What do we talk about when we talk about the climate crisis? Like any of the looming, interconnected horrors that thrum beneath our daily existence, garbage-compacted down into the word “issue,†the reality of our ongoing ecocide is a tricky target for theater. How do you use such an ephemeral, archaic, embarrassingly human art form to approach something so vast and catastrophic, something that seems simultaneously to demand and repel our attention? In two new plays, one locally grown and one visiting from Ireland, the future of the warming earth is on view through a side door. In talking about the apocalypse, both Sarah Mantell, playwright of In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, and Carys D. Coburn, writer/creator with their Dublin-based theater collective Malaprop of HOTHOUSE, wind up talking about family.
Mantell’s approach is more straightforward, more eager to move us, and ultimately less moving. In their program note, they describe coming out as nonbinary during COVID lockdown: Writing In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot was, for them, a way “to commando-crawl my way out of queer imposter syndrome.†In a companion essay on Playwrights Horizons’ website, the writer Jen Silverman recounts being struck by how Mantell’s play puts “nonbinary or fluidly gendered characters onstage without that ever once being a subject of argument or conversation: they just are, and their being is inarguable.†Silverman isn’t wrong about the play, but one can’t help noticing that the centering of these characters still seems to require quite a lot of commentary from the outside. Mantell would probably argue that such is the unfortunate necessity: Their hope, they write, is “for a better American theater where more people like me exist visibly on our stages. And perhaps for a moment when that is so common that I wouldn’t need to say anything about it to you at all.â€
That’s great — may we all hope for that moment — but what’s odd isn’t what Mantell is saying but what they’re not. Strangely, their note spends next to no time reflecting on their characters’ context — a corporate-ruled, disaster-ravaged future. The climate crisis itself, either real or speculatively envisioned, gets almost zero ink, and this feeling of imbalance between the container and what it contains bleeds into both play and production. In Sivan Battat’s staging, the titular Amazon warehouse comes off less as an ideologically crucial, meticulously imagined dramatic world and more as a kind of shorthand dystopia, its details still fuzzy. What Mantell wants is a diverse group of queer, nonbinary characters supporting each other in dire straits and caring for each other as chosen family. That much their play’s got — what it lacks is a fully reasoned, rich and compelling environment for them to do it in.
Genre fiction is harder than people want to give it credit for, partly because 90 percent of it is world-building. Watching In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, my brain kept jumping to Severance, a TV dystopia that’s got its t’s crossed and its i’s painstakingly dotted. (Just look at how much time that show spends explaining why a character can’t sneak a written message out of the office, even if she swallows it.) By contrast, Mantell’s characters are surrounded by unaddressed blips in internal logic — if the show were a Dungeons & Dragons game, the players would be endlessly riding the DM about loose ends and loopholes. “If you don’t read the labels, how will you know what’s going on out there?†says Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) to newcomer Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy). Both of them are working “Outbound†at an Amazon warehouse in Wyoming; their job is to scan the packages before they get put on the trucks, and Jen is frustrated that Ani isn’t reading the names and places on the labels aloud. “Everyone reads the shipping labels,†she says. “We share them, always.†It’s not a cutesy ritual: Jen and her cohort read the labels as a way of figuring out what cities remain unsubsumed by the rapidly moving coastlines, and to keep an eye out for the names of loved ones they lost “when the corporation cut off access.â€
This realization is supposed to hurt when it hits, but my mind was elsewhere. What does it mean that Amazon, now ostensibly a totalitarian nation-state, “cut off access� Presumably the entire country can’t be just a series of warehouses, because people are still ordering things, which implies that there are still, like, houses to order them to? That aren’t part of Amazon? Or are there? Wherever these undeterred consumers are, it seems like Jen and her group of five close co-worker friends, who’ve been traveling in a caravan of their own cars and campers from warehouse to warehouse, can’t get to them somehow. But how does the corporation control travel, between warehouses or beyond them? How can it stop employees from going elsewhere, if there’s even an elsewhere to go to? Is there still a government? Is Jeff Bezos president for life? And, eventually, when the faceless Amazon overlords punish Jen and the gang by obscuring the addresses on the shipping labels with code (“We won’t be able to find anyone,†Jen cries), why in the world would they leave the recipients’ names legible, rather than just encoding the whole damn label?
The easy answer there, of course, is that there’s pathos in still being able to read the names. “Katy… Zaynab… Samira,†says El (Sandra Caldwell) sorrowfully as she scans. “Delanté… Talia… Leslie.†But a justification built on audience emotion, not on character reality, is writerly contrivance only. Without an in-world sense of logic, moments like these expose the flimsiness of the show’s foundations, and they just keep piling up. To wit: Jen is heartsick for her friend Barbara, who stayed behind in Pennsylvania a year and a half ago when the rest of the group left that warehouse to move on to Wyoming. But if Barbara knew the group’s system, why not just order something from Amazon? As many somethings as possible, as often as possible, as a way of trying to get her name and address to show up under her friends’ scanners? (Eventually, Barbara’s name does appear on a box—another sentimental pretext for keeping the names unencoded—and the climactic consequences are, once again, engineered for emotional oomph rather than sense, paradoxically making them fall flat.) Especially as it becomes clear that subversion is and has always been the official agenda for Jen and her friends, why are there apparently no security cameras anywhere? I’m happy to have such quibbles explained away, but Mantell leaves a lot of explaining to do.
