In early June 2013, two journalists—columnist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras—arrived in Hong Kong to meet with a disgruntled techie named Edward Snowden. Remember him? A million news cycles ago Snowden became famous for using his top-secret government security clearance to download a cache of documents proving that the National Security Agency surveilled Americans on a vast and indiscriminate scale, dropping into our digital lives to collect as many as three billion pieces of information in a single month. Snowden had come to Hong Kong to prepare for life on the lam, Greenwald and Poitras to get hold of his files. News stories based on the material started appearing just a few days later.
Oona turns out to be a 30-year-old free spirit—not merely a foil to Vernon but his polar opposite. Where Vernon’s default outfit is a business suit, she wears desert-war khakis. Where he’s thoroughly digitized, spending his life in a computer-screen glow, she’s philosophically analog, having only just conceded the necessity of a flip phone. (“I think Steve Jobs is a cultural war criminal,” she tells Vernon, “turned the whole world into drooling zombies.”) Where he’s “as tightly wound as a Swiss watch”—and a health-conscious one, at that—she smokes like a chimney. Among Oona’s first moves as she settles into the room they’ll share for the next week are to reopen the curtains and insist he stop calling her Mrs. Babbage.
Through 4/2: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM Den Theatre 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee 773-609-2336route66theatre.org $25-$30, $20 students
