Steve likes Masha; Masha likes Nikolai; and Egor just wants to win a microwave. It’s another day at the office for the workers of St. Petersburg’s infamous (real-life) Internet Research Agency, whose job is manipulating social media to advance Russia’s agenda at home and abroad. Set in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, office comedy meets political satire in Sarah Gancher’s shape-shifting examination of the power, seduction, and danger of a good story. A New York Times Critic’s Pick in its acclaimed online version, the NYC premiere is directed by Tony Award® winner Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder).
Complicity was not of course possible in the no-longer-available 2020 streaming production, which required viewers to process it on the fly, in much the way they process social media, deciding for themselves what to laugh at — and what to ponder, repost or trash. Lacking that formal congruence, the live “Russian Troll Farm” has a temperature problem: Instead of cool, it feels overheated; instead of suggestive, prosaic.
Yes, its characters work at a real-life organization, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which does employ an army of coders and tweeters to sow discord on American social media. And yes, a good percentage of the tweets we see these characters firing off are real in that they were really created by Russian internet trolls and really deployed during the 2016 election. But as Gancher notes in the program, “The Office is not about paper, [and this] play is not about politics. It’s about the people.” While that aim — to unmask the trolls and flesh them out as humans — is potentially compelling, it doesn’t end up generating a consistently powerful engine for the play.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Vineyard Theatre Off-Broadway Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Projection and Video Design | Jared Mezzocchi |
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Projection Design | Jared Mezzocchi |
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