Pretty? Absolutely. Perfect? Not so much. Zane Phillips and Elizabeth Lail play a couple in Pretty Perfect Lives.
Technology is being used more, and more inventively, in scenic and production design for the theater. Social media has become a vital part of marketing—and occasionally casting—shows. But tech has yet to make a big impression in theater as a subject. Three decades into the 21st century, plays about life in the digital age are still scarce. (Maybe that’s why Job, which recently transferred to Broadway, hit a nerve.)
Tucker (Phillips) and Tiffany (Lail) work through some issues.
Enter Pretty Perfect Lives, Gage Tarlton’s seriocomedy about an influencer couple who invite a third partner into their relationship. As Jesse, the young man whom Tiffany and Tucker find on Feeld (a real-life app for polyamory), hooks up first with Tucker, then with Tiffany, and T and T circle back to each other, PPL starts to resemble Schnitzler’s La Ronde for the TikTok set.
For its first hour or so, Pretty Perfect Lives plays like a parody of influencers in all their narcissistic, clicks-obsessed, monetizing glory. “It’ll make great content for us,” Tiffany (Elizabeth Lail) responds when Tucker (Zane Phillips) confides a desire to explore sex with men. After he leaves her for Jesse, her content is sponsored by Neutrogena, maker of the cream she uses “to calm all the redness from my face after a good long crying session.”
Over at the Jesse-Tucker home, Tucker is trying to unwind after work, but Jesse (Nic Ashe)—cellphone camera at the ready—instructs him, “I need you to go outside and act like you’re just getting home. It’s this new trend on the App: I’m gonna speed it up, and there’s this funny sound that goes along with it, and then I’m gonna put a caption over it. It’s gonna be so cute.”
Interspersed with the live scenes are videos posted on the App (that’s what it’s called; no specific social-media platform is named in the script)—by characters such as Mid-40s Wine Mom, Thirst Trap Dance Bros, Bad Stand-Up Comic and Chronically Online Hater.
Jesse (Nic Ashe, right) disrupts Tucker's supposedly perfect life with Tiffany.
Those other App users are all portrayed by Phillips, Lail and Ashe—adding another facet to versatile performances that also involve them playing Tucker, Tiffany and Jesse both as they present themselves on the App and as they conduct their real lives. Director Gabi Carrubba has cast the show exceptionally well: the highly telegenic Lail and Phillips have great chemistry together, and all three actors are convincing in their characters’ real emotional moments and their phonier online personas.
PPL definitely puts out a vibe: Here we are, in the social-media universe circa 2024. Both the cast and the creative team do a lot to bring viewers into this cyberworld—the former by expertly imitating the look and attitude of social-media showoffs; the latter by using the colors, materials, lights and sounds of electronic devices in the show’s design. The silvery gray of cell phones and laptops is a main color in Josh Oberlander’s set, and its walls look like the glass of screens. Oberlander designed the costumes, too, with an extensive wardrobe for all three actors that ranges from gym wear to dress clothes to nude bodysuits to Tiffany’s pastel-colored baby doll dress right out of the “trad wife” trend.
Yet it turns out that the play isn’t just a sendup of social-media personalities. More than halfway through it comes the revelation that Tiffany, Tucker and Jesse have been part of the Internet Reality Simulation Project, or IRSP. All their different couplings? Those were various realities created in the IRSP. “Sounds like some kind of immersive video game,” says a podcaster interviewing Jesse about the project.
Jesse (Ashe, left) speaks to a distraught Tiffany (Lail). Photographs by Marc J. Franklin.
He replies, “It kinda feels like that at first, moving through all these different realities of my life. But then it starts to feel real. And I’m having a hard time separating my actual reality from the fake ones. They’re sort of blurring together.”
Jesse’s distress escalates as the interview proceeds, and by the end of the scene he is crying out. This marks a dramatic shift in tone from the bouncy and humorous earlier scenes, though Pretty Perfect Lives is better before it takes the turn for the serious—and for the convoluted. While spoofing social media isn’t exactly original, fiddling around with chronology and reality, as Tarlton does later in the play, has itself become a familiar trope for playwrights.
Tarlton may have hit on a keen metaphor with his IRSP: that, in curating their social feeds, influencers create an image—simulate a reality, that is—which may not truthfully reflect their life. His play is simply more enjoyable when it’s making the audience laugh than when it’s making them think.
Gage Tarlton’s Pretty Perfect Lives runs through Sept. 8 at the Flea (20 Thomas St.). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit prettyperfectlives.com.
Playwright: Gage Tarlton
Director: Gabi Carrubba
Sets & Costumes: Josh Oberlander
Lighting & Video Design: Zack Lobel
Sound: Emma Lea Hasselbach
