The octet is a musical ensemble of eight, which isn’t a huge number — certainly not on a theatrical stage or for a classical chorus. Yet the octopus has just that same eight tentacles, and in horror tropes it inevitably signifies endless, grasping, inescapable entanglement. A tidy dichotomous frame, that, for Dave Malloy’s chamber musical “Octet,” with its crystalline harmonic evocations of technological concepts and its deep, dark doubts about the clickably addictive nightmares we’ve built with them.
Malloy, the endlessly curious experimentalist behind Broadway’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” among other, even less likely musicalized interrogations, here tackles both our collective tech jones and the ever-expanding universe of faith- or philosophy-based collective recovery programs. Eight variously suffering souls assemble in what appears to be a church basement, where they’ll share fragments of their stories and work through a set of steps (not a dozen this time, just a thematically apt two-thirds of that number) in search of something like peace, trading vaguely opaque hymns and talking one by one through sexual compulsions, gaming obsessions, shopping rabbit-holes and endless dives down lonely information silos. Bleaker impulses, too: Nihilism and sadism and misogyny whisper alienated come-ons from the darkest corners some of these broken individuals have been exploring, and all of them wonder justifiably whether they can really ever be redeemed.
Eight, a dramaturgic note in the program observes, is the number of bits in a byte down there in the depths of the digital well, and the Arabic numeral that represents eight is the same figure we use, turned sideways, to symbolize infinity; that the same infinity symbol appears throughout the cards of the standard Tarot deck appears to mean something here, too. Let that go, though, lest you tie yourself in irritable knots, and be content to enjoy the way Malloy and the admirable cast of David Muse’s handsome in-the-round production build an intense and intimate atmosphere, a space shadowed by humanity’s worst impulses and scoured by truly remarkable sounds.
Did I mention there’s no band? The singers are on their own in “Octet,” if you don’t count their pitch pipes. (Which do, come to think of it, get deployed together briefly in a kind of poor-man’s-harmonica choir.) That means the root sounds here are of the inescapably organic sorts only a body can produce. No strings, no synths, only human noises, further highlighting the gulf between the analog animals we are and the digital distractions we’ve so thoroughly saturated ourselves in.
The songs themselves spill out in a multiplicity of styles, with ensembles as sophisticated as Renaissance motets, and solos as spare and bare-hearted as purest folk. “Fugue State” deploys a metronome and percussive syllabification to suggest the exhausting pace of life at the speed of obsession; “Solo” layers cheesy chatroom banter and a seductively bluesy vocal over warm choral suspensions to explore the alternately banal and intoxicating dynamics of online dating — before whipsawing into the grimmer territories of inceldom. “Candy” sounds like “Hee Haw’s” All-Jug Band on a sugar high (Angelo Harrington II is the winsome soloist), while “Glow” is pure love-lost ballad, a limpid soprano solo from meeting leader Tracy Lynn Olivera describing intimate estrangement over shining harmonies from the rest of the choir.
If it sounds like a bit much, well … it is? Malloy’s is a lively intellect, and he’s trying to paint a picture of something huge — the entirety of digital culture — in what’s essentially a one-act opera. This will not, to put it mildly, work for every audience. But at his best the writer is an idea juggler on a level with Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard, determined to wrestle with what makes us human and what makes humans so awful so often.
So endlessly forgivable, too: After its unsparing, despairing assay of digital depravities, “Octet” will come around, perhaps too quickly for some, to the cautionary observation that even the most agile minds can get lost in logical thickets — and to the acknowledgment, in a solo from a meeting newcomer (Amelia Aguilar), that if technology can offer just one genuine connection to one person genuinely in need of it, its darker aspects may not be entirely irredeemable: “And I found her/ And she found me/ In the lonely ugly chaos of/ the internet. … And she is beautiful beautiful beautiful.”
That’s true of all technologies, of course, from speech to the written word to the atom-splitting tools that simultaneously empower and imperil us. What “Octet” understands about addiction, and about recovery, is that none of us is individually in enough control to do much about any of it — but that collectively, with rigorous honesty and what one might call a ruthless shared humility, we can contain ourselves enough to contain the damage.
Octet, through Feb. 22 at Studio Theatre in Washington. About 1 hours 40 minutes without intermission. studiotheatre.org.
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