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There's No Place Like It, a play about love, disconnection and technology, by Rivka Rocchio, was featured and produced by Arizona State University's TheatreLAB series. 

• Thursday, October 30, 2017 7:30PM
  

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Selection from There's No Place Like It:
TINA
We used to wrap up in each others’ arms. And the presence meant something and our arms

LEVI
Our hands

TINA
were decidedly one another’s

LEVI
Intangible, but manageable, real. Your dark eyes…                                                                         

TINA
In absence, love became fettered to the earth. Our connection chained to phones. This untouchable feeling now grounded. Now enclosed in clear boxes. 

LEVI
But in this separation, free from the leering gaze of others.  Your pixelated love, sometimes clearer in the grains.

TINA
Our voices moving across lines. Through space and time. Our declarations reaching through the air. Intangible-

LEVI
but still somehow manageable. A feeling. A connection. 

TINA
But now we’ve moved to texts.

LEVI
I can message you instantly. I love your dark eyes. 

TINA
But words are thought without breath. Without life. And now, even in our presence, we are absent. 

LEVI
Hyper-connected moments. You know the moment I think of you. Our messages have layered the days with new meaning. 

TINA
You have wrapped your words in someone else’s convention and form. Abbreviated by haste so that even you becomes u. 

LEVI
From three letters to one. 

TINA
A hollow vessel I could never fill and i, with its short pillar base and floating cloud-like pinprick –  

LEVI
Doesn’t even come close. 

TINA
Stripped of punctuation: The loving warmth of parenthesis. The urging on of commas, or the decisiveness of a period.

LEVI
Free from conventions, we linger in ellipses and dashes. Our half thoughts leading the other on- 

TINA

But never creating a whole. Stripped of words. We used to wrap up in each other’s arms. Our skin just a mask for a skeletal connection. The closest we could be. 

Do you remember that feeling?