Ten Arguments @ Leos Ensemble (Arts Mission Oak Cliff)
—Jill Sweeney
Silicon Valley tech guru and author Jaron Lanier in his 2018 book entitled Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now writes that the best (or worst?) arguments for decamping from all social media are that it:
Takes away your free will.
Contributes to the insanity of our world.
Turns you into a jerk.
Manipulates truth.
Is destroying the meaning in every word you say.
Annihilates your ability to be empathetic.
Makes you miserable.
Takes away your economic dignity.
Is the reason politics are so awful and impossible.
Hates you.
These tenets—ironically formatted to be as clickbait-y as possible—form the spine of Dallas-based playwright A. Emmanuel Leadon’s Ten Arguments, produced and staged for its world premiere at Arts Mission Oak Cliff by new-ish local company Leos Ensemble. Founder Nick Leos is also credited with “conceiving” the play, and co-directs with ensemble member Kelli J. Howard as part of Arts Mission’s artist-in-residence program. The play uses each argument as inspiration for a series of vignettes spanning the last decade or so, exploring the negative impact of social media on our lives. It’s a topic ripe for further consideration, especially given that for many of us, our social media intake grew exponentially during the pandemic. It’s a shame, then, that despite an enthusiastic if uneven cast, Leadon’s play takes too broad and unfocused an approach to the topic to add much that’s new to the dialogue. Satire requires a scalpel—this play is too scattershot to hit any particular target.
Starting from 2013 onward, the play presents short scenes, sketches really, in the style of MADtv or an Upright Citizens’ Brigade show, that touch on one of Lanier’s arguments. Some scenes are more grounded, while others are more surreal; many involve a celebrity cameo. Technology is used to some good effect—several segments involved pre-taped sequences (though some of these dragged a bit), and projections of short segments involving pertinent or prominent moments in social media provoked chuckles or groans of recognition from the audience. The actors also performed some sequences on camera live, and made the most of the opportunities technology and the Arts Mission Oak Cliff space offered.
Cast members were as follows: Matt Crawford, Jon Garrard, Princess James, Sarah Mendez, Lauren Oxford, Vinnie Serionel, and Savyna Viraphonh. Crawford and Garrard were the standouts of the evening. Garrard’s loose-limbed physicality lent itself well to caricatures of Joaquin Phoenix and a grotesque Greg Abbott, and Crawford got to let loose as a tyrannical Jeff Bezos, and an earnest, Spanish-spouting spoof of Beto.
Frustratingly, there were moments that surfaced with a clarity much of the production lacked. Two women (James, Oxford), trying to find words to discuss the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas with their daughter (Mendez), contrast the shooting with war: “Sometimes, someone is very bad and kills people without permission.” An absurdist sketch with various “recovering white rappers” was the most successful segment of the night, garnering big laughs. The scene’s idea is that the rappers—Post Malone, Lil Rick, Fred Durst, et al.(Crawford, Garrard, Serionel)—are now in charge of the NAACP and shepherding Iggy Azalea (Viraphonh) towards embracing “whiteness as an endless well of self-promotion rather than a whip with which to whip others.” In contrast, a pre-taped scene set in 2021 exploring racial tensions between AT&T employees was long and flat.
Leos Ensemble was founded in 2019, and was quickly awarded Best Alternative Theatre Production of 2019 by Theater Jones’ Frank Garrett for the company’s production of Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime’s small hours. Their embrace of new technology and formats (beyond this piece, the company produced a virtual trio of scenes from pre-modern female playwrights for 2020’s FIT Festival, plus an entirely TikTok-based production of Gertrude Stein’s Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It in 2021) is an exciting snapshot of where theater may be headed next, with Leos Ensemble at the forefront. While Ten Arguments wasn’t the company’s strongest showing, it’s exciting to look forward to what we can expect next from this dynamic new voice on the local theater scene.
WHEN: Closed April 9th
WHERE: Arts Mission Oak Cliff
WEB: For more information about Leos Ensemble, visit their website: https://linktr.ee/LeosEnsemble
