The Moderate

Play (2026)
by Ken Urban
Directed by Jared Mezzocchi
Central Square Theater
A Catalyst Collaboraitve@MIT Production
February 5 – March 1, 2026

Multimedia Designer: Jared Mezzocchi; Assistant Projections Designer: Emery Frost; Scenic Designer: Sibyl Wickersheimer; costume Designer: Chelsea Kerl; Lighting Designer; Sound Designer: Chritian Frederickson; Technical Director and Builder: Al Gentile

With Nael Nacer (Frank Bonner), Celeste Oliva (Edyth Bonner), Jules Talbot (Rayne), Gus (Sean Wendelken), Marin (Greg Maraio)

Frank, middle-aged, is looking for work and lands a job as an online moderator of potentially sketchy websites for a social media conglomerate. He is hired by Martin (Greg Maraio), a decent, but dutiful, manager of the group. A friendly and down-to-earth new colleague of Frank’s with a bit more tenure on the job, Rayne (Jules Talbot), offers him support and guidance in what begins to develop as a difficult challenge for him. In the course of perusing through many sites and having to determine whether to allow them to remain on the social media platform, Frank encounters a self-taken video by Gus (Sean Wendelken), a teenage boy who pleads for help. Apparently, Gus has been beaten by his father and is reaching out on social media to get some kind of support. Having seen this, Frank feels a responsibility to help Gus, but is warned by Martin that this is not Frank’s job. Rayne offers some good feedback, but Frank is placed in the difficult position of deciding what to do – if Gus’ video shows him actually being beaten, it is Frank’s job to take the site down. Meanwhile, Frank’s home situation involving his own wife, Edyth (Celeste Oliva), and their unseen son, is complicated. Edyth has recently moved out, frustrated by what she sees as Frank’s squandering of money and his expression of anger towards their son. How Frank is affected by Gus’ story informs how he responds both to his own son and to Edyth.

This brilliant production of a wonderful play deals with a harsh subject-matter but its mode of doing so is so deft, and the acting and direction so brilliant, that the pain of being exposed to the challenging subject-matter is outweighed by the artfulness of the presentation.

The ingeniously and inventively designed set by scenic designer Sibyl Wickersheimer and built by Al Gentile makes for a truly enveloping theatrical experience. With screens literally everywhere, the action, largely dramatized at the outset by video and slide images, is replicated on various surfaces of the main stage as well as on both walls to the sides of the stage and the audience. That replication is done tastefully and thoughtfully in such a way that the effect is cumulative rather than numbing. Nonetheless, the rendering of so many images – everywhere – makes one respond viscerally to the thematic injunction that screens have come to dominate our lives. The entire team which has put together the set, the lighting (Kevin Fulton), the projections (Jared Mezzocchi and Emery Frost) and the sound (Christian Frederickson) should be highly commended for how compellingly the stagecraft is done, situating compellingly this noteworthy theatrical experience.

This set of technical wonders is robust support for the truly superb acting of the entire cast. Led brilliantly by Boston theatrical treasures Nael Nacer and Celeste Oliva, this team of actors conveys a sense of the tragic drama underlying much of the cyber-realm in which we function, so filled with pain, punishment, sadism, and horrors of all sorts. The brilliance of the acting comes through the gradual appearance of the characters from cyberspace itself. At the outset, we almost totally experience these characters as images on various screens, but, as the play develops, they emerge, one after the other, onstage, as though their actual and tenable existences solidified from the mediated imagery though some evolving logic of compassion. Indeed, the play, though set in cyberspace and demonstrating the vivid challenges of operating within it, is all about humaneness and sensitivity, and how one deals with the challenges to that within the networked universe.

Indeed, as Frank and Edyth come into physical view, the power of their own conflicts and challenges come into view as well, and it is to the great credit of Nacer and Oliva that they make the portrayal of their marital conflict so immediate and compelling. One feels, in their presence, right in the midst of a vulnerable and intimate engagement, the complicated, fraught, overwrought, but very real and immediate, sense of their problems. And, because of the thoughtful and penetrating way the script presents this, and the wonderfully vivid and developed way that Nacer and Oliva under director Mezzocchi’s guidance have conveyed this, that one brings a sense of hope and possibility to this scene of despair.

As well, in the role of Rayne, Jules Talbot provides a witty, funny, but deeply thoughtful work counterpart to Frank, and both Nacer and Talbot carry off their engaging continuing dialogue very persuasively. Talbot manages to offer a truly Gen X sensibility to the role while seeming at once older and wiser than one might think, depicting gracefully this wonderful fusion of traits.

As Gus, the fraught kid who appeals for help on social media, Sean Wendelken is compellingly vulnerable without being maudlin and gives a palpably vivid sense of how difficult it is to ask for help in the midst of brutality. The onstage street scene, depicting Gus in actual interaction with Frank, is beautifully done, so evocative of the complexities of engagement in the cyberworld and difficulty with trusting connections made there.

As Martin, Greg Maraio, in a kind of straight-man role, does a fine job, navigating the official supervisory persona with an appropriate combination of relaxed informality and managerial urgency.

The play itself demonstrates incredible finesse by playwright Ken Urban, who alchemizes the superficially mundane world of social media into a horror show. That Urban manages so deftly to connect the challenges of this moderating job to the ordinary challenges in the lives of moderators is worthy of note. (I personally know someone who has performed this very function of site moderator on social media and have learned from them how horrific things can be and what a toll it can take on the moderators.)

It is interesting that two dramas about people who moderate, and are deeply affected by, upsetting social media content, are running concurrently in Boston. The other is Job at Speakeasy Stage Company.

This play has lots of X-rated content. (The person who accompanied me to the play felt overwhelmed and had to leave early because of the prevalence of difficult images.) Though thoughtfully contextualized in a superb production, this material is charged and demands preliminary awareness and appropriate caution beforehand.

Overall: A terrific production, brilliantly acted, directed and produced, not to be missed.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)