DateMe: An OkCupid Experiment Takes Comic Aim at Online Dating Sites Community
Robyn Lynne Norris’s free-form satire makes its premiere that is off-Broadway at Westside Theatre.
Go from a veteran: on the web suuuuucks that are dating. Sure, apps like OkCupid, Tinder, and Hinge cut down in the awkwardness that accompany approaching prospective love interests in individual and achieving to discern another person’s singlehood within the place that is first. But placing apart the reality that even the many algorithm that is complexn’t constantly predict in-person chemistry, forcing prospective daters to boil by themselves right down to a self-summary leads people to not merely placed across an idealized type of on their own for public usage, but in addition encourages individuals to latch on the many surface-level aspects to quickly determine whether someone’s worth pursuing romantically. For females especially, online dating sites can also be dangerous, making them available to harassment or worse from toxic males whom feel emboldened because of the privacy associated with the Web.
Yet, online dating sites remains popular, hence rendering it a target ripe for satire. Enter #DateMe: an experiment that is okCupid. Conceived by Robyn 
Lynne Norris, who cowrote the show with Bob Ladewig and Frank Caeti, and located in part on her behalf own experiences, the task is actually a sketch-comedy that is extended, featuring musical figures, improvisatory segments with market involvement, and interactive elements (the show possesses its own OkCupid-like application that everybody is encouraged to install and create pages on ahead of the show). In place of a plot, there is a character arc of kinds: Robyn (played in this off-Broadway premiere by Kaitlyn Ebony), finding by herself forced to try OkCupid the very first time, chooses to see just what is most effective regarding the software by producing 38 fake pages. If that appears overzealous, a few of her rules — including never ever meeting some of the individuals she converses with online — declare that this experiment that is so-called been made to fail through the outset. The cynicism and despair underlying Robyn’s overelaborate ruse is sometimes recognized through the show, with components of pathos associated with tips of a troubled romantic past and recommendations that she’s got difficulty making deep connections with individuals in general peeking through the laughs.
For the part that is most, however, #DateMe is content to keep a frothy tone while doling down its insights.
Robyn’s findings of seeing lots of the exact exact same expressions and character faculties on pages result in faux-educational sections where the remaining portion of the eight-member cast, donning white lab coats (Vanessa Leuck designed the colorfully diverse costumes), break people on to groups. Perhaps the creepiest of communications Robyn gets on OkCupid are turned into cathartically amusing songs (published by Sam Davis, with words by Norris, Caeti, Ladewig, and Amanda Blake Davis). If any such thing, the two improvisatory segments — one out of that the performers speculate how a date that is first two solitary market people would get according to their pages and reactions for their concerns, one other a dramatization of an audience user’s worst very very first date — grow to be the comic shows associated with the show (or at the very least, these people were in the performance we went to).
It really assists that the cast — which, as well as Ebony, includes Chris Alvarado, Jonathan Gregg, Eric Lockley, Megan Sikora, Liz Wisan, Jillian Gottlieb, and Jonathan Wagner — are highly spirited and game. Lorin Latarro emphasizes a feeling of playfulness in her own way and choreography, specially with a group, created by David L. Arsenault, that mixes the aesthetic of living spaces and game programs; and projections by Sam Hains that infuse the show because of the feeling that is appropriate of overload.
#DateMe is really so entertaining into the minute that just do you realize afterward exactly how trivial its view of online dating sites in fact is. Today for this viewer at least, it was disappointing to notice the show’s blind spot when it comes to race and how discrimination still plays out on dating apps. As well as on a wider level, the show does not link the increase of dating apps to your predominance of social media marketing most importantly, motivating a change more toward immediate satisfaction than in-depth connection. Similar to associated with very very first dates dating apps will likely send you on, #DateMe: An OkCupid test provides a completely enjoyable break without making you with much to remember after it is over.