one hand: haha! On the other hand: I felt a twinge of dread that the next hour would be primarily a demonstration of why reheated nachos in fact taste bad.

When dialogue has clearly failed and the characters are sitting in awkward silence, Charlie tries what seems to be his promised strategy to conjure a desire or a circumstance between them: the anticipated cage, big enough for a large dog (or a person), placed upon the table in direct focus center stage. Yet despite the cage’s awaited premise and its physical imposingness, it is striking how anticlimactic both the cage itself and Anna’s agreement to get into it ultimately is. Charlie suggests the cage, Anna says yes with nonchalance, he sets it up, she gets inside. Even this object which seems to offer a titillating deviation from first-date expectations and infuse the situation with clear roles of desire (dominant, submissive) or scripts of play (pet play, kidnapper/victim play?) fails to generate a dramatic circumstance. Charlie tries to get off on Anna in the cage at first. He drags his chair into the aisle of the theater and stares at her inside the cage like he is looking at a screen and slurps down his enormous plate of spaghetti in record time as if he is created the perfect pornographic TV dinner for himself and is reveling in awakened sexual hunger. But soon the duo devolves back into awkward conversation, and it seems like we are back to square one. 

Part of the cage’s failure to inspire desire seems to be that Anna was too ready to get inside it. Charlie later complains that he cannot get hard because Anna wants to be degraded, and this tampers the eroticism of the situation for him. Charlie both needs someone who does not have her own desires, who will continually “yes” him, and also someone who has enough of her own desires to chafe against him and offer him an object of desire in the form of an obstacle to conquer. Essentially, he needs someone to dangle something he cannot have in front of him so he can convince himself he wants it. Anna, on the other hand, is perpetually “down for whatever.” She wants Charlie’s desires to determine hers, but her lack of conviction is precisely what undermines his desire. To Charlie, everything about her “was made in a lab for me to like it and you to not,” and thus she cannot actually give him power by getting into the cage. She never had anything to concede in the first place.

In what seems like the play’s last-ditch effort to make something happen between its characters, Charlie and Anna both find reasons to take off their clothes. Anna disrobes down to her underwear and Charlie strips entirely naked. There is a desperation to this move, both on the parts of the characters and the play itself, like it is scraping the bottom of the barrel of theatrical possibility. But even when the clothes are off and Anna is out of the cage, there just is not enough of anything between them, friction or attraction, to get anyone off. The two of them in relation is like a mise-en-abyme reflecting one another’s vacancy; neither of them can do anything except abdicate their own responsibility towards desire and hope the other fills it in.

But lo, right when all hope is lost, the characters find something that works. They realize that if they cannot give each other desires, if the scripts and props of sexuality they have employed have failed, they have recourse to one more source: an audience. This is both the play’s audience and the ever-nebulous “chat” that Charlie calls out to – the spectators of “the porn” he declares he wants to “make … of [his] life”. The thought of this nebulous, hungry crowd finally begins to turn Charlie on, and make “something [happen] to us and me,” as he declares. The only desire either Charlie or Anna can locate is one that is being conjured for them, displaced outwards: 

Charlie and Anna finally (sort of) touch each other, finally have the sex they have been trying to have since the play’s beginning. It is definitely not good sex—more like dry-humping through the cage, still mediated even if it is the closest to skin-to-skin they get—but at this point I was, like the characters, simply relieved that it was happening. I was equally depressed and compelled by the gap between how little I actually cared about Anna and Charlie having sex and how much they needed me to care in order for it to happen at all. 

This gap—which is realized through live theater’s affordance of placing internet personae in the same physical space as the usually abstracted audience they draw on to conjure desires—felt like date’s real protagonist, its defining and fascinating element. Yet it is also what made the play difficult to watch. It does not follow any of the rules one expects from dramatic structure. There is no sense of stakes or real character; everything that happens is forced through an obvious device. It left me feeling the frustrating emptiness of a too-long scrolling session where I both want to keep watching the unfolding catastrophe of strangers’ relationships and to brick my phone because I feel like my mind and heart are being poisoned by its vacuousness. 

I recognize and even admire that date’s characters’ failure of action is the play’s subject itself rather than a failure of the play. As someone who researches digital media, I think date’s identification of the failure to want and to act is a truthful observation about so much internet-mediated relation. But I cannot help feeling wary when I walk out of the theater wanting to log off from the place where I just spent my evening. Compared to the reels of short-form videos and text-and-image scrolls where so many of us now spend much of our time, the theater is cumbersome and effortful and expensive and undeniably relational; it is a place where we can do things together and remember what it means to partake in any action at all even (especially!) as it becomes increasingly harder to do so. Do we want to spend our brief and fleeting time together in such a space meditating on how impossible it is to want or do anything, still, all these years later, waiting for Godot to cum? 

Hanu Shahdadpuri is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in English and Theater & Performance Studies. They work on early modern drama, video games, and the relationship between 16th/17th century anti-theatricality and 20th/21st century anti-trans rhetorics. They are also a dramaturg of new and classical work.

Article cover photo by Ava Calabrese Grob.

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