Alexis
Soloski

April 12, 2015

Nina, a Russian woman now living with her sister in America, finds herself back in her childhood apartment. She sees her mailbox, her mother’s kitchenware, her father’s vodka bottles, “all the books we left behind.” But Nina isn’t really home; she’s watching her nephew play a version of the video game Call of Duty, set in Pripyat, the Ukrainian town she was forced to evacuate after the Chernobyl disaster. “Ludic Proxy,” an ambitious and intermittently successful drama written and directed by Aya Ogawa for the Play Company, takes its title from a particularly contemporary phenomenon: the feeling that we know a place in reality because we have encountered it virtually. (A few years ago, my husband was driving on a Miami causeway for the first time when he realized he knew the route already — from Grand Theft Auto.) The play shows how the simulated can adjoin, infuse or ultimately replace the actual. In the first and strongest section, Nina (Jackie Katzman) slips between her rose-colored Russian girlhood, as she rehearses the part of Nina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” and the starker present-day world of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. As her nephew and his friend play Call of Duty, actors create the game’s visuals by using tiny cameras to film a dollhouse (beautifully conceived by the lighting and video designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew).