Sell/Buy/Date Written and performed by Sarah Jones Directed by Carolyn Cantor Playing at New York Live Arts until January 16 Note: This article concerns the workshop production of Sell/Buy/Date staged in New York in January 2016 A woman with a barcode tattooed on her ass. That was the image that stuck with me after Sarah Jones finally broke character and used her own voice to thank Friday night’s audience for attending this special workshop production of her exceptional one-woman show. Sell/Buy/Date is a humorous look at an unfunny subject — the sex industry’s capacity for exploitation — and it will be fascinating to see how the show develops during the course of its run at New York Live Arts and the months before of its world premiere later this year. Sell/Buy/Date is a work of speculative fiction. Set roughly a hundred years from now, the play explores potential developments in the relationship between sex and technology, and their effects on human interaction and psychology. Jones is a professor using “bio-empathetic resonant technology” (BERT) to teach her students about the sex industry of the past, a sort of VR that provides an alibi for Jones to adopt a series of personae who can tell us the imagined future-history of the twenty-first century. One […]

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Salman Rushdie Random House, 2015; 304pp Salman Rushdie‘s twelfth novel is a New Yorker’s Arabian Nights, a wryly witty, promiscuously intertextual work that offers delirious pleasures and fantastical beings in equal measure. Our world — New York in the present day — has been beset by “strangenesses”. A gardener who hovers an inch or so above the ground, an abandoned baby who identifies moral corruption in her presence by inflicting disfiguring sores on its source, lightning strikes, wormholes. Much as midnight’s children, in the novel of that name, derived their telepathic powers from an accident of birth, so the people on whom these strangenesses center share a common (supernatural) origin, a jinnia named Dunia who fell in love with the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd and bore him enough children to guarantee a healthy global distribution of descendants eight hundred years later. As we move between happenings in our world and Fairyland, we learn that, in order to save the world, a showdown between humankind and the four Grand Ifrits, the dark jinn, must be provoked — and won. Two Years‘ overarching narrative concerns an alleged philosophical disharmony between faith and reason. Ibn Rushd, when we meet him in […]