IN LOVE AND WARCRAFT: CERTAINLY HAS A HIGH DPS
Last night, we attended Custom Made Theatre Company’s production of a new play by Madhuri Shekar, “In Love and Warcraft.” The show is, on its surface, a zippy romantic comedy about a young woman who learns to love in the real world instead of the fantasy life she lives in the world’s most popular MMO.
​
Last night, I was driving home from the show, listening to a playlist of my favorite music on Spotify. The theme from the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers came on, and I began to sing along. And all I could think was – if the audience I just sat with saw me right now, they would laugh at me.
​
I hate the term “nerd blackface.” I really do – I know people throw it around a lot when talking about shows like The Big Bang Theory. But it’s an awful phrase because we geeks and nerds are not a real oppressed minority, and we don’t hold a candle to the racism thrown around in this world every day. So I don’t have a good, snappy term to describe what I saw on stage other than, “just like The Big Bang Theory.” On TV, things like playing Dungeons and Dragons are a punchline. In “In Love and Warcraft,” using the word “collectibles” instead of “toys” is a punchline. Seeing things that you love and a life that you’ve lived laid out in front of an audience who is hooting and hollering like they’re watching a halfway decent episode of Who’s Line is it Anyways is pretty sobering. It reminds me that for all of the articles that are written and ink that is spilt over how geek culture is the mainstream now, there is still a very large contingent of people who want to point and laugh at the freaks.
“In Love and Warcraft” is, I think, meant to be a cutesy romantic comedy. And while I can’t tell if it’s this particular production or the script itself, but the play I saw, through it’s own missteps, is two things: 1) Deeply against nerd and geek culture. 2) Full of messages about sex that are really problematic.
​
The main character of “In Love and Warcraft”, Evie, is a college student who plays a lot of World of Warcraft. She meets a cute boy, and struggles with balancing her time between the game and her online friends, and her new found real life. That’s fairly harmless, and what it says on the package. I wish that was the show I saw. Instead, Evie meets a boy, Raul, who is nearly perfect. He’s attractive, loving, kind, and everything anyone could want from a man. He’s portrayed as so perfect in the first few scenes with him that it’s hard not to see him as a Mary Sue (although I doubt that was Shekar’s intent or her execution.) With that element in play, the play begins to take a dour turn.Her nymphomaniac roomate, Kitty, immediately pounces on Evie’s newfound crush, telling her to dump her Warcraft boyfriend because he’s a “loser.” When we see this boyfriend, Ryan, having overheard that he’s losing his girlfriend through Vent rather than hearing from Evie himself, director James Nelson and actor Drew Reitz made the decision to have him screw up his face into a comical expression and clutch a Jabba the Hutt toy. Look at this freak, the staging says, no wonder he can’t keep a girl. What a loser. In Ryan’s subsequent scene where he confronts Evie and her new boyfriend over this revelation, he’s continually played for laughs by doing stupid kung fu and talking in a deliberately high pitched voice.Like in the Big Bang Theory, one of the only two geeks you’ll ever meet over the course of the show is portrayed, over and over, as an overly comical stereotype only there to amuse you. As the audience continually laughed uproariously at someone who could be me or one of my friends, I felt myself getting more and more uncomfortable.But that wasn’t why I almost left at intermission. In the last scene of Act One, “In Love and Warcraft” goes from hurtful to me and mine to deeply, deeply problematic.
​
Evie, you see, isn’t interested in sex. She never has been. When her new boyfriend tries to touch her, she recoils. She’s just not comfortable. But this perfect, attractive Raul keeps pushing her and pushing her. Over the course of the scene he tries to touch her over and over when she’s made it very, very clear that she’s uncomfortable. When she finally explains – again – that she loves him but isn’t interested in sex, he agrees to respect her wishes, although it’s very clear that both Raul and the playwright want us to think this is a bad thing. In one of the last lines of the act, he gives her the ultimatum that she’ll have to stop playing Warcraft to stay with him. “I think it’s only fair,” he says, “with what you’re asking me to do.”
So yeah, I almost walked out.
​
I finished the play, and I’m glad I did. It gave me some more perspective on what Shekar was trying to say. In the end of the show, through some convolution, and a really well constructed and acted sequence that takes place within the game, both Kitty and Raul learn that they’ve been acting very wrong, and to accept Evie (and Ryan) for who they are. I believe Shekar was trying to construct those two characters as deeply flawed individuals and not necessarily the best influences on Evie. But the play itself doesn’t support that. In the end, Evie learns that she wants sex because…well, I’m not really sure why. She has her first orgasm on a OBGYN’s table, and I guess that was her turning point? It wasn’t really clear. The characters turn to each other and shrug about how they’re all crazy. “Crazy,” in this case, means things like wanting to play WoW, or men wanting to dress in women’s clothing.
​
I feel weird writing this review. The Custom Made Theatre Company are good people – they put on an excellent production of Little Brother a few years back. And tearing apart a local theater production from a small company that’s really struggling is not something I want to do. Shekar’s heart was in the right place, I think. But the play ends up supporting a narrative that would make all of my asexual friends feel like freaks.
​
And I can still hear people laughing at me.
​
“In Love and Warcraft” is playing at Custom Made’s theater in San Francisco through December 12th.