What I liked
The acting was very well done and the story was brilliant.
What I didn't like
I’m sad that the audience during my viewing of this play was so sparse.
My overall impression
Violence in often overlooked these days thanks to the abundance of violence in video games and movies and television. Real violence is recapped every day, multiple times a day, on the news and newspapers and shared through social media sites. People have become so immune to the real violence and war that happens every day unless they see it up close and personal. Overlay takes an unnerving and yet brilliant look at war in a story of a dystopian future who uses virtual reality video games using an “overlay machine” to escape the reality of everyday violence. The story is told through various characters like the “handler” who uses a certain set of skills to calm people down and convince them that everything is okay and her husband who works on the virtual reality games and cannot quite handle the reality of what he is doing. Then there is the “clean up” crew who thinks she is playing a fun game with dancing flowers until her overlay machine glitches out and she sees that she is actually picking up body parts in the destroyed warzone. The advancement and problems with the overlay are explained through someone who started out in the real war zone, moved into overlay war zones where they saw teddy bears getting shot instead of people, and finally working on the overlay machines and creating the virtual realities themselves. Overlay is a deep and slightly unsettling story with an interesting look at what the future of technology could perhaps bring to our own future.
