Intriguing subject loses something in translation

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Brat Productions artistic director Michael Alltop read an article in the New York Times describing the release of 650,000 AOL users' search logs, and the seed for the group's new production,

User 927

, was germinated.

The play's title is also AOL's anonymous ID number for its most notorious seeker, someone whose three-months-long catalog of depravity is breathtaking in its scope. (One of its tamer examples: Judging by several consecutive search terms, one can assume s/he may have contracted mange in a highly unorthodox manner.)

Alltop commissioned Katharine Clark Gray to write a play about the scenario. Unfortunately, it's unworthy of the national attention it received before the play's opening and of the dark complexity of its subject matter.

Gray is obviously so enamored of Tracy Letts' contemporary stage-thriller style that she named her show's lead characters, mother and daughter Leah (Michele Guidry) and Deena Letts (Emilie Krause), after him. However, the play's confused, condescending plot can't even touch its aspirations. Leah has fled to Osterville, Ind., from Brooklyn after some nasty business between her boyfriend and daughter. She arrives in the Midwest, somehow forgetting everything she learned in her years as a New York advertising executive, and becomes a Luddite, banning computer use and uttering ridiculous statements such as, "There was a time when logs were for cabins and pods were for peas." Right. And nets were for fish, and cookies were for baking, and thrillers were for giving a thrill.

Deena chafes against her mother's restrictions (their arguments are the play's most believable dialogue), sneaks off to the library to surf the Internet, and, after poking around User 927's search file, quickly vanishes. All that's missing is Scooby Doo's Mystery Machine, as a brother-sister pair of teenage bloggers (Elena Bossler and Conrad Ricamora) volunteer to help solve the crime.

The set's technical aspects ought to be a central element in this work about a wired world, but instead, a pair of video monitors mounted above the stage are used thoughtlessly. When they aren't wasting screen space by illustrating the Letts' trip to a Dairy Queen drive-through, they exploit the exploited further by flashing images of bound and tortured women to no purpose.

You could possibly forgive the amateurish quality of Gray's script if the issues it misses weren't so fascinating. Internet privacy, technology-induced isolation, teenage subcultures, sexual exploitation, the darkest recesses of the human soul, Gray - well, maybe not Gray, but someone - could have picked any one of these themes and made a piece of captivating theater. It's still a good idea, but not this time.

Playing at: St. Stephen's Theater, 10th and Ludlow Streets, Philadelphia. Through Sunday, June 22. Tickets: $15 to $27. Information: 215-627-2577 or www.BratProductions.org.EndText