The road to Silicon Valley implosion is paved with good intentions. In Rachel Bublitz’s dark comedy Burst, playing through July 26 from Fort Lauderdale’s New City Players at Island City Stage, the intentions of its lead character, Sarah Boyd (Nicole Hulett), couldn’t be nobler. Her firm, Tactix, is dedicated to discovering how to biodegrade plastic by chemically altering its polymers, thereby solving a “global crisis,” according to the World Resources Institute, one that generates 353 million metric tons of waste per year. So what if the science being conducted through her venture capital-funded headquarters in Mountain View isn’t quite—OK, isn’t even close to being—scalable yet? That’s what the next round of funding is for. Fake it til you make it, right?
Boyd’s presence in the show precedes her first appearance, as we take in Aubrey Rodriguez’s set design for Boyd’s office, where the action takes place over one monumental night. Before the play opens, our eyes are drawn to a clever mocked-up Forbes cover radiating the penetrating gaze of Hulett, as Boyd. It reminded me very much of the actual Forbes cover depicting Theranos CEO and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes holding a test vial of blood between her thumb and forefinger. This association, I soon found out, was intentional: The showbill’s notes from director Elizabeth Price are simply six quotes from Elizabeth Holmes, followed by the ominous phrase “The bubble is beautiful, until it bursts.”
We meet Sarah Boyd in a harried state, which is to say it’s just another Tuesday for this high-powered CEO. Although perhaps not just another day at the office, because over the course of the show, the mercurial founder will confront two specific but overlapping threats.
In the first, her company is to begin a trial of its own making the next morning, after it initiated a civil lawsuit against Boyd’s former professor and mentor at U.C. Berkeley, who has publicly stated that she doesn’t believe Tactix has the data to support its grandiose claims about eliminating 20 percent of the world’s plastics. Chemist Jennifer Weaver (Mary Gundlach), Tactix’ earnest co-founder and chief technical officer, whom Boyd met in college 20 years ago, is set to appear in court and lie about the false promises Boyd has made to her funders, and she’s having second thoughts about putting her reputation on the line. About half of the interactions in Burst center on this dilemma.
The other, juicier half, in terms of theatrical momentum, involves the appearance of a journalist, Alexis Lyons (Dayana Morales), for a late-night interview for an investigative feature into Boyd and Tactix. As Lyons’ demeanor, initially played by Morales as a bubbly fangirl enamored by her proximity to a Bay Area powerhouse, gradually gives way to the bulldog reporter in disguise, Boyd’s stage-managed persona finally begins to crack under the pressure. It’s a marvelously paced tet-a-tet, superbly acted and directed.
That said, Bublitz’s script can feel a little too schematic. Even the appearance of Lyons, though technically an unexpected story element, is telegraphed; when Boyd is informed that a female journalist is coming to her office instead of the chummy male reporter to whom she usually confides, she flies into a sexist tirade that insults the intelligence of all women writers—thereby teeing us up to expect the exact opposite, which is what we receive. I wanted to be surprised by Burst far more than I was.
Furthermore, Sarah Boyd is written as an overly familiar Silicon Valley archetype—a heartless sociopath with a lust for growth and power who will bulldoze anyone who stands in her way. Line after line underlines her staggering egotism: “I am changing the world.” “I’m nothing if not vastly impressive.” She compares her work, even in its fraudulence, to the inventions of the wheel and fire. I’m not sure if even the freaks who run some of our biggest tech companies talk this way, or if this is just how TV tech villains communicate.
But by God if Hulett doesn’t sell each and every line. The Aussie-born actress is magnetic, from her opening scene—in which she practices a hyper-polished version of her funding pitch—to the play’s close, a revisit of the same speech but in a transformed context. Playing Boyd with a manic, intimidating energy, she can be funny and menacing, often in the same breath. Inserting a crazed giggle to defuse tense moments, she can summon tantrums with the fist-slamming impatience of a tinpot dictator but just as easily turn on the charm and false modesty. It’s scary how accurate this performance feels.
From a technical standpoint, New City Players’ team excels in the wellness-coded language and style of firms like Tactix, from Boyd’s sweater vest with its company logo resembling a leaf (kudos to Costume Designer Casey Sacco) to the tastefully arranged coffee table books in the office, with titles like Little Joys and Stillness—nouns unknown to the perpetual motion machine that is Sarah Boyd.
The most impressive touch is the wall of recyclables at the back of the stage—thousands and thousands of plastic containers filling up a phalanx of storage units, bottom to top. It’s unclear if this museum-ready display is actually an element of Boyd’s office or it’s a symbolic suggestion of sorts from Scenic Designer Rodriguez, but either way, it feels fitting. There they are, the targets of our culture of convenience, piling up and bearing down, mocking the action below in all of their eternal stubbornness. Megalomaniacal CEOs may come and go, but the plastic is here to stay.
Burst runs through July 26 at New City Players at Island City Stage, 2304 N. Dixie Highway, Wilton Manors. Tickets cost $40. Call 954/376-6114 or visit newcityplayers.org.
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