After decades of collaboration, the pair reunite at La MaMa for a world premiere that challenges audiences to reckon with the cost of surrendering individual agency to collective automation.
Tim Blake Nelson forecasts a grim future in his play, And Then There Were No More, which director Mark Wing-Davey opened last week at Off-Broadway’s La MaMa. Here is a world without judges or juries. Verdicts are reached by machines — non-negotiable machines. A machine also functions as the executioner. Anyone considered “beyond rehabilitation” is destined to perish in a newly developed machine designed to execute “without pain.” The lawyer representing the convicted must strive for justice in a system that is devoid of mercy.
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Elizabeth Marvel plays the lawyer. “That’s literally the name of my character,” she tells Observer. “I think it’s a good indication of the nature of the play. We’re almost archetypes. It’s as if all the dross has been burned off these people. I represent the law and the function of the law.
“My position is that a painless execution is a lie. It cannot be proved. It’s only diagnostically proved by computers. Nobody has reported back from the other side as to the truth of it. In my opinion — not my character’s opinion — there’s no such thing as a painless execution. I don’t want to give too much away because part of the play is the argument of the case.”
Marvel has the rep and heft for this role. She put in time as the U.S. President on Homeland. Her usual playground is Off-Broadway (she has three Obies — for Therese Raquin, Misalliance and A Streetcar Named Desire). “I’ve never been invited to the Tony party,” she smiles.
Same for her equally gifted husband, Bill Camp. He recently brought off a sharp, persuasive portrait of that investment moneybags, J. P. Morgan, on The Gilded Age. Taken together, they qualify as the Lunts of Off-Broadway, although Marvel is quick to shoot down that kind of aggrandizement: “We’re just a couple of old hippies, who run around in our pajamas all day.”
She’s hopeful the play will land well with audiences. “Honestly, I just want it to be received. I hope people come to see it because it’s a play that’s going to demand a lot of attention from them. We’re going to have to pitch them how to listen because the language is very vigorous. It’s complicated, but it is also incredibly thought-provoking. Audiences are going to have to engage on a mental level that I believe will be very exciting and restorative for them.
“If people come and turn their phones off and give us their attention, we can actually help them improve their mental focus, their mental facility, when we engage them with this play.”
She already has another play lined up after Nelson’s. “Next, I’m doing a piece we did briefly at the Public and the Woolly Mammoth in D.C., called Ford/Hill. It’s based on the Anita Hill hearings and the Christine Blasey Ford hearings. That will happen sometime around January.”
Nelson and Marvel go back to Juilliard-classmate days, and their professional paths have crossed a lot in the past three decades. She has done a bunch of workshops and readings for him, and she’s in a film he just made, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd. She even showed up for the first read-through of And Then There Were No More — but in a different part.
“At that point,” Nelson says, “I decided — along with the play’s director, Mark Wing-Davey — to put her in the lead role. And I can say Beth Marvel is going to be extraordinary in this play.
“This play is an allusion to our unique selves that modern technology poses. It refers to an imagined future in which individualism recedes in the interest of an algorithm collective.”
Even with the play done, Nelson still stays busy. “I’m editing a movie that I wrote and directed. And then, of course, I’m at the rehearsals for the play whenever I can be because it’s the world premiere and, therefore, I’m working on the writing. As the actors and the director begin to stage it, I learn more and more about the material. That’s a real privilege of having this level of director with this level of cast — the rigor with which they’re approaching some very difficult material. I get to be in the room where it’s happening and see clearly what’s working and what isn’t — and make changes. It’s actually my favorite part of the playwriting process because you can see the whole piece. It’s very exciting.”
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