In ‘The Nether’ A Cautionary Tale For The AI Age

When I first read about Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether a few years back, I was immediately intrigued by the bold premise and made a note that I’d like to see it whenever I got the chance, so I was particularly excited to see the play show up as part of the Lake Worth Playhouse’s Black Box series this season. A 2013 play that explores what virtual reality means for morality, it’s a piece I think I responded to much differently today than I would have even a few years ago. In other words, back then, maybe I would’ve taken some of the questions it poses as merely speculative ones. But given how much artificial intelligence has evolved and infiltrated our daily lives in the meantime? The chilling piece and the unsettling questions it raises felt much more urgent to me, like a prescient cautionary tale that’s all too appropriate for the AI age. 

Having caught the opening night of the play last Thursday, I was hoping to have this review done earlier this week rather than just under the wire ahead of its second and last weekend. Briefly, I even considered pulling an all-nighter to get it done ahead of the rest of the first weekend, only to find in The Nether a piece that clearly deserved more than a single night’s contemplation. Then, when I continued my theatrical weekend by attending a production of Hamlet I also had plans to cover, I decided to tackle the latter play first because The Nether gave me so much moral and intellectual complexity to unpack that the notoriously opaque Shakespeare play actually seemed comparatively straightforward! 

In retrospect, though, the degree of thematic overlap between the two plays revealed a surprising amount of thematic coherence in my bizarre little double feature. You see: in Hamlet, a metatheatrical play within a play asks how much illusion has the power to reveal about reality. And, centering on the idea of a three-dimensional virtual world that its characters can physically inhabit, The Nether seems to be asking the same thing along with several even more unsettling questions. 

For instance: if something would clearly be wrong if done to a real person in the real world, is it still wrong if done to a lifelike avatar in the virtual world? Fundamentally, that’s the issue that central characters Morris and Sims have almost opposite perspectives on. And as Morris, a government agent responsible for overseeing that virtual world— called “the nether”, hence the play’s title—  investigates Sims for crimes committed in a secret online realm called The Hideaway, the play allows them to explore their respective positions in considerable depth.

Now, the skeevy part? Sims is a pedophile who has maintained enough restraint to avoid acting on his sexual impulses with real children but created in The Hideaway a kind of sanctuary where he is free to indulge his dark desires. Though Morris argues that The Hideaway is dangerous because doing unthinkable things in the nether could function as a sort of rehearsal for doing them in real life, Sims asserts that having an outlet for them in The Hideaway is what has allowed him not to yield to that temptation.

Intriguingly, The Nether makes Sims’ side of the argument disturbingly coherent at times rather than setting him up as a cardboard villain, while making Morris’s uncompromising condemnation of The Hideaway feel at times like an irrational vendetta that needlessly encroaches on individuals’ personal freedoms. As crafted by Haley and brought to life in an exquisite performance by Terry Perkins, Sims comes across as cultured, well-spoken, and even charming, while the rigidity of Morris’s beliefs and her relentless condemnation of behavior she disapproves of at times makes her seem downright unlikable. 

This is especially true when it comes to the dynamic that emerges between her and Doyle, a 55 year old middle school teacher who first came to the Hideaway as a “client” paying to spend time there. By the time he’s exhausted his financial resources, he’s so addicted to the world that he agrees to stay on as an “employee” tasked with maintaining the world’s illusions. 

I won’t spoil one of the play’s more shocking reveals by explaining exactly what form Doyle’s “service” to Sims takes, but it eventually becomes clear that the dynamic is an exploitative one, which complicates Sims’ argument that the Hideaway is defensible because only imaginary people are being harmed. And when Morris confronts Doyle about the fact that he is considering crossing over into the Hideaway permanently— leaving his “real” body to be maintained by crude life support systems while he enjoys the “freedom” the Nether offers him full time, we discover another disturbing downside of its seductions in the fact that he’s willing to give up the prospect of having a relationship with his daughter in the real world to do so. 

Despite his complicity in Sims’ “crimes”, Doyle ultimately comes across as more pitiful than contemptible, emerging as a surprisingly sympathetic character as the depths of his psychological dependence on the Hideaway are exposed. Actor Russell Kerr does an excellent job of making the character almost endearingly awkward and gradually revealing the depths of this vulnerability, especially in a poignant final scene which I also don’t want to spoil the details of for prospective viewers. Meg West is equally impressive as Morris, projecting a cool determination and decisiveness well suited to the professional role as “interrogator” she spends most of the play occupying while occasionally hinting at the softer emotions the script eventually suggests are lurking behind this steely mask. 

