“Memory, all alone in the moonlight/ I can dream of the old days/ Life was beautiful then…” – from “Memory,” by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Successful theatrical productions achieve the “suspension of disbelief,” temporarily convincing audiences that what plays out on stage is real, no matter how much it stretches credulity.

Some audiences are more gullible and more easily mesmerized than others, usually because they enjoy being fooled and generally prefer fantasy to objective reality. Other crowds are harder to please because they’ve seen too much bad theater to buy into anything.

Many in the latter group are jaded critics who hate most every show, especially if the general public loves it. (See “Cats.”)

Last week, Lackawanna County was the stage for a pair of productions that were so clunky and transparently mercenary the goal may as well have been the widespread incitement of disbelief.

The curtain opened once again on the escalating civil war in the county and city Democratic parties. ‘Tis the season for challenging nominating petitions, and “MAGAcrats” and backers of Scranton Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti and Commissioner Bill Gaughan predictably clashed over “unfortunate” irregularities in some petitions.

On the second stage, PPL Electric Utilities unveiled a mammoth infrastructure project that was clearly crafted to feed invasive data center development, but the utility insisted the plan is really an overdue upgrade that will benefit valued customers used to reliable electricity. The data center connection is a happy, massively lucrative coincidence.

Cue the county players

Petition challenges are standard elements of any election season, but melodrama starring the campaigns of incumbent state Sen. Marty Flynn, D-22, and Democratic newcomer Jeffrey Lake had just enough backstage intrigue to capture the audience’s attention.

Flynn and Lake both faced challenges that were quickly dismissed or withdrawn, but the brief scene highlighted Flynn’s well-documented ties to Dunnore businessman Alpesh “Al” Patel, a devoted donor and business partner of Flynn and an aspiring data center developer.

Patel submitted petitions supporting Flynn that contained ‘“signatures,”  “addresses” and “initials” that strongly seemed ghostwritten by the same clumsy hand. The audience easily identified the holes in Patel’s script. You might expect better from the executive director of the county Democratic Party. I don’t.

Flynn attorney Kevin Greenberg dismissed the controversy over the suspicious Patel petitions as “an excuse for somebody to go online and talk about a few pages that are clearly unfortunate and that Mr. Flynn was not involved with in any way, except some volunteer did it for him and they are what they are.”

That Patel’s pages were “clearly unfortunate” for Flynn’s campaign is obviously, embarrassingly true, but the characterization of Patel as just “some volunteer” is laughably disingenuous. Aside from his multifaceted support for Flynn, Patel and county Democratic Machine Chairman Chris Patrick infamously engineered the backroom coup that made Brenda Sacco a de facto majority commissioner for the equivalent of a three-act “Summer stock” farce.

Patel is no bystanding stagehand. He’s a major Flynn patron and Machine cog who stumbled into the spotlight. Don’t be surprised if he makes a few more “unfortunate” cameos between now and the May 19 primary election. Both Flynn and Lake will appear on the ballot, setting the stage for the next act of Shakespearean intraparty electoral fratricide.

PPL, you’re up

On Thursday, Sunday Times Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky broke the news that PPL Electric Utilities plans to build three massive electricity switchyards, a substation and string 12 miles of new transmission lines on monopoles as high as 150 feet, mostly in (surprise!) Archbald. Frank perused project maps and noticed that although data centers aren’t directly referenced, the sites of all five customer facilities directly correspond with the sites of proposed data center campuses. Weird, huh?

Frank naturally asked PPL what role data centers played in the planned upgrades. A PPL spokesperson unconvincingly played down the only believable reason for the work. The upgrades are overdue and necessary to ensure safe, reliable service for everyone and increase capacity for new customers, which PPL doesn’t individually identify due to confidentiality and competitive concerns.

“These transmission projects are planned years in advance, and they’re designed to address multiple needs, including reliability, resilience and then evolving customer demand across the region,” according to the utility.

I’m watching from the cheap seats, and in my admittedly narrow vision, the only “evolving customer demand” that would justify such a massive infrastructure investment is data centers. It’s either that or AI-controlled killer robot factories, which even the most trusted industry forecasters say won’t be ready for mass production until at least the mid-2030s.

Maybe I’m just another jaded critic who’s seen too much bad theater to sit still for more, but I’ll be in the audience when PPL presents its plans in a public forum. An informational open-house scheduled for Tuesday at the Throop Civic Center is postponed indefinitely.

If I get bored at the eventual PPL sideshow, I’ll remind myself that the “overdue upgrade” storyline and the political drama playing out on the city and county stages are intimately connected and could result in real, lasting damage to the objective reality we call home.

That’s the part the producers are desperate for us to forget.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, loved “Cats” and doesn’t care who knows it. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.