At the center of Kate Douglas’s The Apiary are two MVP performers doing their best to batten down the hatches of both a play and a production that can’t quite find their moorings. April Matthis and Carmen Herlihy are downtown heroes, if “downtown†is still a thing — virtuosos of the richly strange who are always, through whatever layers of style they’re inhabiting, grounded, fully present, specific, and compelling. The most exciting thing about The Apiary is that it pairs them up, and for a while their oddball camaraderie is enough to keep us invested. They can’t knit up all the loose threads in Douglas’s and director Kate Whoriskey’s work, but they can—and do—provide the play with a warm heart, serving as a reminder of exactly how much superb actors can lift up their material.
Matthis and Herlihy play Zora and Pilar, two lab workers in, Douglas’s script says, “a synthetic apiary, 22 years in the future.†This future is bee-less, except for a few quickly withering colonies maintained in labs like this one. Pilar—a tender soul who dutifully monitors the hives under the loudly stressed-out supervision of lab manager Gwen (Taylor Schilling, formerly of Orange Is the New Black)—calls what she and her colleagues are doing “palliative care.†She isn’t gloomy, though. She’s caring, curious, and easily charmed. Of course she’s wistful for a world that used to have avocados and almonds (“Remember when everyone just drank almond milk all the time like it was no big deal?†she sighs), but, as she tells the reserved, hyperintellectual Zora, “My hopes are usually up.†Zora raises an eyebrow. “That’s not really meant for science,†she responds flatly. “Hope. It skews the data.â€
For all the biochemical tchotchkes of Walt Spangler’s big-statement set—center stage is encased in a floor-to-ceiling column of fine netting, inside which most of the play’s action occurs—Douglas isn’t primarily concerned with the nitty-gritty of restorative apiculture. It’s clear that she’s interested in how human beings have failed our fellow creatures and our shared planet, and in what exactly we might owe them, and each other, in reparation. Her play, however, feels erratic in its attempts to construct a robust throughline from these questions. We get a plot, but we don’t really get consistent development of a clear motivating idea. Before we meet Pilar, Zora, or Gwen, we meet Cece (Nimene Wureh), a former employee of the lab — though, as the lights rise and Cece delivers the show’s opening soliloquy, we don’t yet know who or what she is. We only know that, when she was young, her mother used to keep bees. “And that woman was superstitious, my god,†laughs Cece. “She told them everything.†Cece introduces us to the real tradition of “telling the bees†— an old folk belief that beekeepers should talk to their hives, keeping the bees informed of important events (“Like they’re your neighbors,†says Kara, a friend of Cece’s also played by Wureh, who takes on a quartet of parts). Failing to communicate with the bees, say believers like Cece’s mother, will lead to hive death and disaster.
As I chatted with my partner about this tradition, he said it sounded to him like biodynamic winemaking. Some people swear by this method, which derives from the theories of a man who also believed he was a clairvoyant who could see the color of people’s auras, and which includes techniques like burying a manure-stuffed cow horn amongst your grapes for reasons having to do with cosmic energy. But, said my partner, the thing is: It’s not really about the mystic rituals — it’s that biodynamic methods require such a lot of time and effort spent on your vines, and so much by-hand-and-eye investment in the tiniest details, that you’re bound to see things you might otherwise have missed. Like telling the bees, it’s a kind of romanticization of what is, essentially, a dedication to greater care and attention.
There’s something intriguing there, if—in the context of actions that might be taken to avert imminent extinction and climate death—a touch sentimental. Douglas bookends her play with moments that feel like statements on the transformative power of increased communication and care, but the whole of its interior arc bends in a different direction, even toward a different genre. Things really kick off when Pilar, Zora, and Gwen discover a dead human body in the lab. Who is it? How did it get there? Why is it naked? And why are the bees—up till now fluttering at death’s door—suddenly acting like it’s Christmas? The cadaver and its implications launch data-minded Zora and helpful, hopeful Pilar on a secret research project of their own, grisly yet ecologically righteous. “I mean, we’re beekeepers,†says Zora, eyes hard with resolve. “We have to try and keep them.â€
Connecting the dots of what The Apiary actually wants to say might be less sticky if Whoriskey’s production felt more fluent. Instead, there’s a broad, vaguely dissonant quality to much of the show’s theatricality — as if the production keeps elbowing you in the ribs, taking you out of it every time you try to sink in. This sensation manifests in the acting—Schilling’s ranting, largely two-dimensional Gwen feels like she’s in a completely different play from Matthis and Herlihy—and in the design. Spangler’s set is bulky and expensive-looking, seemingly committed to a kind of realism, and yet that soaring netting is speckled with what look like raisins — stationary black dots that are meant to be bees. Same goes for the hive frames that Pilar lovingly removes for testing: more black dots. The delicate vestiges of life and movement that remain in these creatures are of such central importance that seeing them manifested as clearly static set dressing is disconcerting. Realism has gone as far as it can go and has hit a wall: What could have happened on the other side?
Whoriskey tries to answer that question with a fifth performer, a dancer in a gas mask (Stephanie Crousillat) who spends the play trapped inside a dark glass box at center stage that Pilar describes to Zora—the new hire and thus the depository of exposition—as the “graveyard.†(There’s “a lot of sweeping up dead bees,†Pilar smiles nervously. “A lot of dead bees. A lot a lot…â€) Crousillat writhes and undulates during scene transitions, and while she’s clearly meant to embody the bees’ life force (Douglas’s script lists “the bees†as a character but makes no mention of a dancer), it’s less obvious how she meshes with the whole of the production’s aesthetic vocabulary, or why she’s confined to the graveyard, or what she’s providing besides a fairly straightforward illustration of a narrative arc that we’re already well up on, given how often and literally the characters discuss the bees’ well-being and behavior. She is that dangerous directorial temptation: a gesture that feels cool without necessarily being additive.
At the same time, Christopher Darbassie’s sound design and Grace McLean’s original music punctuate the show with intense, strangely upbeat, almost techno-poppy transitions, amped up even more by Amith Chandrashaker’s supersaturated discothèque lights. Before the play begins, the preshow music is on blast with loud, party-time classic pop. Listening for a theme, I couldn’t come up with anything more satisfying than… Disco? If that’s the unifying element, my question is, with the best will in the world, why?
This flashy, somewhat haphazard quality feels like the work of a director opting for big, fun choices in order to obscure a muddle. As a result, the play only feels more diffuse. Nevertheless, The Apiary isn’t without ideas or without heart. The former might not entirely coalesce, but the latter is visible and palpable in Herlihy and Matthis. They, at least, are worth telling the bees about.
The Apiary is at the Tony Kiser Theater at 2nd Stage through March 3.