Speaking of masks, the last two actors in the five person cast The Nether calls for have to navigate what might be an even more difficult acting challenge. Both play characters who we first meet in The Hideaway, and Haley eventually reveals that behind their virtual avatars, neither one is at all who they initially appear to be. The first is Woodnut, a fellow agent of Morris’s who succumbs to some of the temptations of the Hideaway when sent there to gather intelligence. In the part, I found Matthew Pyle quite effective when taking the character at face value as a rugged “client” coming to the Hideaway for a good time and even more so as my understanding of his identity and intentions shifted throughout the play. 

Last but not least is Emily Huhn, who probably has the most difficult task of all in playing Iris, the nine year old “child” whom Sims forms a special attachment to. That Huhn is clearly older than her character made her scenes significantly more comfortable to watch than if there were any doubt about the actress’s actual age, though imagining an actual child or a performer who could more believably pass for one in her place makes them even more chilling in retrospect. 

Costumed in a doll-like dress and conveying a wide-eyed innocence, Huhn nevertheless does reasonably well at selling the illusion of Iris’s girlhood, though I sometimes found her performance to be a little muted where more playfulness and exuberance might’ve been called for.  

But where Perkins and Huhn both accomplish something remarkable is in their portrayal of Sims and Iris’s relationship as something characterized by genuine tenderness and even love as well as appalling acts of sexuality and violence, which makes the dynamic all the more disturbing. Perkins especially makes it viscerally clear that he feels an almost fatherly protectiveness towards Iris and is terrified of losing her, even though he knows she is not “really” the little girl she seems to be. This is further complicated by the fact that it’s eventually implied that “Iris” may be the virtual avatar of another adult rather than a soulless creation of some algorithm, which raises yet more disturbing questions about the nature of a “love” that both parties seem to experience as psychologically “real” though it depends upon an illusion. 

In Haley’s elegantly constructed script, every scene raises the stakes while raising more and more of these questions, some of which have profound enough implications to give “to be or not to be” a run for its money. Director Trish Weaver-Rhodes clearly understands the playwright’s vision for the piece, steering each actor into interpretations that allow each character to register strongly as a recognizable “type” immediately while being nuanced enough to do justice to the play’s psychological complexity. 

Rhodes also keeps the pace of this ninety-minute one-act brisk enough to maintain suspense throughout the play’s lengthy interrogation scenes while allowing the script more room to breathe in the seemingly “lighter” and more emotionally loaded Hideaway scenes. The contrast between the two is also highlighted visually in the difference between the drab realism of the interrogation room and the picturesque, storybook quality of the Hideaway in a lovely set designed and painted into being by Olga Kark. 

Lighting design by Ardean Landhuis facilitates the movement between these two distinct worlds and further defines the aesthetic difference between them, though the fact that they occupy the same stage aligns powerfully with the idea that the boundary between the two is not quite as obvious as it seems. 

That the playful Hideaway interludes are literally and figuratively warmer and more colorful than the increasingly stark and brutal “real world” scenes allows the audience to experience for themselves how tempting the Hideaway might be as a retreat. After all, when we can build fake worlds that feel more pleasant and inviting than a punishing real one, is it any wonder that they’re places to which many of us yearn to escape? 

Thankfully, technology hasn’t yet advanced enough to allow us to escape into alternate realities as fully as Haley’s characters do. But when even I often find myself tempted to ignore whatever messes I’ve made in my “real world” in favor of another comforting conversation with a sycophantic chatbot, it also isn’t so far off that I can dismiss the questions the play raises as purely speculative ones. 

Considering, too, how much of my life I’ve organized around escaping to the “fake worlds” I find onstage in theatre after theatre, yes, I’d say that some of The Nether’s questions don’t strike me as hypothetical ones at all. On the other hand, when so much of the rest of our modern lives are mediated through screens, at least the theatre is a place where we’re forced to unplug from it all in favor of an onstage illusion that just might shed some light on the world we’ll find waiting for us offstage.  

So, if you have enough time in your schedule this weekend to power down your smartphone for a few hours and enjoy some good old-fashioned analog entertainment, I’d definitely encourage you to check out The Nether as long as you think you can handle the intensity of its more sensitive subject matter. You can catch this show at the Lake Worth Playhouse’s Stonzek Theatre for only four performances through this November 15th, and I’ll, of course, be seeing how many more shows I can possibly cram into my theatregoing calendar in the meantime!