We are in the Army Now

Forget the Upper Stage you once knew: it has been transformed into a hybrid social medium, something between an Instagram account and an iPhone screen. Forget theater as you knew it too. Everything here sparkles with an ultrapop cyberspace aura.

The four performers are reminiscent of Power Ranger superheroes, Pokemon, and the sexy being that is Cardi B. Everything unfolds in a camp atmosphere, filled with snapshots from the lives of borderline millennials, TikTok-style choreographies, and Britney Spears music videos, all set alongside deeply confessional selfies and memes on the controversial relationships between socio-environmental justice and social media platforms. Except that what’s posted here is the collective rage and urgency of an entire generation, coupled with the fierce humor that pervades it.

Might we all in fact be superheroes, ready to do battle? Can Steve Jobs and working class people from the Athenian Nikea neighborhood sit side-by-side in the same selfie? Are homophobic Greek fathers and religiously devout Greek mothers just another work in progress? Can ideology be explained through the use of emojis?

In a time that seems to lack doers, where things are fluid and seem incomprehensible, who exactly will our heroes fight? Generation Z take up weapons and welcome us into a new world where emojis and Pokemon coexist with extreme sensitivity and dissident activism, and all inside a theater form as digital as is it incurably physical.