‘Looking at You’ Review: Big Brother in Your Pocket

Kamala Sankaram and Rob Handel’s opera takes a hard look at surveillance in an app-based world.

ByHeidi WalesonSept. 10, 2019 4:38 pm ET

New York

Subjects for immersive theater don’t get much more relevant than the insidious spread of surveillance, which is cleverly explored in the opera “Looking at You,” by Kamala Sankaram and Rob Handel, now in its world premiere production at HERE, which co-produced the work with Opera on Tap and Experiments in Opera. Audience members receive lanyard ID badges as their tickets, and are invited to sign in with their “employee numbers” to get free drinks for consumption at their cabaret-style tables; we are attending what purports to be a tech-company party. So far, so benign. But about midway through the 82-minute performance, the tablet on my table started showing images from my Facebook page. My page is pretty tame, but by the end of the show, I had to wonder what else could be found out about me. That’s the point.

Mr. Handel’s artful, well-paced libretto and Ms. Sankaram’s lively music-theater-infused score limn the tale of Dorothy, an ambitious engineer who invents an app, CheckUOut, for Rix, the tech company that she has just joined. It’s supposed to be a relationship aid, as in letting you find out right away if that cute guy at the bar is someone you should date—but it is actually a powerful data miner that instantly collects and analyzes everything the internet knows about that person. Meanwhile, Dorothy’s boyfriend, Ethan (an Edward Snowden figure), has just released 1.7 million secret documents, the product of surveillance by 13 governments.

Gradually, the opera reveals a sinister connection between these two activities: Personal data mined from seemingly harmless social media can be commercialized and accessed by all kinds of entities. This privacy invasion is taken to its logical, weaponized extreme. At the app launch, the Department of Homeland Security swoops in on the audience member chosen as the app’s demonstration target and takes him away.

It’s a serious issue, but the creators avoid didacticism, instead skillfully deploying suspense and humor in their storytelling. Ethan contacts Dorothy from his secret location by hacking her Fitbit; there are sly “Casablanca” references to go with Rix.

The excellent singers deliver solid characters: Baritone Paul An as Raj, the hyper hacker-turned-tech-mogul who sees only how cool (and profitable) CheckUOut is; tenor Brandon Snook as Ethan, who explains his actions in a poignant ballad with the refrain “You don’t know how naked you are.” Mezzo Blythe Gaissert persuasively shows Dorothy grappling with the consequences of her creation. A backup trio— Adrienne Danrich, Mikki Sodergren and Eric McKeever —are the geek engineers who groove along with Raj…until they don’t. Ms. Danrich in particular shines in a soul-inflected aria that concludes, “Because you’re white / You’re not accustomed / To being surveilled.” The accompanying piano and three saxophones sound like a much more varied ensemble; they, along with the computer-generated backup chorus that emanates from the tablets on the tables, give the whole piece an insistent bass beat and murmuring background that contribute to the overall feeling of foreboding.

Nic Benacerraf’s scenic design is dominated by seven screens, with video by David Bengali, that bombard the audience with scrolling text messages, TV news reports, Facebook posts and, most sinisterly, the bits of personal information piling up and the dots that represent the data points swirling into shapes as “the algorithm learns.” Raj’s clownish pink-shorts tracksuit, with giant pockets in a contrasting fabric for his devices, belies his single-minded, amoral pursuit of cool ( Kate Fry did the costumes). Director Kristin Marting, who helped develop the piece, and music director Samuel McCoy wove the live performers and the video into an absorbing, frightening whole.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).