Review: BETC's "Ideation" is a creepy and very funny comedy
Aaron Loeb’s Ideation is a shot to the gut — not a primitive one, but a sophisticated, fine-tuned thrust, as if a Victorian gentleman had whipped the concealed blade out of his ivory-headed walking cane and pierced you through the middle. Except that this play isn’t elegant, exactly. It’s a fast-talking, whip-smart spoof of management consultants that also evinces a certain wistful admiration for their skill in slicing and dicing knotty problems into small and apparently logical pieces and fitting those pieces together in ways that smooth, sanitize or obliterate their misshapen contours. And it’s also an over-arching look at a contemporary world in which you can’t trust what you’re told, the ground tends to keep shifting under your feet, and Big Brother is undoubtedly watching — perhaps from the skies over Europe, perhaps thanks to a tiny filling placed in your tooth at the dentist’s. Although these examples don’t appear in Ideation, the play does evoke such paranoid imaginings, along with icy shivers along the spine. Which makes it perhaps the creepiest comedy I’ve ever seen — though also one of the funniest.