By Kai Maristed

A consistently engaging and engaged, insightful, humorous, scarily moving, polished contemporary drama with a premise to die for.

The Moderate by Ken Urban. Directed by Jared Mezzocchi. A Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at the Central Square Theatre, 450 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, through March 1.

Nael Nacer in The Moderate. Photo: Nile Scott Studios.

In this new age of the fast scroll, one’s free reading time seems to shorten as inexorably as one’s mitochondria. So in case you have to leave here early—as a handful of patrons did last night at Central Square Theater, more on that to come—let me start this review with its overall conclusion: Yes. Go see it! Nab two tickets or four, for a consistently engaging and engaged, insightful, humorous, scarily moving, polished contemporary drama with a premise to die for. If you are into the tech fireworks of multimedia staging, so much the better. Oh, and get those tix ASAP, because performances, running through March 1, are limited.

Frank Bonner (Nael Nacer) is in a bind. He has lost his sales job and his beloved wife who has moved out taking teenage son + Gameboy, mainly because Frank secretly plunged them into debt by borrowing deep to finance finishing his English degree online. He needs a job yesterday. Any job. Plus, it’s the early days of the Covid lockdown, so there are no jobs. The one he’s offered, at minimum wage, and vaguely defined at first, is as a ‘moderator’–one of a global army of tens of thousands who scan flagged-as-inappropriate content for a social media behemoth whose CEO’s name starts with ‘Zuc.’ You thought AI took care of all that? the play asks. Think again. There are some calls only humans can make.

Thus the brilliant premise. Because how must it affect a person’s psyche, to be locked in a room for shift upon extra shift, scrolling through all the sickening garbage only humans want to perpetuate—and document. From child porn to ISIS killings, a moderator can only punch accept or reject. No interventions allowed, no matter what Frank might see—or fear. No alerting authorities—you must go through Corporate, and 99 percent of  questions will be ignored. Meanwhile, the Corporate Guidelines for accept/reject are as logically and morally murky as you might by now have guessed.

Greg Maraio, Nael Nacer, and Jules Talbot in The Moderate. Photo: Nile Scott Studios.

Most of these facts of a modern moderator’s life are laid out by Martin, (the mercurial Greg Maraio) Frank’s supervisor, who disarms him and us with a mix of charm, cynicism, and I’m-just-a-cog-too-ism. Though not completely. The real truth-teller in the organization is Frank’s fellow moderator, Rayne (Jules Talbot), half his age and twice as savvy. Rayne gets the best one-liners. Irresistible whenever on screen, she earns them all.

I say on screen, because that is how The Moderate is presented. It’s scarcely staged. One sees Frank at his desk darkly and imprecisely, through a sort of translucent cage. He doesn’t move much through the first two thirds of the play; instead we see his face in close-up, projected identically on three walls of the theater. Martin is even more disembodied—we mostly see only his head in close-up. Ditto Rayne. Most importantly, the images and video clips Frank is being asked to rule on are also projected in blow-up format, with much staccato flashing of lights. Disgusting stuff. So many dickpics, especially on all three walls simultaneously. I suspect this may have prompted the early walk-outs—or was it the strobe effect, which is not recommended for migraines?

The rest of the nearly full house stayed glued to their seats, laughed at the quips, and went keenly silent as the play turned darker, asking for both empathy and attention to twists of theme and plot.

Urban’s tale of an Everyman caught up inside the social media beast tackles a question Meta has paid a fortune in legal fees to have us scroll past: are these platforms journalism, or not? What does it imply, to ‘moderate’ internally? Also: when the guidelines deny basic human instinct, is there any way the moderators can break their corporate chains?

While meshing Frank’s nightmarish job with his marital crisis adds stress (and too much shouting) to his mounting crisis, I found the motivation for the wife’s (Celeste Olivia) sudden walkout less than convincing. Later, Frank’s interactions with his son and another kid (Sean Wendelken) also felt sketched in, less real than the two-dimensional projections we’d become used to, and which make sorry sense in a world of flat screens.

Prolific, dedicated playwright Ken Urban has authored over twelve full-length productions and earned multiple awards. Currently Director of Dramatic Writing at MIT, he is a master of traditional, actors-on-stage, audience-intimate drama. Last year’s Danger and Opportunity, is a notable example. As much as The Moderate’s technical tour-de-force dazzles—the audience was up and cheering at the close—let’s pray it not be the future of live theater. I look forward to Urban’s next invention.

Kai Maristed’s work has been published in Agni, Ploughshares, Five Points, and elsewhere. Her books include Broken Ground, praised by John Coetzee, and Belong to Me, starred by PW. This fall saw standing ovations for her full-length play, Paul and Émile. Her new, prize-winning story collection, The Age of Migration, will be out in July.