Review: ‘Private’ Explores What It Means To Be Under Constant Watch

metroweekly.com:

Private (★★★★☆), would insist on at least that level of privacy in their own home.Others, like Corbin (Eric Berryman), Georgia’s “promising, up-and-coming engineer” husband, might more easily be persuaded to drop the fragile veil of privacy if it meant finally earning real money.Offered a dream job and fat salary at a Fortune 500 tech company, Corbin is ready to sign away “access to anything” to seal the deal.

That means granting the company the right to monitor his phone, data, car, office, home, anything, purportedly in order to protect the firm from corporate espionage.This also means that Georgia’s life would fall under the same surveillance — her calls and conversations all monitored and logged.Director Knud Adams’ brilliant world-premiere production conveys the play’s points that the future is now for those already being monitored and logged by their devices, and in their homes by Siri or Alexa or whatever other technology is listening.And whether set in the past, present, or future, a couple weighing a paycheck against a bitter compromise is a dramatic dilemma that never goes out of style.In terms of visual style, Adams and his creative team wed Pirnot’s big ideas to minimal design, subtly but surely evoking the not-too-distant future, à la films like Her or Ex Machina.Scenic designer Luciana Stecconi surrounds the actors in a plush, bare, fluorescent-lit oblong set, peach-toned in certain light, and a vibrant canary yellow when in the form of Corbin and Georgia’s home, the play’s main battleground.Lighting designer Masha Tsimring captures every mood inside that plush yellow and peach box, while Danielle Preston’s costumes hit the target of character-revealing and fashion-forward enough to feel slightly foreign to.