Beginning with the world’s most expressive case of car sickness, The Chroma Key lurches into territories one would only expect to encounter in cable TV’s unsurveyed peripheries: a noir scene all but *spoken* in black & white, a Socratic dialogue trapped inside a deranged game show, a menacing infomercial for a product with no obvious function, a martial arts training video that takes a tragic turn and keeps going, and a full-cast choreographed dance number/bodily resuscitation set to the theme song from St. Elmo’s Fire. All the characters in the play are inhabited by the woman at its center, but her consciousness has itself been taken hostage by the countless stories, pictures, ads and songs it’s let inside. Hilarious, strange, and upsetting, The Chroma Key is a 21st-century character study that is a dumpster dive through the 20th century’s cultural detritus. Touchstones are David Lynch, Beckett, Laurel & Hardy, Rivette, and the movie Sleepaway Camp.
