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‘Jenny’s’ instant message

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Times Staff Writer

Jennifer Marcus sits alone in her Calabasas bedroom, typing and clicking. A 22-year-old wizard in cyberspace, she hardly ever goes anywhere else. Already an obsessive-compulsive, she has also become an agoraphobic.

The image of a computerized recluse is a strikingly modern emblem, but can Jennifer carry a play? In theater, people interact with each other in a shared, tangible space. People like Jennifer would never venture into one.

In “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” however, playwright Rolin Jones and director David Chambers venture into Jennifer’s world and evoke it in stirring theatrical terms. This premiere at South Coast Repertory’s Argyros Stage is a miniature but dazzling display of stagecraft that harvests many laughs and finally a few tears.

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Jones anchored his narrative in a very human quest that requires no computer skills to comprehend. Jennifer was born in China and adopted by Americans. Now on frosty terms with her mother and afflicted with psychological disorders she can’t understand, she wants to know more about her biological parents. She’d like to meet them.

It’s a difficult challenge, especially for someone who can’t even leave the house. So Jennifer decides to do it via virtual reality.

Understand that Jennifer is a genius. When she was in high school, her science project attracted the attention of the brilliant Dr. Yakunin, an expert in artificial intelligence. He wrote letters to colleges for her, but she never used them. Instead, she was hired and fired from minimum-wage jobs. She spent her time holed up in her bedroom, increasingly trying the patience of her mother, Adele.

When Jennifer resumes contact with Dr. Yakunin, he helps her obtain a Defense Department subcontract that involves re-engineering obsolete missile systems -- something she can do from home. She uses those contacts to obtain material to build a robotic incarnation of herself. Her plan is to send the robot to China, to find her birth mother.

Yes, there is an element of science fiction in Jones’ yarn. But the story is rooted in a recognizably real human personality and in Jennifer’s relationships with her parents, with her one friend outside cyberspace, and with the colorful personalities she encounters online.

Melody Butiu, as Jennifer, is a whirlwind of controlled and controlling energy. Jennifer’s use of voice recognition systems on her computer enable Butiu to leave her keyboard and prowl around the bedroom. Occasionally she emerges from her room for confrontations with her mother and reassurances from her father.

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Actress Linda Gehringer makes sure that we sympathize with Adele, who works overtime as a trade fair producer to pay the bills -- while her daughter can’t even take out the trash, let alone keep a job. April Hong plays the robot “Jenny Chow” with deft physical and vocal stylizations and echoes of the Frankenstein story.

The men are also superb: William Francis McGuire as the laid-back dad, Daniel Blinkoff as the laid-back friend and JD Cullum as four online friends and employers who are, more or less, the opposite of laid-back. Cullum has fun with the hilariously frenetic Dr. Yakunin and with a Mormon missionary in China who helps Jennifer in exchange for occasional online sex chats.

Most of the play’s scenes are flashbacks within the framework of an instant-messaging session between Jennifer and a bounty hunter, whose assignment we don’t immediately comprehend. The play’s subtitle is “An Instant Message With Excitable Music,” and Jones’ dialogue conveys the spontaneity of instant messaging, even though the production has been meticulously polished by director Chambers.

Chambers reunited the design team who worked wonders with his brilliant staging of “Search and Destroy” at South Coast in 1990. They use sliding screens, stark lighting contrasts and, yes, “excitable” music to illuminate this exciting new script.

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‘Jenny Chow’

What and where: “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow”; South Coast Repertory, Argyros Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. and 7:45 p.m.

Ends: May 18

Price: $27 to $54

Contact: (714) 708-5555

Running Time: 2 hours

By Rolin Jones. Directed by David Chambers. Sets by Christopher Barreca. Costumes by Dunya Ramicova. Lighting by Chris Parry. Music/sound by David Budries. Stage manager Jamie A. Tucker

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