DateMe: An OkCupid Experiment Takes Comic Aim at Online Dating Sites Customs

Robyn Lynne Norris’s free-form satire makes its premiere that is off-Broadway at Westside Theatre.

Go on it from a veteran: on line dating suuuuucks. Yes, apps like OkCupid, Tinder, and Hinge reduce in the awkwardness that is included with approaching prospective love interests in individual and having to discern a person’s singlehood into the beginning. But placing aside the reality that even the many complex algorithm can’t constantly anticipate in-person chemistry, forcing potential daters to boil themselves down seriously to a self-summary leads people to not just placed across an idealized type of on their own for general general public usage, but in addition encourages individuals to latch on the many surface-level aspects to quickly see whether someone’s worth pursuing romantically. For females especially, online dating sites can also be dangerous, leaving them available to harassment or even even worse from toxic males whom feel emboldened by the privacy associated with Web.

Yet, internet dating remains popular, hence which makes it a target ripe for satire. Enter #DateMe: An OkCupid Test. Conceived by Robyn Lynne Norris, whom cowrote the show with Bob Ladewig and Frank Caeti, and located in component on her behalf very very own experiences, the task is simply an extended sketch-comedy show, featuring musical figures, improvisatory sections with market involvement, and interactive elements (the show features its own OkCupid-like flirt software that everybody is encouraged to install and create pages on prior to the show). In the place of a plot, there is a character arc of kinds: Robyn (played in this premiere that is off-Broadway Kaitlyn Ebony), finding by by herself obligated to test OkCupid the very first time, decides to see just what is best suited in the software by producing 38 fake pages. If that appears overzealous, a few of her guidelines — including never ever meeting some of the individuals she converses with online — declare that this experiment that is so-called been made to fail through the outset. The cynicism and despair underlying Robyn’s overelaborate ruse is sometimes recognized through the show, with items of pathos concerning hints of the troubled romantic past and recommendations that she’s got difficulty making deep connections with individuals as a whole peeking through the laughs.

For the part that is most, though, #DateMe is content to keep a frothy tone while doling down its insights.

Robyn’s findings of seeing lots of the exact exact same expressions and personality faculties on pages result in faux-educational sections where the other countries in the eight-member cast, donning white lab coats (Vanessa Leuck designed the colorfully diverse costumes), break people on to groups. Perhaps the creepiest of communications Robyn gets on OkCupid are turned into cathartically amusing songs (published by Sam Davis, with words by Norris, Caeti, Ladewig, and Amanda Blake Davis). Of course such a thing, the two improvisatory segments — one out of that your performers speculate how a very first date between two solitary market users would get according to their pages and reactions with their concerns, the other a dramatization of a gathering user’s worst very first date — turn into the comic features for the show (or at the very least, these people were during the performance we went to).

It surely assists that the cast — which, along with Ebony, includes Chris Alvarado, Jonathan Gregg, Eric Lockley, Megan Sikora, Liz Wisan, Jillian Gottlieb, and Jonathan Wagner — are highly spirited and game. Lorin Latarro emphasizes a feeling of playfulness inside her way and choreography, particularly with a collection, created by David L. Arsenault, that mixes the aesthetic of living spaces and game programs; and projections by Sam Hains that infuse the show aided by the appropriate sense of multimedia overload.

#DateMe is really so entertaining into the moment that only later were you aware exactly just how trivial its view of internet dating in fact is. Today for this viewer at least, it was disappointing to notice the show’s blind spot when it comes to race and how discrimination still plays out on dating apps. As well as on a wider degree, the show fails to link the rise of dating apps towards the predominance of social networking in particular, encouraging a change more toward immediate satisfaction than in-depth connection. Similar to associated with the very very first dates dating apps will likely deliver you on, #DateMe: an experiment that is okCupid a completely enjoyable break without leaving you with much to remember after it really is over.