New play explores what search reveals about us
PHILADELPHIA -- They are an unquestionably bizarre set of Internet search terms: Mange. Human mold. White camellia. Dying Elmo.
Could those words also be clues to finding a missing person?
That's the premise behind User 927, a new production in Philadelphia that blends fact and fiction in the tale of a disappearance from a small Midwestern town.
"It's the world's first play based on a search log," director Michael Alltop said.
The story's central clue is the real-life online search log of an AOL subscriber — identified only as User 927 — that was released to the public two years ago in a well-publicized privacy gaffe.
Alltop said he was astonished when AOL intentionally released some 19 million search requests made over three months by more than 650,000 subscribers. The logs were meant to help academic researchers, but they were posted on a public site and quickly circulated once a blogger discovered them.
Although AOL had substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers' real user names, there were enough clues for The New York Times and The Washington Post to track down two of the users and identify them by name.
The identity of User 927 is still unknown. But Alltop was fascinated enough by that subscriber's freakish queries, including some disturbing sexual imagery, to commission a 90-minute play around the search log.
Alltop's friend, 30-year-old writer Katharine Clark Gray, crafted a story of a mother and her teenage daughter who move from Brooklyn, N.Y., to fictional Osterville, Ind., in search of a simpler life.
Shortly after arriving in their new home, Mom declares an "analog" summer for the two of them — no Internet, no e-mail, no computer.
But daughter Deena, 14, sneaks off to the public library and uses a computer there. With two friends she quickly makes online, Deena begins exploring an actual website that has copies of the AOL search logs, one of many created in the aftermath of the release.
Audience members see the queries on screens overhead as Deena and her friends delve into the logs, getting a glimpse into the lives of some users. The trio's interest in User 927 was piqued because previous visitors to the site had given that log high ratings.
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