I Am a Camera

A slight but moving meditation on photography and identity, I Am a Camera inverts the passage in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories from which it takes its title (“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”); Stainken and Sher think and think and think about the way visual images speak to our senses of ourselves. Camera is also the purest prime-time iteration we’ve seen of the Neos’ Too Much Light performance philosophy, which stipulates that the performers play only themselves, not characters. As their childhood photos flash onscreen, Sher and Stainken casually reveal personal details: from their ages (Sher is 40, Stainken 25) to their health-insurance status to their Social Security numbers. In another set piece, we see them silhouetted against vacation photos as they narrate their travel experiences. In an interview segment, the two ask each other intimate questions that they answer by choosing from a stack of photos of themselves shot by Allen.

Stainken and Sher are casually engaging, and much of what draws us in is their chemistry and a question that goes unanswered, about the nature of their real-life relationship. But while Allen and the performers find plenty of nifty uses of photography, we can’t say they achieve much insight into the nature of our relationship with the medium. Much of the show, set to a soundtrack of camera-themed tunes by the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Death Cab for Cutie, feels like vamping to fill out the hour: A sequence in which the actors use sheets of paper to catch small pieces of projected photos is a lovely image, but it goes on for three songs.

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