Futura—Can a font change the future?

Anne Sandoe as The Professor Photo: Brian Landis Folkins

Futura, by Jordan Harrison (Orange Is the New Black), opens with The Professor (Anne Sandoe) lecturing her students on the history and subtleties of writing, typefaces, and fonts over the millennia, from the destruction of the Library at Alexandria to Gutenberg and into the digital age, where the art and process of handwriting has virtually disappeared. As the lecture continues, we gradually come to understand, in this script, that following the digitalization of all books, all paper copies were collected and destroyed ... or were they?

The entire first half of this 85-minute one-act performance is a monologue, with Sandoe regaling us—using a lecturn and an informative PowerPoint display (Brian Freeland)—while dressed in an elegant silver power suit with just the right touch of modified design elements by Annabel Reader to connect us from the present fashion standards to some point in the not too distant, but searing, future.

Anne Sandoe as The Professor and Hallie K. Schwartz as Grace Photo: Brian Landis Folkins

Sandoe thoroughly captivates us with passion and erudition as The Professor covers a panorama of distilled ideas, putting us into the position of students who are both frightened and entranced by her persuasive power and command of these subjects, as well as her alternately austere, exacting, witty, and ascerbic delivery.

Harrison's script includes a wonderful short discourse on the convergence of font design and art, with The Professor noting that Futura is the only font to be registered as a work of art. Paul Renner created Futura, the font used in this review, in 1927. When the Nazis came to power, Renner was targeted for daring to abandon the formal Gothic austerity of German Blackletter font that had been in use since the time of Gutenberg.

Ami Dayan as Edward Photo: Brian Landis Folkins

Without spoiling the dramatic turn of events that take place toward the end of The Professor's lecture, let us say that we are quickly transported to a different location, where a small cabal is trying to resist the digitalization and control of all knowledge. This ruthless bunch—Grace (Hallie K. Schwartz), Gash (David French), and Edward (Ami Dayan)—sends chills down our spine, as they interrogate The Professor. Led by Schwartz' psychopathic, live-wire performance, we are thrust into a desperate world where the future of freedom of thought and expression hangs in the balance. Dayan's Edward, as the mastermind of the operation, is both wonderfully elusive and laser-like in intensity, while French is wholly enigmatic as the technology wizard and knowledge seeker.

Director Meredith C. Grundei's staging moves smoothly from the dynamics of The Professor's urgent entreaty to the desperate and frenetic actions of the resisters and, finally, to a revelatory site, amplified by transformative lighting (Sean Mallary) and sound (Freeland).

David French as Gash Photo: Brian Landis Folkins

At a time when the Google Books Library Project is well on its way to digitalizing the world's books, the NSA and other government agencies have a backdoor key to almost all devices and online sites and traffic, while legible handwriting is becoming a lost art, and knowledge and thought is increasingly manipulated by the power elite, Futura serves as a dramatic wake-up call for us and the steps we must take to preserve our most basic freedoms.

The Catamounts presentation of Futura—Can a font change the future?, by Jordan Harrison, runs through April 16th at the Nomad Playhouse in Boulder. For tickets: thecatamounts.org, 720-468-0487 or go to the ticket link: futura.brownpapertickets.com.

Bob Bows