Two Comic Playwrights Find Dark Humor in Russian Aggression

Gancher is best known as a collaborating playwright on group-written musicals: she shaped both “The Lucky Ones” and “Hundred Days” with the husband-and-wife band the Bengsons; she co-wrote “Mission Drift” with the collective the TEAM. There are no songs in this project, so Gancher provides the orchestrated din of social-media chatter. The earlier production of “Russian Troll Farm”—co-created by TheaterWorks Hartford, the Civilians, and TheatreSquared, a company in Fayetteville, Arkansas—was one of the notable successes of the streaming-theatre era. (It won an Obie.) The characters appeared in familiar Zoom boxes, their faces uncomfortably close; as you looked at your screen, you could see the reflection of your own face, a ghost among machines. The Russian trolls were trying to lead normal lives—fall in love, keep their day jobs—while being sucked into the relentless online maw, but so were we all, and that bad-mirror symmetry was key to the show’s effectiveness. (Its co-directors, Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson, worked on this version as the video and projection designer and the dramaturge, respectively.)