Screen queen

Do not talk to Marianne Weems about technology. Or, at least, if you are discussing her latest projection-saturated meditation, don’t lead with it. For 15 years, Weems and her company, the Builders Association, have been wrapping their pieces in complicated multimedia packages in which characters amass 3-D data bodies (Super Vision), or their video images morph across racial lines (Alladeen). But getting pigeonholed as the “techie theater group” has gotten exhausting. “I’m not interested in that discussion anymore,” the director says with a groan. “Whenever anyone says anything about art and technology, I just glaze over.”

This isn’t to say that Continuous City, a bittersweet investigation into social-networking sites and global displacement, will happen with just a rug and a chair. (“We did start from that idea,” confesses Weems, wistfully.) Thirty hovering screens slam open and shut on pneumatic hinges; an actor videoconferences with his actual family members; taped contributors appear in a babble of personal confessions. But Weems, 48, and her collaborators aren’t simply slapping high-tech design concepts on narratives; rather, they are looking at their own lives—and starting with the tech within.

Weems, dramaturg James Gibbs and actor-writer Harry Sinclair spent months discussing issues relating to the “new urbanity.” Sinclair, who splits a life between New Zealand and Los Angeles, says they “talked for ages about how you feel connected to people over distance. The show asks, ‘Is this really intimacy you feel with people from Facebook, from texting? And can it be sustained?’ ”

Sinclair’s skeletal story revolves around that American icon, the traveling salesman. As his character, Mike, roams the world, he hawks a networking tool called Xubu. (It’s a fictional device that nonetheless “exists” on the Builders’ website.) We see Mike through his constant video contact with his boss (Rizwan Mirza), his withdrawn young daughter (Olivia Timothee) and her nanny (Moe Angelos). Each in turn has Internet interactions: Mirza cyberdates; Angelos composes city-specific vlogs.

Despite their glossy sheen, Builders’ projects are overwhelmingly personal. Weems herself started from a central image of a girl dwarfed by screens because of her own goddaughter—whom she contacts almost entirely via video. “Our productions tend to be made for the people inside them,” the director admits. So Continuous City feels surprisingly intimate. Weems and the Builders forge their own “virtual hearth” with such cozy moments as Mirza’s cousin holding up old photos during their iChat. (“This is not the time!” laughs the actor, flinching at the sight of a decades-old hairstyle. “Let’s end the scene.”)

As you might infer, the tone is surprisingly (for the Builders) nongloomy. “After our last few shows, no one came away going, ‘Woo hoo! Life in the 21st century!’ ” Weems notes wryly. “I think now, we’re seeing the good of this stuff a little bit more.”

Continuous City is at the BAM Harvey Theater.

WATCH EXCLUSIVE VIDEO OF <em>CONTINUOUS CITY</em>»