If you’ve ever felt like dropping everything and joining a cult, Miranda July’s New Society seeks to provide this radical experience. All in 2 hours. From your cushy seat in the Walker’s McGuire Theater. For 35 dollars. But don’t be misled! New Society is no Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate.

Full of feigned spontaneous moments of interaction with the audience and glib appeals to intimacy, the piece unfolds over the accelerated course of the formation of a new society (including flag design, anthem writing, debauchery, constitution drafting) and attempts to create a very real albeit peculiar connection among audience members.

Facilitating  human connections is the goal of July’s solo act, which premiered at the Walker Art Center Oct. 30-31. Unfortunately, the juxtaposition of escaping reality to form a new society and forming deeply positive connections with random human beings didn’t work. The former wish too desperate, too dark, to match the latter’s idealism.

“Haven’t you been feeling like something is about to happen?!” July asked the audience only a few minutes into her grand experiment. “We could all stop trying forever. We could have backrubs, yes, we could do that. I feel you deciding.” The trouble is that from the onset, there was no ideological tension, no [dark] impetus, real or fantastic, to drive the audience together. The sweet, utopian bent  of July’s whole experiment did not put the audience in any mood to escape and embrace a New Society.

But the show must go on, so the audience reluctantly joined “New Society.” The aisles became streets, the chairs homes, and the event programs currency (“The little picture of me is the face on the bill!” July said.) We sang the anthem July pre-wrote for an audience member to “invent” (“Dooon’t go home, stay with meee, New SocietE”), listened to our new governing legislation (“Sam’s Law” something to the effect of “ Before you go philandering freely with New Society members, Miranda, the leader, must think you a fine specimen.”), and determined who the richest person in our society was (“So… who’s got the most cash?!”).

In the years following New Society’s establishment, sex, death, and yoga ensued. But it’s really July’s life trajectory that propelled the performance forward. July had a baby boy, a lesbian affair, and a mental break down (though not in that particular order), all events which one would expect to engage the audience, the New Society, on some deeper level. Yet they felt fleeting, insignificant, and at times disingenuous.

Something was missing throughout New Society. Words like quirky and fresh colored my pre-New Society perceptions of Miranda July. Maybe it was her huge electric blue eyes or her Wes Anderson-esque picture box cinematography? It’s hard to say. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to say that I left New Society sorely disappointed–like waiting hours in line for a cronut, only to be presented with a stale, donut-shaped croissant. Delicate yes, fluffy yes, but ingenious? No way.