The Blind Date Project (part of PS 122’s Coil Festival), an unscripted play, makes one aware of certain unexpected convergences between performing improv and going on a blind date. It turns out that the two activities can require a similar skill set – openness to the unknown; a determination to take a positive attitude toward your partner’s suggestions and conversational overtures; a refusal to let your composure crack, no matter how weird things get – and both can also present plenty of opportunities for awkward silences, spiking anxiety, gushy over-enthusiasm, and, if the night is going well, enthusiastically mediocre karaoke performances.

So, as Anna and Harry meet at the bar in the back room of the Parkside Lounge, the audience clusters at the tables and booths that fill the rest of the space and become eavesdroppers on someone else’s first internet date: every tentative, intimate, snarky, cuckoo moment, every up and down, complete with phone calls from an ex-wife, confessions about porn viewing habits and tastes, and a debate about whether every woman in fact has daddy issues – or at least, that’s some of what happened on this particular night.

While one of the piece’s creators, Australian actress/writer Bojana Novakovic, always plays Anna, and always starts the night waiting at the bar for her (late) date to turn up, her date is cast from a rotating array of special guests at each performance. I saw Frederick Weller, who played a not-quite-as-divorced-as-he’d-led-the-Internet-to-believe app developer named Harry. Other guests this week have included Laverne Cox, Pablo Schreiber, Larisa Oleynik, and Reggie Watts. And since Novakovic also has a number of different takes on the character of Anna (I saw a math teacher still wounded by a recent breakup but very direct about what she wants now), every performance could be completely different, beyond the initial prompt to show up about ten minutes late and bring flowers. The main similarity is the situation, one that’s all too believable, all too familiar to anyone who’s ever been on a blind date – but also contains just that hint of hysterical exaggeration that makes for good comedy. In fact, the piece is most successful when it keeps to the lighter and more absurd side of things; the chemistry between the two felt legitimate, but it’s still hard to pull off genuine intimacy under such conditions.

Unlike most improv performances, though, the actors aren’t completely free to shape the course of the evening. As an informational card on each table informs the audience, the director is, on occasion, guiding events through text messages and phone calls. We don’t know what they say, but we do hear the messages come in. These are set up to interrupt the narrative more or less organically. Anna notes early that she’s set up a series of “rescue calls” or texts with a friend, who’ll contact her every ten minutes or so with a potential “emergency” that she could use to get out of the date if she’s miserable; Harry keeps getting calls or messages from his ex-wife and son with various childcare mini-dramas. It’s an interesting way to structure the performance that also adds a sort of meta-commentary on life in our technologically-addicted times; while wrapped up in each other, the characters remain tethered to their digital lifelines in a way that would detract from their supposed date, even as that technology enhances and shapes the show (the show also has a Twitter feed that’s live-tweeting each performance).  Of course, we have no idea how much input is actually being exerted, but the performers handle it remarkably, never showing a flicker of distraction or any signs that a conversation shift is happening in anything other than an organic way.

In an interview, Novakovic describes the piece as ”somewhere between comedy, performance art, improv, and theatre” – and perhaps more precisely immersive theater (a la Sleep No More), where the audience is actively existing in the same space/time as the action rather than simply as a spectator to a story set in another place and time. And while this could lead to high-concept mishmash, somehow all the elements come together into a piece that’s perhaps not as immersive as some, but is immensely fun, ruefully familiar, thoroughly entertaining, and fast-paced enough to leave you wanting more.