How sadly apt, to attend Within the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot the day after Jeff Bezos ordered The Washington Publish to chorus from endorsing a Presidential candidate. Appears the world’s richest man didn’t need to endanger profitable authorities contracts ought to a serial bankrupter acquire reentry to the White Home. Was Bezos purchased, or is he pre-bribing Trump? Because the little lady within the meme says, “Why not each?” Regardless, right here we’re, watching a play set about 15 years from now, when catastrophic sea ranges are swallowing American states east and west. The U.S. goes underneath, but Amazon nonetheless delivers.
Sarah Mantell’s future fable takes place in and round an Amazon delivery middle in rural Wyoming—dry land for the second. Pleasant and chatty Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) works a shift with taciturn beginner Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy). Containers of varied sizes trundle down a conveyer desk; the orange-vested laborers scan labels and stack bins on a big utility cart. If you happen to knew nothing in regards to the play, the whole lot would look regular. Jen reads every deal with label out loud—“Flagstaff, Arizona” and so forth—complaining when Ani doesn’t do the identical. “How will you already know what’s occurring on the market?” Jen asks, ominously. That’s once you understand the employees are gauging how far the ocean has crept by which cities are nonetheless receiving. It’s a intelligent gadget, emblematic of Mantell’s sleek means of juxtaposing banal element with apocalyptic horror. We additionally be taught the company minimize “entry.” No electronic mail, no cellphone to the skin. Everybody lives out of their truck, does their shift, and unwinds within the car parking zone with video games and chitchat. It’s the tip of the world, and we’re nonetheless in a late-capitalist gig economic system with zero safety.
Regardless of the cli-fi backdrop, Mantell’s baseline style is office dramedy. It’s a queer world, too: on this co-production by Playwrights Horizons and Breaking the Binary Theatre, all performers are girls or female-identifying. The colourful characters have banded collectively due to shared curiosity, touring from warehouse to warehouse to flee dangerous administration or lethal waters, from Albany to Ohio to Pennsylvania. Ani is the straight exception, an Oregon escapee who misplaced her husband to the floods—however her journey goes in surprising instructions. We observe two parallel plots: Ani’s hidden agenda—which includes Jen, and covert sabotage undertaken by Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart), who hoards sugar and dumps it into concrete mixers, slowing building of Part D. Queer need and business jamming intertwine neatly.
Somewhat too neatly, if we’re being trustworthy. Mantell’s play suffers from poky pacing and schematic storytelling in its try and stability quirky romcom and ecological wakeup name. Regardless of working solely 95 minutes, the piece drags within the center because the characters every get an compulsory monologue about their expertise surviving the catastrophe. Director Sivan Battat establishes a relatively too cozy and laid-back vibe, however the writing’s additionally guilty as coincidences and heavy-handed plot twists pile up and the plot teeters between semi-surreal and believable. Nonetheless, there are beautiful speeches right here and there. Working a shift with Sara, Ani floats the concept that the warehouse and all of the technological progress it represents may must go:
We’ve invented a variety of silly issues. However something we invent we are able to uninvent, proper? We uninvented handkerchiefs with Kleenex. We uninvented free time with hobbies. