Millennial hysteria seems enviably frivolous these days, but the hand-wringing of those halcyon times is what initially inspired writer and actor Eric Bogosian to begin work on Humpty Dumpty, a play that explores some of his favorite themes.

"I've always been interested in how specialized my life is, living in the city, and I wondered if I could survive outside of it. Movies and short stories and books that deal with that kind of topic have always been my favorite stories. Like the old Twilight Zone show or Swept Away or Lord of the Flies. Even Robinson Crusoe. It's a genre of stories—what happens when you don't have civilization," says Bogosian. "When Y2K was approaching, I kind of revved it up and started moving in on the story, but what I wanted to do was go a little bit further and look at not just physically in what ways I'm vulnerable, but psychologically. In other words, to what degree do I rely on my civilized environment to tell me who I am in my core? How do I define myself by the world in which I live, and would I be able to define myself out in the middle of nowhere, in a more primitive situation?"

In Humpty Dumpty, two couples, a writer and an editor from New York and a producer and an actress from Los Angeles, organize a vacation getaway in rural upstate New York and arrive there armed with all the trappings of "civilization," including cell phones and laptops. Their haul of high-tech gadgets proves useless, however, when a catastrophe hits the outside world, cutting off all utilities and communications. The couples are virtually stranded at their remote vacation house, where the only other person around is the local handyman, who lends them a hand from time to time.

At the time he was first writing the play, of course, Bogosian had no idea just how much more resonance Humpty Dumpty would have after the year 2000. The play has undergone some revisions since Sept. 11, although terrorism and other potential causes for the disaster take a back seat to the introspective, individual dramas that are taking place within the characters.

"When this play was first being staged—we were just about to go into production—Sept. 11 happened, and for a moment there it felt as if everything was starting to happen the way it was happening in the play, and that was very frightening," says Bogosian. "For those of us here—I live just blocks away from Ground Zero—we were in sort of a survival mode for a day or so."

Bogosian, who has worked as an actor, playwright and screenwriter for more than two decades, knows the arts and entertainment business well and has gleaned many of the insights in Humpty Dumpty from working in those industries. "The thing that I'm interested in looking at is the idea of defining myself by how I integrate with this very large network of people who exist primarily in New York and Los Angeles, who are the information shapers of our society," he says. "There are all kinds of pecking orders of status in this world, and it's important because we define ourselves and compete with each other. Whoever writes the play that gets the most attention becomes the more important playwright. Whoever writes the news article that gets the Pulitzer Prize becomes the more important news writer. This competition and this self-definition becomes part of the way the whole society is thinking of itself."

Bogosian continues, "At the end of the day, the studios, the newspapers, the television stations, the companies that publish books and publish records, all of them belong to gigantic multinational corporations, and if they're shaping the way we think about ourselves, then we're being shaped by something that's really larger than a human entity. It's kind of a scary thought, but unfortunately, that's sort of where we're moving at the moment. I think this applies to government as well."

Although Bogosian takes a hard look at what forces are molding how we, as both individuals and a society, define ourselves, Humpty Dumpty also explores themes of rebirth and resilience. The egg motif of the title plays a prominent role.

So without Palm Pilots, TiVOs, PCs—let alone electricity and water—would we cease to exist? That might depend on how one defines existence.