Charles
Isherwood

September 13, 2015

The title is a tease in the new play “Judy,” by Max Posner. We never meet a woman by that name, but that’s the least of the oddities in this ponderous puzzle, set in 2040. Generally dramas taking place in the future push hard on the futurism, but Mr. Posner’s 25 years ahead doesn’t seem wildly more exotic than today, except that everyone apparently lives in basements, most people have forsworn profanity (fat chance) and Internet connections are worse (a disturbing thought). Also, people are weirder, and tend to wander off point into thickets of inanity. When the computer (or “System,” as it is called) belonging to Timothy (Danny Wolohan) goes on the fritz, Markus (Marcel Spears), the shy tech guy who arrives to fix it, gets an earful of this: “Judy was just asking me upstairs as she was getting out of the shower … her skin was very damp, you know, H2O gathered in the shoulder dips? What’s the medical word for shoulder dip? You know: the sinking skin round the bone under the neck? Am I talking about a clavicle? Do you have a girlfriend?” Presented by Page 73 at the New Ohio Theater, “Judy” relates the mostly glum, disjointed lives of three siblings living in an unnamed city. The unseen title character is Timothy’s wife, who despite that odd monologue has apparently left him as the play begins. When he was relating this news to his older sister, Kris (Deirdre O’Connell), his computer went kaput.