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Regional Reviews: St. Louis The Last Show on Earth Also see Richard's reviews of Appropriate, The Color Purple and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
But the funny thing is that you find yourself rooting, paradoxically, for artificial intelligence in the end, in its impossible race against time, as the all-knowing machine furiously tries to reassemble one last spark of human inspiration from a few chaotic bits of memory. Before the planet comes to its inevitable scorching conclusion as it's absorbed by an expanding sun. And of course things have gotten jumbled up over a billion years. Pained TV interviews, resurrected from deep within the AI's memory, somehow re-emerge as discussions of ravenous tigers on the loose in suburban America, gobbling up middle-schoolers, instead of assault rifles doing essentially the same thing here in the present day. Playwright Taylor begins it all with a very brief lecture, showing how long you and I have been gone from the scene, and how much the sun has ballooned up to a tremendous size. Mr. Taylor's spoken framing device appears to have been added at the last minute, for clarity, though perhaps he should be wearing a white lab coat as he explains the show's premise. Otherwise, Meredith LaBounty's costumes are very fine, turning spangly as everything comes to a blinding climax at a blistering pace, under the increasingly radiant lighting design of Denisse Chavez (she co-designed the set with director Cashion). Several of the company's usual suspects populate the stage, laying on a luscious layer of satirical reality in a chaotic series of flashbacks. First, though, Maggie Conroy, Ashwini Arora, Will Bonfiglio, Miranda Félix, and Marty Rubright quietly languish in a phone center at lights-up, staring out at some unseen parking lot like animals in a zoo. Rachel Tibbetts sneaks in, with cameos by Ellie Schwetye, Carl Overly Jr., and about a dozen other fun modern actors. They are once again keepers of a brilliant flame of inspiration in a brand new ERA show, playing long-dead people who just happened to have been recorded digitally and ended up in a billion year old memory bank. But you can see why the AI gets confused about our usually haphazard sources of divine inspiration. The play chronicles machine intelligence's efforts to dredge up every kind of madness that came right before our own (unexplained) mass extinction, without ever getting at the source of some inner spiritual pyre. Corporate double-talk and internet influencers have managed to burrow down into the machine subconsciousness and have survived clearly enough in its memory, though they don't really deliver the cyber-beast any closer to enlightenment. Quite the opposite, in fact. And once again, Equally Represented Arts has found a powerful new way into our own last embers of inspiration, through a crazy series of scenes (director Cashion is listed as "scenographer," in partnership with playwright Taylor). And the pace reaches near-hysteria as the super-intelligence goes sifting faster and faster through its fragmented memories of mankind in search of some last-minute kind of transcendence. A lot of the blizzard of images comes on a large TV screen upstage. The singularity never admits it doesn't know something, but the frantic action in those final 15 minutes suggests a kind of desperate search for something like the innermost peace of a long-lost race as it all comes to an end. Maybe it's terrified. Anyway, Insane Clown Posse makes an appearance, and somehow an incredibly misguided musicalization of Waiting for Godot still exists in the AI knowledge bank. Two or three lovable dance breaks renew our unguarded attention as surrealism gradually wins the day. It's an increasingly overwhelming experience in a one-hour, 45 minute package that gobbles you up like a dying sun, faster and faster, louder and louder (but not too loud). And obviously I can't tell you how it ends. But the multi-camera videography and the shimmering light and costumes, and a delirious climactic speech beautifully surpass even Stanley Kubrick's ending to his own science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Last Show on Earth, produced by Equally Represented Arts, runs through September 26, 2026, at the Kranzberg Arts Center, 501 N Grand, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.eratheatre.org. Cast: Also featuring: The ERA Band: Production Staff: Additional Production Staff: Marketing and Audience Services: House Managers: Video Production Team: Writing and Development: Executive Producer: Miranda Félix |
