If you want to know how theater can respond to our current cultural moment of Brat summers and endless doom-scrolling, you need not go any further than Tedford Stage in Scales Fine Arts Center, where Caryl Churchill’s play “Love and Information” is being performed under the direction of professor Stephen Wrentmore. Although it was written in 2012, the play has only grown in relevance. It comprises 57 scenes that are squeezed into just an hour and a half, crafting a feeling that is eerily reminiscent of a binge session on TikTok or Instagram reels.
“It’s really exciting […],” Wrentmore said. “I think it’s a play that comes out of left field and says, ‘Hey, have you thought about this in a theater before?’ It challenges the whole idea of what a theater space can be.”
Because of how radical this play’s structure is, the entire Wake Forest crew was left with the monumental task of bringing it to life. With over a hundred unnamed characters and absolutely no stage directions, almost every aspect of the play had to be reimagined from scratch. Each of the twenty actors and actresses is responsible for multiple, wide-ranging parts, each of which requires a unique costume from designer Karsen Green. There are no lead roles in this play, which made it all the more impressive that many of the characters made themselves memorable with only a minute or so of stage time. Junior choreographer Caleb Walsh and senior stage manager Vir Gupta expertly managed the constant flow of characters and props across and around the stage.
More than anything, what I think this play truly understands about our lives in this age of the internet is just how intimate and intertwined the comical and the tragic is — the quotidian and the catastrophic. Especially when you think about each scene as a scroll on your phone, it is undeniable that the play goes a long way in reflecting how images of war and violence can be followed by celebrity drama or preceded by lighthearted memes. The play chooses not to spend much time on either the light or heavy themes, but constantly pings back and forth between the two. Wrentmore said his approach to the heavier topics in the play was to give them space without indulging in those moments.
“You let them exist as a truth, and then you go to a different truth […],” Wrentmore said. “It would be disingenuous not to recognize some of these areas, but the play isn’t interested in solutions, it’s interested in how these ideas are present for us.”
Another triumph of the play is its versatility. There are scenes as intimate as a couple in bed and as abstract as individuals drifting through the cosmos. There is a scene about oranges and irrational numbers and a scene about dementia. The fact that the comedy and the tragedy are so tightly packed together allows the more emotional moments of the play to hit with an unexpected force. There are scenes that ask big questions and some that simply ask, “Where are my keys?”
“In a liberal arts University it allows us a platform for cross-collegiate conversations,” Wrentmore said. “It involves our STEM students, medical students, philosophy and theology.”
Wrentmore continued: “It’s reminiscent for me of flipping between videos on Instagram. Either they grab your attention or they don’t. Either you know what they mean or you don’t. But you become addicted to the flip… You land in the meat of the scene straightaway, there’s no warmup, no exit […]. The scene is about the human connection or failure of human connection, rather than the acts or the actions.”
This is a great play to go see, especially if you’re not sure that theater is your thing. It’s an entirely different look at drama — it’s fast-paced, it’s fun, it’s entertaining while still having moments of real lucidity. “Love and Information” will be playing at 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sundays through Nov. 10.
