Never Tell: Sex, Trust and Video Art

Published: July 31, 2006

It’s nice to see a play now and then that reflects the way so many people spend their days: bound to their computer screens. James Christy’s intriguing Never Tell opens with two office workers at their desks and at their laptops. One has just created the ultimate killer application. With it, a computer will come to know its owner — right down to the deepest, darkest needs and predilections — and will have the ability to share that true self with the true selves of others. Computer dating will take on new meaning.

Skip to next paragraph Manny (Jason Schuchman) wants to tell Hoover (Mark Setlock) the news, but Hoover has his head on his desk, asleep. When he is awake and informed, he quickly concludes, “This thing is a gold mine.” These are the first clues that Manny and Hoover are very different kinds of people.

Elsewhere in the city Will (Matthew Wilkas) is preparing a video installation for a gallery show. The installation will soon be the talk of the town because it includes a particularly brutal, realistic rape scene. His wife, Anne (Teresa L. Goding), is appalled. “This completely changes the piece,” she says. “It’s pornography now.”

On the surface Never Tell is about the content on video screens. Ultimately it is about personal relationships, greed, trust and the various ways someone can take another person’s life. The last piece in the puzzle is the return to town of Liz (Eva Kaminsky), with whom Manny had a particularly unpleasant breakup.

Mr. Christy has a real gift for contemporary, insightful, sometimes darkly funny dialogue that reflects believable human interaction. He is so good at this that it takes a long time to realize that the sharp, confident, self-determining women in the script exist only in terms of which man possesses them.

These characters, ingeniously directed by Drew DeCorleto, can be irritating, but they are rarely boring. Manny’s final speech, recalling a major adolescent trauma, is a bit anticlimactic, though. Maybe Mr. Christy should have just revealed a ghost behind a door.

Never Tell continues at the Michael Weller Theater, 311 West 43rd Street, Clinton, (212) 352-3101, through Aug. 13.