Now You See Me

Claire has a significant relationship with her television: she talks, and it answers her. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she auditions to participate in a reality TV show so she can fight her "Final Battle" in front of millions of viewers. "A dark comedy with disturbing insights ... funny and provocative." -The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) "The technology of vanity is developing so quickly that NOW YOU SEE ME, the new play by Neal Bell, is almost a period piece already. The play imagines what would happen if a terminal cancer patient was the star of a reality T V show that would chronicle her own decay and death ... The play ... [is] crammed with intriguing ideas, dramatic and otherwise ... such as the suggestion that watching people die is a kind of pornography. Among the liveliest inventions is Bell's plainly deliberate use of stock television-show dialogue for his characters, echoed here and there by actual T V programs seen in fragments on one of two onstage screens. NOW YOU SEE ME comes on like a sitcom - it very nearly is a sitcom, a critique of the thing by nearly being it-and implicitly asks us whether reality shows aren't actually sitcoms themselves, a cheapening of everyone involved, including the viewer." -Adam Sobsey, Indy Week