Fragmented reality: West End Productions stages vignette-filled 'Love and Information' at North Fourth Art Center

Humans want to know, they need to know, they have to know.

These sentences have likely driven every person who walked this planet.

Caryl Churchill’s “Love and Information” features 100 characters trying to make sense of what they know. The West End production opens on Thursday, Nov. 9, at the North Fourth Art Center. The play runs Thursday-Sunday through Nov. 19.

Churchill structured her piece as a series of more than 50 fragmented scenes, some no longer than 25 seconds, all of which are apparently unrelated, but which accumulate into a startling mosaic.

Splintered attention spans rule. Someone can’t get a signal. Another won’t answer the door. Someone put an elephant on the stairs.

“This is the strangest play I’ve ever been in or directed,” said Joe Feldman, director. “There’s no plot. There’s about 50 vignettes.”

The dialogue ranges from four lines to several pages. The vignettes explore the ways we long for, process and reject knowledge.

“The characters are not named,” Feldman said. “There’s no location. All the characters appear once only.”

The short scenes range from a family gathered to watch home videos to friends debating the existence of God.

The first catches a man and a woman mid-conversation. She has a secret; he wants to hear it; she’s indecisive, but finally whispers it to him. The audience can’t hear it.

“She’s created these vignettes with the precision of a surgeon,” Feldman said.

There’s a man talking to a female friend about his love for a virtual voice.

“She says, ‘It’s not real’,” Feldman said. “ ‘But what about the sex?’ He says, ‘It’s great’.”

Some sketches take a darker tone.

Two women taking a course on memory improvement are told to link the memory to a room in their house.

“The whole scene shifts into a very horrifying thing,” Feldman said.

The director says he took on the challenge because the script terrified him.

“It’s almost more like a poem than a play,” he said of its random nature.

“My speculation is she did this not so much to confuse the audience, but to keep them off-balance,” Feldman added. “Either people are going to enjoy it or they’re going to be so gobsmacked they’re not going to care for it.”

Churchill is a playwright known for dramatizing the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Originally produced at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2012, “Love and Information” moved to the New York Theater Workshop in 2014.