Once upon a time, video games didn’t require things like lightspeed WiFi, monthly subscriptions and a headset to talk to fellow players anywhere in the world. The pure simplicity of 2-D games like Tecmo Bowl, Pac-Man, and even the raging kitchen fires within The Sims, are relics of a more facile era in gaming. And if the game malfunctioned? Sometimes a tap of the console and blowing some air in the cartridge did the trick.
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Video games nowadays often require a complete submission to the fantastical worlds within, the details and craftsmanship easily surpassing Hollywood’s grandest blockbusters. For Evie and her brethren who sit around scarfing Doritos and energy drinks while leveling in Warcraft’s world of Azeroth, the landscape on their screens is grander than anything Marvel can offer.
Within these fantasy walls, Evie and her fellow players exist as conquerors and deities that reach stratospheric heights. But when it’s time to go live in the real world, the real battles truly begin.
City Lights Theatre Company’s production of Madhuri Shekar’s “In Love and Warcraft” has plenty going for itself. The script itself offers up plenty of solid laughs as characters bumble around searching for connections of the flesh and blood variety when not getting their heads chopped off.
Director Kimberly Ridgeway moves the play succinctly and with purpose on a bedazzler of a set by Ron Gasparinetti, with oodles of playground crafted for Maxwell Bowman’s wonderful projection work that’s heavy on Nintendo and Atari nostalgia. Yet the acting performances aren’t always fully connected, too often lacking a heightened chemistry while moving away from stake-raising truths. Still, the crafting of the story is quite effective.
Evie (Anna Kosiarek) is a boss in all the ways one can be a boss. She is young — a 22-year-old college senior — but controls the world in her guild of Warcraft players, and even hustles a job advising others about relationships when not locked in battle. She’s got a grip on things until she meets up with a client for whom she writes love letters, the handsome Raul (Alejandro Flores). There is certainly intrigue, but the hang-ups over her own ability to engage in love slows things down. After all, this is the real world, where direct connections can’t be controlled by a joystick and a high-definition television.
Those problems don’t exist for Evie’s roommate Kitty (Miranda Liu), whose full-on connection with her sexual desires is the polar opposite to Evie’s predicament. Meanwhile, there’s the energetic Ryan (Filip Hofman), who considers Evie his girlfriend, even if it’s just inside the Warcraft zeitgeist.
The play finds its sharp arrows especially in the more purposeful second act, when Shekar’s work balances its laughs and messages to greater effect. Kosiarek takes her character through a much more certain path initially, but lets Evie muddle through the most challenging moments. There are multiple scenes that give Kosiarek the freedom to effectively stumble through Evie’s discoveries.
The final scene may be the most potent for the young cast, Ridgeway’s direction exploring the humorous nuance of how video game characters move, dance and breathe. The final reveal of Azeroth is splashed with the shimmery colors of Madeline Berger’s costumes, lit by Ed Hunter. These moments feel liberating for the cast, the writing allowing them to free themselves and dig into their best attempts at the broad characterizations of Warcraft.
While the play may not feel like the most polished work, it balances nicely between big laughs (get a load of ensemble member Will Livingston’s cackle-inducing monologue as a hairdresser, and Alycia Adame’s Spanish retort) and critical commentary. For anyone who makes their identity in the gaming world, it’s a tough thing to reconcile being a premiere goddess in Azeroth versus being a regular girl in Southern California.
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (‘22-‘23); @davidjchavez.bsky.social
‘IN LOVE AND WARCRAFT’
By Madhuri Shekar, presented by City Lights Theater Company
Through: Feb. 9
Where: City Lights Theater, 529 S. Second St., San Jose
Running time: 2 hours with an intermission
Tickets: $20-$63; cltc.org
