goestoshow

Criteria, a sci-fi dystopic ‘thriller’ (in so far as a one man play can be a thriller) was very good. It had all the makings of a good 60s sci-fi short story. The premise was that the US has, in the 24th century, broken up into 6 countries based on the first number of the social security number for the states in them(I looked on wikipedia and a lot of the bits of information about SSNs used for the premise of the play seem to be incorrect, so I won’t go into a lot of detail on that), which were then swallowed up into 3 larger superstates based on the prefixes 2 (Twoland — the eastern states), 4 (Fourland — the middle states, a stripe beginning on the south side in Texas), and 5 (Fiveland — the western states with California being the dominant).

People in these new states have their SSNs tattooed to their hands as a means of identification, and there’s lots of racial allegory in the way the dominant SSNs treat both each other and the less dominant prefixes (0, 1, and 3). The main character is from Fourland, and is part of a government program to use untattooed people as terrorists against Fiveland. The audience follows him on his journey to blow up an important train via suicide bombing, which is a pretty relevant topic.

I felt it a bit slow, such that a lot of scenes seemed to drag on a bit longer than they should have, but it was still pretty good. On going in, they stamped a SSN on people’s hands as a ‘participation stamp,’ which had me worried we’d have to do something, but we didn’t.