Now You See Me
by Neal Bell

Claire has a significant relationship with her television: she talks, and it answers her.

Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she auditions to participate in a reality TV show so she can fight her “Final Battle” in front of millions of viewers.“A dark comedy with disturbing insights … funny and provocative.”

—The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)“The technology of vanity is developing so quickly that NOW YOU SEE ME, the new play by Neal Bell, is almost a period piece already.

The play imagines what would happen if a terminal cancer patient was the star of a reality T V show that would chronicle her own decay and death … The play … [is] crammed with intriguing ideas, dramatic and otherwise … such as the suggestion that watching people die is a kind of pornography.

Among the liveliest inventions is Bell’s plainly deliberate use of stock television-show dialogue for his characters, echoed here and there by actual T V programs seen in fragments on one of two onstage screens.

NOW YOU SEE ME comes on like a sitcom — it very nearly is a sitcom, a critique of the thing by nearly being it—and implicitly asks us whether reality shows aren’t actually sitcoms themselves, a cheapening of everyone involved, including the viewer.”

—Adam Sobsey, Indy Week