If there were a scintillating play of character going on inside this half-built house, that would be one thing, but Jen and her fellowship are, for the most part, merely appealing rather than vibrant. As the group’s old hands, Horowitz and Ash, the performers Barsha and Tulis McCall are fun to watch, and, at the same time, it’s tricky even to assign strong adjectives to the characters, who, for all the seeming variety among them, don’t really dramatically pop. This may in part be because Mantell often presents them inside some fairly vanilla contemporary playwriting tropes: short scenes separated by smash cuts (where the buttons of the scenes aren’t as meaningful as the cutting method makes them appear); a series of soliloquies to the audience, all on the same theme (“The first night I slept in my car/van/RV…â€); a repeated game as a way to structure group scenes. Maribel, played by Pooya Mohseni, leads the group during their break times in one of those “guess who the killer is†games — it makes for some fun, but also for too much formal predictability, not to mention a line that we just know is going to be brought back around so that it can be deployed to newly profound effect: “If you don’t even try the werewolves will win every time.â€
I wanted to like that line. The spirit it’s trying to summon—the fuck-the-corporation spirit that Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart) embodies as she hoards sugar to mix with the concrete of the warehouse’s under-construction wing to keep it from setting—is why I wanted to feel psyched about Mantell’s play, why I kept waiting for some spark to catch. As it turned out, I wouldn’t see a flame start to crackle until a few days later, in an entirely different dystopia. In Carys D. Coburn’s HOTHOUSE, directed with cabaret flair by Claire O’Reilly, a more heightened, fragmented play-world makes for more dramaturgical freedom. Could one ask plenty of questions about the context of the voyage we’re welcomed to as the show begins — a luxury cruise to the Arctic Circle to see the last of the melting ice caps? Certainly. But when the ship’s captain (Peter Corboy) is a bespangled, anxiously ingratiating master of ceremonies, and the ship itself manifests as a kind of burlesque dreamscape—where the acts run from exotic dances by anthropomorphic extinct birds to flashbacks from the abusive childhood of a young girl named Ruth (Ebby O’Toole Acheampong), growing up in Dublin in the ’60s—then the potential literalism of such a scenario evaporates. Theater takes its place and spreads its wings.
HOTHOUSE takes a few scenes to find its footing, although the staid and sleepy matinee audience I saw it with may have been a factor; the crowd didn’t warm quickly to the show’s vibe, which is half Hibernian deadpan and half campy fringe. But in its latter movements, the production showcases not only a distinctive and haunting vision of disaster but also some very fine acting. As Ali and Robin, two passengers on the cruise ship who stumble into intimacy, Maeve O’Mahony and BláithÃn Mac are captivating and understated. In a more stylized mode, Thommas Kane Byrne turns Ruth’s tart, trapped mother, Barbara, into a subtly devastating drag persona. “How is it I’ve disappointed you more than him?†she asks her daughter, who’s grown up into an angry, pregnant 28-year-old staring down a future of trying to be “only half as fucked up as her fucked-up parents†(soon enough, we’ll discover that the baby Ruth is about to have is Ali). “It’s easy now, for all of you…†says Barbara, between pulls of a cigarette, “to tell us off, condemn us, all you women’s lib types… It’s hard now to remember what it was like. The shame if I left you behind, the struggle if I took you … The rules were different. [Men] were these — I don’t know, like hurricanes, or earthquakes. You couldn’t live with them, talk to them, you just coped with them. And maybe you got so used to coping you forgot you didn’t have to, that you shouldn’t.â€
Coburn’s feat is to have crafted a dramatic metaphor that’s fully integrated, not merely a container holding an object. The story of Barbara, Ruth, and Ali isn’t a family narrative merely set within the climate crisis — the two stories are in fact one and the same, braided and fused. “Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable the inferior or detrimental?†Ruth, rapt, reads aloud from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?†Though Ruth’s father gave her the book, helping to cement him in her heart despite the abuse he inflicted on her and her mother, it’s Barbara’s eventual revelations that Carson’s words are pre-echoing. The great human power to accustom, to literally acclimatize ourselves, is both gift and possibly fatal curse. It makes us, whether in the context of a family or the wider context of the burning world, too able to endure, too unlikely to revolt, too certain that we are, in the captain’s words, “powerless to change what really needs to change.â€
Without spoiling too much of HOTHOUSE’s marvelous climax and denouement, I’ll simply say that O’Reilly uses minimal resources to choreograph a riveting shipwreck (with John Gunning’s lights doing great work), and in its wake, rather than bleak devastation, there is, fact, one of the most moving epilogues I’ve seen in quite some time. Here, Coburn imagines beyond the inferior and detrimental, the patterns we’ve all grown far too used to. Family, in HOTHOUSE’s final moments, is redefined — it takes a new shape, one that creates space for a different future. “There is no redemption in outgrowing the past…†says Mac, playing a character who may or may not be Robin from the cruise ship, and speaking to a young child, “no transcendence in ceasing to be defined by our pain… no triumph in being more than a wound because we always should have been more.†True or false or complicated, it’s still a gentle battle cry: To save ourselves, as individuals, as families, as co-inhabitants of this huge hot house, we have to stop seeking absolution in our own suffering. Being “only half as fucked up†as the ones who came before us isn’t enough and never was. We have to stop coping, and start taking care.
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is at Playwrights Horizons through November 17.
HOTHOUSE is at the Irish Arts Center through November 17.