Act I and Act II take place in the United States in the year 2038 A.D.
Synopsis: Set twenty years in the future, the internet has inextricably embedded itself into all aspects of everyday life, making wi-fi a necessity for basic survival. In this net-driven and highly political world, Sgt. Donna Lloyd leads a small federal task force dedicated to fighting net crimes, including those of Daria, a cyber-vigilante who has aided several of Lloyd’s cases. But when a digital death threat toward a US Senator implicates Daria, Lloyd must determine Daria’s true motives before the violence spreads to the real world.
Run time: 100 minutes including intermission*
*There will be a 10 minute intermission between Act 1 and Act 2
A note from the Playwright:
First, a trigger warning: this play contains white supremacist rhetoric, including racial slurs.
I began this play in 2018. I’d been messing around with the characters Lloyd and Daria for a while, but didn’t have a specific villain in mind until I read an NPR story about how some groups were using online gaming platforms to spread white supremacist rhetoric to younger audiences. Still very activated by the 2017 events in Charlottesville, I knew that if I wanted to write a play about the internet, I had to include a warning about where we were headed.
The cast began rehearsal for this production on May 9, 2022. On May 14th, a young man armed himself and drove three hours from his home with the specific goal of taking Black lives. He killed 10 people. The violence in Buffalo, NY, is devastating for any number of reasons, but the hardest pill for me to swallow was the death of Ruth Whitfield at age 86. Like my own grandmother, she had 8 Black grandchildren.
I considered censoring the play to some extent several times over the last four years, especially during this rehearsal process. Ultimately, I didn’t because I believe it’s important to confront extremism head-on. The biggest misconception moderates have about white supremacism is that it’s somehow a fringe idea. That if we stop talking about it, stop giving it attention, it’ll go away. The sad reality is that this has never been the case. Ruth Whitfield lived through eight and a half decades of American racism, only to have her life taken by a man influenced by the same ideas she had to fight against her whole life. Whether we recognize it or not, racism continues to inform policy just as much as it informs violence. Still. To this day.
Part of the goal of this play is to illustrate the intersection between rhetoric, policy, and violence. The future portrayed in Voice of the Net can be bleak, but unless we actively fight against white supremacism, it may very well be our future.
And so, this play is dedicated not only to those who lost their lives in Buffalo, but to all the lives we’ve lost to the racist violence over the past four centuries. We can stop this cycle. But not without collective action and tangible change.
