Its sheer spectacle inspires brief awe, then you figure it out, and it is reduced to technology, and fun. The fun is especially dense in the large, somewhat lighter areas of the drill hall floor called “clearings,” where the captured images erode more slowly. Visitors hold and repeat deliberate poses — for a kind of Muybridge, stop-motion effect. Or they collaborate, joining hands in rings. Dancers and yoga devotees may especially revel.

A timeline of the history of surveillance, meanwhile, makes one thing abundantly clear: Privacy is over. But if it’s any consolation, you can leave with a printout of your own image, seen from the vantage point of dear old Big Bro.

His name is Robert Smith, but everyone calls him Yank. And it is a part that has just been waiting these many decades for Bobby Cannavale to step into it.

In New York, the production has the cast, including Bobby Cannavale as the brawny ship stoker Yank, perform on a turntable that circles the audience like a conveyor belt.

Writing from inside Yank’s deepest desires, dreams, and innocence, O’Neill created one of his more densely and poetically conceived scripts, about a world where language and the body confuse one another, and end up cancelling each other out.

I wanted to do a show that’s looking out at the world instead of in. The Armory’s drill hall is such a huge space, occupying a whole block; its sheer size is one of its most obvious features. It’s scary. I didn’t want to make something big just to fill it, and I didn’t want to create a world inside. I wanted to look out onto the world. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is that art galleries, studios, and houses can be cut off from the world. They are designed to keep things precious and away from dirt and difficulty. I think this produces a great danger: you’re looking away from life and not toward it.