What if your car’s navigational system told you not only where to go, but also how to parent, when to invest, even which job offer you should take? That’s the flimsy premise of The Navigator, Eddie Antar’s wearing comedy at the WorkShop Theater Company.
Dave (Joseph Franchini) is a stock American dad, overextended in his family and financial obligations. He lost his job a few months ago, a fact he has hidden from his wife (Nicole Taylor) by getting in his car and going for long drives during the week. One day, the voice of his car’s GPS (Kelly Anne Burns) tells him to buy some stock, stock that his broker (Michael Gnat) advises is risky at best. Without revealing too much of the plot—the points of which you can see coming from miles away—the navigator’s tips pay off, and pretty soon, Dave is living on cruise control, answering questions before they’re asked. The novelty of his successes fades, and Dave finds little value in a life without choices.
Despite competent acting and design elements (Quentin Chiappetta’s sound design especially is sharp), The Navigator cannot overcome its anemic conceit. It takes only two or three right answers for the audience to tire of the Navigator’s prescience. Compounding the monotony, Antar fails to justify Dave’s smoldering resentment of his newfound fortune. The Navigator brings him from the brink of bankruptcy to solvency in a matter of weeks, staving off not only foreclosure, but also divorce and death. Yet Dave remains unfulfilled, leading him to a whimpering assertion of empowerment and self-possession.
In the end, Antar cannot earn the conclusion he draws, because his play is driven by a tiring device and devoid of engaging conflict. He neglects the Navigator’s corruptible nature, rendering Dave a bland regurgitation of the downtrodden everyman. Perhaps if the Navigator aroused some darker aspect of Dave’s character, the destructive climax would better avail itself. However, given the unchallenging relationship between man and machine here, Dave’s resolution feels like an impossibly idealistic expression of jackassery. Were unemployment and foreclosure rates not such a lingering threat, maybe Dave would play more sympathetically. But they are, and so he doesn’t.
The Navigator; Written by Eddie Antar; Directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby; WorkShop Theater; 312 West 36th Street, 4th Floor East; www.workshoptheater.org
