The phoniness of our cellular lives

In the ‘60s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that if the videophone ever caught on, the world would become a global theater. It’s a pleasing prospect, but camera cellphones to the contrary, we appear to have chosen to go the other way at the moment.

“Alladeen” -- the extravagant multimedia theater piece that opened at the REDCAT on Wednesday night -- shows the world having become a global village precisely because we don’t know who is on the other end. If seeing is believing, hearing can be trickery. The telemarketing Texan who has just interrupted your dinner is probably in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. That too is theater, but a disembodied kind.

The central figure in “Alladeen” is the telephone, although we never see it. Everyone -- whether it is a young woman on the streets of New York trying to make an airplane reservation over the phone or the clerk fielding her call in Bangalore -- wears a headset, talking while looking vacantly into space. Physical human interactions are a distraction from the earnest business of telephony.

What we do see is the world from the perspective of the computer screen, and all the visual candy that it can bring us. This is a glossy multimedia spectacle full of dazzling technology that actually works, and it is easy to see why it has been such a hit as it tours the world’s arts festivals.

If “Alladeen” is to dwell on the curious enchantment of globalization, it needs perspective, and its own global credentials are impressive. It is a seamless collaboration by companies in two theater capitals. The direction is credited to Marianne Weems, who heads the Builders Association in New York. Design comes from Keith Kahn and Ali Zaidi of the London company motiroti.

Underneath them comes a list of credits practically as long as those for a feature film. And the show is very much like a film, partially enacted before a cinematically wide screen on which is magically assembled, through computer wizardry, a Virgin Megastore in Manhattan or London. Yet it is thanks to a wizard of conventional theater and opera lighting, Jennifer Tipton, that virtual reality enhances rather than dwarfs theatrical reality.

Alladeen is an Indian pronunciation of Aladdin. These telephone service centers in India are wish machines for parties on both sides, and part of the disturbing charm of “Alladeen” is to show that the magic lamp is far from perfect. In the central scene in Bangalore, young Indians learn to “neutralize” their “mother tongue influences” and become “sensitized” to America by watching television shows, such as “Friends.”

But, of course, neutralizing the mother tongue can’t neutralize the deeper levels of cultural comprehension. Baseball, for instance, is understood as developing the mood of sacrifice, as the game of rebirth because it is played in the spring. The more violent football, on the other hand, is a winter sport, hence it’s manner of destruction.

Once these Indian technology workers begin to interact with Americans, there is endless possibility for cultural collisions, with the ever-present possibility of desperation on both ends. The Indians work through the night and lose their own identity while attempting to find new ones they only partially understand. Meanwhile, some of the Americans at the other end are plain crazy.

A man lost in Yosemite and freaking out calls for directions. A young Indian woman with Silicon Valley fantasies gets carried away when booking a flight from San Jose for an Indian in California.

These are all treated humorously, so as not to ruffle the ever-merry surface of “Alladeen,” and we soon learn to expect a new technological delight around every corner. A Bollywood beat keeps the pulse lively. On large computer projections, we are happily bombarded with video interviews of real workers in Bangalore. Errol Flynn pops up when one overeager worker, Aman (Joey is the name he assumes on the phone) goes for the telephonic kill. The cast -- Rizwan Mirza, Heaven Phillips, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jasmine Simhalan and Jeff Webster -- is uniformly impressive, especially in its mimicking of accents.

Yet all the technological glitter doesn’t add up to much in the end. “Alladeen” doesn’t attempt to address the political issues of globalization or outsourcing, but it does, in just a little more than an hour, create an underlying mood of discomfit that didn’t hit me until sometime after the flickering images and the Bollywood beats faded.

Everyone has a wish, and everyone is easily deceived. These young Indians are losing touch with the central aspects of Indian philosophy and ways of finding fulfillment as they are literally brainwashed with the American dream. American entrepreneurs are technology pimps.

The globetrotting young woman in New York making her cellphone reservations is last seen in a karaoke club in London, talking to her boyfriend on the phone as she dances by herself. Neon flashes. The bartender amusingly riffs on Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” “Keep talking,” she tells her boyfriend, “and I’ll keep dancing.”

The more ostentatiously technological these people become, the more desperate becomes their addiction to it and the lonelier their lives.

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‘Alladeen’

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

When: Today-Sunday, 8:30 p.m.

Ends: Sunday

Price: $34-$38

Contact: (213) 237-2800