Pretty Perfect Lives

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Gage Tarlton’s Pretty Perfect Lives asks the question: What is sadder: The people who have so little going on in their own lives that they latch on to the influencers who post inane content to an insanely devoted five million followers, or the said influencers not getting to live their own lives in the quest for being that steady stream of content for people that they will never know? The influencers stand to gain either way: the vast number of followers converts into lucrative marketing opportunities for any company that can prove they have something the followers can be convinced they need. This is Marketing 101 with no conscience, dollar signs upon dollar signs as unsuspecting lambs go to their slaughter.

Tiffany and Tucker are so “adorable,” and that is meant in the Biblical sense. Their followers adore them. Tiffany and Tucker can do no wrong, that is until some sincere self-questioning gets in the way of their being the perfect couple on which so many pin their daily lives and aspirations.

The problem is Tiffany and Tucker are human beings with feelings, or at least one of them is. Those poor human beings with feelings always get sideswiped in the game of life. They fall in love and are deluded into thinking they are loved back. Enter Tucker, sensitively played by Zane Phillips, as the sincere half of the influencer couple. There isn’t anything he wouldn‘t do to please Tiffany. He loves her so passionately, we even find later that he doesn’t care if she doesn’t love him back, but one must wonder why this is so. For Tiffany, was it just a frisson that eventually became something superficial once Tucker served his purpose? We witness videos of followers that would give anything to be with someone like Tucker: he is handsome, he is built, he is handsome, he is sincere, he is handsome, he is thoughtful, and have we touched on how handsome he is?

It is only in passing we discover that he is curious about men. “I’ve always thought of myself as being very comfortable with my sexuality, like I’ve always thought that dudes are hot, but like, I just kinda knew that I was only into girls…I still really like women, but I’m also like, maybe I like dudes, too. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not as straight as I thought I was…But, I don’t know, it’s just something that’s been on my mind. A lot.” Tiffany is okay with this…it makes for great content. And by the way, she secretly recorded this conversation.

Tiffany has no boundaries and completely defines “take no prisoners.” When Tucker expresses his hurt at her betrayal of his vulnerability, her insincerity in her “sorry” shines a light on her inability to not only see things as others experience them, but an unwillingness to ever take no for an answer if someone else’s dissension would impede the desired effects of what she plans to accomplish. For her, it is all about the engagement. She creates a platform for discussion and its success is measured by the number of people who participate. She pooh-poohs Tucker’s feeling of humiliation when a video of his sexual encounter with another man has gone viral. She is determined to keep the video up and has changed their password to keep Tucker from deleting it. And with regard to the other man, she is not even forthright with him. He thinks he is entering into a threesome; she just plans to watch (with a camera rolling). Everyone is at her disposal.

Elizabeth Lail as Tiffany is most successful in her video post after the encounter. “So yesterday, Tucker and I invited someone over that we met on this app called FEELD, which just so happens to be the sponsor for today’s video. FEELD is a dating app for open-minded people to find like-minded people. You all know I wouldn’t use an app that I didn’t personally love, so consider this my full-fledged endorsement.” There’s another similar endorsement for Neutrogena elsewhere in the play. Leave it to the playwright to find appropriate scenes for real product placement in a play about influencers. The playbill acknowledges that Pretty Perfect Lives is in collaboration with FEELD.

Nic Ashe as Jesse is utterly sympathetic. His entrance is very much that of a fly entering the spider’s web. He is totally believable in the segue into a “boyfriend” relationship with Tucker although being the social media addict he is we catch him ignoring Tucker in favor of perusing content on his phone. It does lead to a breakup we don’t get to see. The only manifestation we are privy to is Tucker’s inability to sleep but using the internet on his phone to enable him to fall asleep restlessly. Jesse’s segue into a relationship with Tiffany is utterly mystifying. She is not Miss Warmth by any stretch of the imagination and her inability to put others first in any situation truly comes to a head in their final exchange. “But I’m not the right person for you. You, this whole experience, it’s all becoming clear to me. And I need, I need, I don’t know exactly what I need, but it’s not this.” Ashe is haunting in a later sequence when he is being interviewed about his experience with Tucker and Tiffany. It culminates in a mournful realization that he was there to be used and abused.

Lail has the unenviable task of playing someone so heartless. Whereas she gives this character her all, it is the play that fails her. Even in a penultimate scene on a beach littered by shards of discarded media in the place of seashells, it is still an uphill battle for Tucker to convince Tiffany of his devotion with no hope of his love being honestly returned.

Director Gabi Carrubba keeps the pace interesting until the play takes us to scenes that need a scorecard. The Jesse-Tiffany boyfriend-girlfriend scene is one of those. The beach scene is another. Either man actively interested romantically in such a self-serving harpy defies reality. Unfortunately for the audience, those two scenes feel the longest. Having Tiffany set the stage for the beach scene is an unwelcome and poorly thought-out distraction during Jesse’s interview. The final scene is a sweet rom-com moment that sheds light on how the first meeting of Tiffany and Tucker must have looked and sounded, but placing Jesse at that wedding is merely a “red herring” that conflicts with what we know about Tucker.

Josh Oberlander’s scenic and costume design actively support the work, but the “nude” suits for the beach scene are downright odd. The reflecting surfaces and whiteness of the basic set are functional in taking us from location to location clearly. Zack Lobel’s lighting is sensitive to the scenery and his video design is often ingenious in setting the tone with “internet enhancements.” Emma Lea Hasselbach’s sound design firmly plants us in the internal workings of live media.

Tarlton’s work is not without promise. As a social critique of people who are surgically attached to their smartphones, it is somewhat spot-on. (Heaven forbid we miss that recent post documenting what was ordered in the latest restaurant!) At points when actors were immersed in their phones rather than looking at or speaking to each other, the silence of audience realization, or rather revelation, was deafening.

Pretty Perfect Lives (through September 8, 2024)

The Flea Theater, 20 Thomas Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.prettyperfectlives.com

Running time: 75 minutes without an intermission