Review: "Very Blue Light" Offers an Anatomy of and Antidote to Our Times

Very Blue Light

Written by Daphne Silbiger

Directed by Emily Moler

Presented by The Tank and Isabelle Chirls at The Tank

312 W 36th St., Manhattan, NYC

September 10-October 4, 2026

Dom Martello, Sam Im, Anita Parrott, and Ellenor Riley-Condit. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.

It seems fitting that, on the Thursday we saw Very Blue Light, we each separately spent the day at our respective workplaces listening to talks about AI. While Very Blue Light is not about any single tentacle of Big Tech, this new play by Daphne Silbiger is very much concerned with our inescapably algorithmic zeitgeist, with living in a moment when it feels like, as one character puts it, "Shit's so weird." Very Blue Light brings one character, currently a Tesla employee, from Austin, Texas, to Marfa, a small, artsy desert city also known for its mysterious airborne lights, to visit a pair of old friends. As this visit unfolds, the production perfectly captures the pervasive anxiety that most of us live with right now, while holding out hope for real community and connection.

 Ellenor Riley-Condit and Sam Im. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.

The play begins with Magna (Dom Martello) and Angela (Ellenor Riley-Condit) having a conversation with each other on their smartphones about the internet habits of Coleman (Sam Im), the aforesaid Musk employee, a friend from high school whom neither woman has seen in a long time but who is now coming to stay with Angela. The pair worry about how Coleman may have changed, an early acknowledgement that keeping up with someone online is not the same as knowing them. Working for Big Tech, which he later says gives him a feeling of relative safety, Coleman lives in what amounts to a company town, a big contrast with Angela's "minimalist" home (his word; Raphael Mishler's set design gives us Angela's deck, occupied by a plastic chair, a lounger, and a cooler, and tall grass bordering the rear walls of the stage). Angela, who used to paint, plans to leave this home and move north to take a job at a bird conservancy–as a social media manager, of course. Magna came to Marfa for an artist's residency and never left, still dreaming, while she gets by, of getting a grant for a particular large-scale project she has conceived. Magna and Angela's friend Michigan (Anita Parrott) is a genderqueer Marfa native who works at a brunch place but, coming at tech from a different direction than Coleman, is also an activism-oriented programmer and hacker. At their first meeting, Michigan and Coleman fall into an extensive (and wonderfully written) debate that includes surveillance, exploitation, and technofascist neoliberalism and what, if anything, can be done by the commodified masses. But the conflicts here are not only abstract. Questions of technology are inextricable from their sociocultural context and intersections. At one point, for instance, Magna, a transwoman, feels that she has to ask Coleman, once her best friend, if he is MAGA. Angela, it transpires, while far from a tech bro, is herself feeling some conservative urges around sex and family (perhaps at least partly helped along by what her algorithm feeds her), and, in a tension that needs no ideological underpinning, Magna feels like Angela is abandoning her by planning to move.

Anita Parrott and Ellenor Riley-Condit. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.

It is noteworthy that, in some ways, Coleman and Michigan are not as diametrically opposed as you might think, disagreeing more about the uniqueness of and best response to our late (or for Coleman, post-) capitalist tech oligarchy. Similarly, Coleman's overall vibe may prompt Magna's question about his political alignment, but he does make some good points about the politics of distraction and division in his answer (it's of course the endpoint of such arguments that differentiates progressivism, for instance, from technofascism). Relatedly, one might wonder how much the internet (argument) culture in which Coleman, like so many, is steeped affects his difficulty talking about something like Magna's transition, about which the "why" is not easily debated or even debatable at all. At the same time, Angela's and Magna's discussions of their online experiences reminds us that it's not only the right-leaning but, as Magna says, anyone "open to stuff outside that middle lane" who can get "sucked into dark shit without realizing it."

Anita Parrott and Dom Martello. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.

On the very much not dark side of things, the rich colors in Jiahao (Neil) Qiu's lighting design are integral to mood-setting and scene transitions, in concert with sound design by Ari Cleveland that makes use on several occasions of a deep, powerful thrum that feels appropriately portentous. Im never lets Coleman approach stereotype territory, even in his difficulty communicating face to face about his emotions, while Riley-Condit gives a similarly multidimensional performance as Angela wrestles with what she wants, how she defines herself, and how she herself feels about Coleman. Martello is compelling as Magna, whether she is expressing the added fear of the past several years, giving Angela some tough love, or engaging in sweetly circumspect flirtation, something that Parrott's Michigan also gets to do, when they are not delivering fiery intellectual rebuttals–or homemade food to their friends. Blue light can of course refer to the eyestrain- and fatigue-producing emission of digital screens, but here, linked to the Marfa lights, it is something bigger, something beyond us and our fraught sociocultural moment, something shareable, something that Very Blue Light reminds audience members is still available to them, especially if they go outside and touch desert.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards