Five years ago, when playwright Jordan Harrison began writing “Futura,” the death of print still sounded like an ominous prophecy, one that could be enlarged into the stuff dystopian fantasies are made of. Today, that dread is palpable to some, and the paperless future is almost here.
When director Amy Attaway started working on Jordan Harrison’s typographical dystopian play “Futura,” she had just bought her first iPad. One of the first news stories she read on her tablet was about Encyclopedia Britannica discontinuing its print edition. The sinister future Harrison devised, where handwriting, printing, paper and books are outlawed and all written materials are part of “The Big Collection” in the cloud, suddenly felt very close.