Hurricanes have wiped out entire communities along the west coast of Florida. Wildfires are burning up over 400,000 acres in northern California. Drought has pushed water levels in the Mississippi River nearly 8 ft. below average in Tennessee. Temperatures regularly rise well over 100 degrees in Arizona. Scary signs of climate change have been popping everywhere this year.
And now they’re beginning to show up with increasing frequency on New York stages. In just the past week, I saw two new plays set in a not too distant future where the coast lines are disappearing and time is running out for humans to exist on this planet at all.
The first was In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, which is now playing at Playwrights Horizons in a co-production with Breaking the Binary Theatre. It centers around a group of women who migrate from one Amazon fulfillment center to the next trying to eke out a living and to find loved ones missing as floods put vast parts of the U.S. underwater. That's an interesting set-up but playwright Sarah Mantell seems unsure about what to do with it. And some of her decisions don’t make much sense.
The women look for familiar names on the package labels as they prepare them to ship out because that’s the only way they can track where people are since neither phone service nor the internet work anymore. But if that’s the case, how are customers placing orders with Amazon? And once the women identify the address of their missing person, why don’t they just go to where they are, or at least send a message with one of the delivery people?
The play sidesteps such logic and tries to focus instead on the relationships between the women. But those don’t really go anywhere either. The women just sit around and drink beer and gripe about their work shifts. And they don’t seem all that upset about the climate crisis either, except for the occasional comment about how far the coasts might have eroded.
In a program note, Mantell, who identifies as non-binary, makes a point of saying that all the women are queer. But that doesn’t seem to matter at all. There is one flirtation but the play moves on before that romance can do more than flicker.
Mantell has also said that she wanted to create characters for older female-identifying actors to play and it is nice to see a stage full of women diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and body size. Alas, their acting abilities also vary. Although in the actors’ defense, Mantell hasn’t created full-fledged characters for them to play. Each gets a monologue about her past life but then just goes back to the general beer drinking and griping.
And director Sivan Battat seems to have put most of her energy into choreographing the departure of scores of Amazon packages, which zip around on conveyor belts smartly designed by Emmie Finckel. Which raises some other questions for me: how did they get permission from Amazon to use its name and logo? And if they didn’t, do they have a good lawyer?
Amy Berryman’s Walden takes a more direct approach to climate change. Her play, which borrows its title from Henry David Thoreau’s classic 19th century treatise on living in harmony with nature, tells its story through twin sisters, whose mother died giving birth to them and whose famous astronaut father raised them to be high achievers capable of following in his footsteps and, if need be, of saving the world.
One sister Cassie has stuck to that plan and as the play opens has just returned from a year-long mission on the moon, where she developed a way to grow food in its barren soil, a vital step in providing an alternative place for earth’s inhabitants to migrate when their planet becomes totally unlivable.
The other sister Stella was also a rising NASA star but has not only dropped out of the program but fallen in love with a guy named Bryan who believes the government shouldn’t be spending money on developing colonies in space but should be using its resources to figure out ways for humans to stay on earth.
Bryan and Stella are practicing what they preach in a remote wilderness where the air and the water are relatively clean, animals still roam and the couple grow their own food. When the returning Cassie comes to visit them, they inevitably start bickering over what the best course for the future should be.
But Berryman doesn’t let those philosophical arguments overwhelm her play. She knows that even the smartest and most dedicated people are just human like the rest of us and that their emotions hold as much weight as the ideas they advocate. And she also knows that no person is just one thing and that few arguments are as one-dimensional as they might seem at first.
Emily Rossum, still most famous to theater folks for playing Christine Daaé in the 2004 movie version of The Phantom of the Opera, plays Stella and stage vet Zoë Winters plays Cassie. They look enough alike that they actually could be twins. And under Whitney White’s sure-handed direction, they are both terrific at portraying siblings who love one another, envy one another but haven’t fully figured out what to do with either emotion.
Motell Foster, an actor new to me, is just as good as Bryan, the linchpin in this three-hander, who is thoughtful and empathetic, making it easy to see how both sisters might be drawn to him.
The creative team is top-notch too. The retro-futuristic cabin Matt Saunders has created for Bryan and Stella is so cool (and beautifully lit by Adam Honoré) that I wish it were available for vacation rental on Airbnb. And Lee Kinney’s sound design provides a subtle but invaluable aural scape that quietly underscores what might be lost if climate change totally destroys the earth.
Walden’s ending may not please some theatergoers. But life isn’t simple either. Thoreau is still seen as a paragon of self-reliance because of those years he spent living alone in a cabin on Walden Pond but he regularly took his laundry home for his family to wash. Of course such an option won’t even be available in the future if we don’t figure out what to do about climate change now.
No comments:
Post a Comment