“Dickhead” is New Play That Satirizes How Tech Complicates Modern Family
This East Village Theater, long known for its progressive plays, is featuring “Dickhead” through Oct. 13. Our resident theater columnist Michele Willens chats with the playwright Gil Kofman and gets his take on how AI and tech intrude into family matters in this riveting take on modern life.
| 27 Sep 2024 | 12:21
Dr. Adams (Frank Licato) and Richard (Ezra Barnes) are in therapy. Richard asks about hypnosis to recover his lost password. (
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Darcy(Kai An Chee) on her OnlyFans Site. (
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Dr. Adams (Frank Licato) and Richard (Ezra Barnes) are in therapy, where Richard recollects a traumatic childhood memory. (
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Junior (Wyatt Fenner) is lost in the metaverse as Darcy, his mother, (Kai An Chee) and Bobby his father (Glen Feinstein) discuss his poor performance in school. (
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Here comes an off Broadway show sure to mess up our minds—hopefully in an instructive way. Think Norman Rockwell meets The Jetsons, says Gil Kofman, the playwright of—pardon the expression—“Dickhead.“ The subject here appears to be traveling through these sometime terrifying Tech times.
“The manner in which technology invades, infects, and transforms our lives has always been fascinating and confounding to me,” says Kofman. “On the surface it appears to accelerate and change everything with the praxis of its frictionless application—but underneath the change is much slower, if it all.
‘Our staid natures and cravings often remain imperturbable in the tsunami of such advances—aging dinosaurs stuck in our own emotional mud,” he says “and it was this evident, almost satiric, contrast that gave birth to “Dickhead.”
And there is more, all dealing with the public and the personal. “Parts of the particular story developed in a more desultory and aggregate fashion,” he says, “reading an article on the loss of bitcoin passwords, the Only Fans site featured on my feed, and testing a VR headset. But the family tapestry always held them all together, and I hope the audience can appreciate and recognize—and yes laugh—at the fundamentals of this story and how it’s transmogrified our family ideals in the era of technology and unfolding AI.”
Interestingly, it was an actual news story that set the playwright off. “The original catalyst/inspiration for the play around which everything was shaped and arranged was the real news story of a family man who kept exhausting his guesses for the password to his bitcoin wallet, which, to his frustration, kept multiplying in value before his eyes.
This was the center of gravity for the play around which everything revolved. It is the nucleus for the family dynamics that then shaped around it and gave the play life. In this way, the play somewhat resembles the popular new novel “The Long Island Compromise,” in which a wide canvas is built round an actual kidnapping.
What does the playwright want audiences to exit the theatre feeling? “Although I want the audience to laugh and enjoy the play as it’s unfolding, I also hope they can recognize the substrate of a more basic reality that is constantly buried by today’s technology,” he says. “The technology here is almost another way to satirize and exaggerate the less visible dynamics at work–like ice capades on ice, accelerating the almost cartoonish movements of figures on skates”
“Dickhead” kicked off on September 26 and runs through Oct. 13. Located at 155 1st Avenue, Theater for the New City was founded in 1971 and is known familiarly as “TNC,” It is also known for highly progressive political plays and community commitment. This one fits the bill.
Michele Willens’ “Stage Right..or Not” airs on NPR’s Robinhoodradio.