You Cannot Undo This Action

Michelle Carter, Oregon Book Award Judge

Angus Bowmer Award for Drama, Oregon Book Award 2021

"There’s a laundry list of things you’d expect from a play about teenagers and technology– questions about its impact on their brains, their behavior, their moral and intellectual development. (“Is social media turning us into monsters?” one of the characters playfully asks.) But playwright Conor Eifler’s first concern is rendering teenagers as dimensional human beings, showing their world the respect of his compassionate attention. The teenagers of You Cannot Undo This Action are smart, hilarious, brave, fearful, wise, naive, and full of longing. They talk about love, death, Lin-Manuel Miranda, movie trailers, Shakespeare, streetlights, and atom bombs. They banter, flirt, read tarot, gossip, spar, kiss, and crack each other up. Technology gives these characters’ personalities full expression. The playwright immerses us in the space that technology creates, a world in which “what are you on?” doesn’t mean what it meant in the 60s. And then, in a turn of events so carefully constructed that it feels inevitable, danger comes to this community from an entirely 21st-century direction. Technology, which has given expression to these characters’ charm and innocence, also empowers those who would use their ingenuity to destroy what they can’t control. Does technology enable the best in us, or the worst in us? Like all wonderful plays, You Cannot Undo This Action leaves its questions with us, to carry away for ourselves." – Michelle Carter

https://literary-arts.org/2021/05/2021-oregon-book-awards-winners/