How many of us have a five-year-old email in our inbox that for one reason or another cannot bring ourselves to delete? And how many of us have a profile in a matchmaking website? And how much do we lie in them? All these questions and more are at the core of Stirring, a cute and sometimes funny study of human relations in the internet era.
The premise is quite an interesting one – seven New Yorkers communicating with each other via the internet, starting new relationships and friendships without having even met each other face to face. What could happen when they finally meet up? The web is full of lies, and these characters know it, mainly because they are liars themselves. In better hands, the play could have had so much more potential, but writer/director Shoshona Currier delivers an entertaining piece that never grips you but never bores you either.
Special mention has to go to the excellent performers, who give it all and try their best with the material they have been handed. Their interpretations feel real and human, never falling into caricature versions of themselves. Whenever the seven of them happen to be talking at the same time, you feel like you are watching a visual interpretation of the internet ‘chat rooms’ themselves: a place where words and dialogs coexist, without anyone paying too much attention to the hidden meanings of their actual conversations. At the end of the day, as Hamlet would say, they are just ‘words, words, words’.
3/5
Adrian G. Velazquez
