The Dostoevsky novella Notes from Underground was adapted into a play that I watched last night at The Yale Rep. It was quite romantic to sit by myself in a packed theatre, mesmerized by the bits of falling snow on the sparse-and-skanky set of the Underground Man’s apartment, with its stacks of filing boxes and makeshift chairs made from parcel delivery containers. Though it was 120 minutes of an older man at his wit’s end and on a rant, I couldn’t take my eyes off the performance. I never even thought to glance at my Blackberry or my watch.

The production used video camera footage projected onto the wall, so that the audience could simultaneously watch the Underground Man’s body on stage and his hyper-mediated face blown up while he documented himself. The white walls of his cell-like lodgings were transformed by enormous moving images: Bauhaus apartments flashing by in black and white, neon lights and highway stripes, and even male party guests wearing tuxedos and sipping champagne like bobbleheads. The distorted movements—from the bulbous and sweaty Underground Man, to his gamine twenty-year-old prostitute—made for exquisite unease. During the final rape scene the audience was breathless.

It reminded me of the endurance of any period of over-consciousness or self-reflection in one’s life: painful, even torturous, but always cinematic.

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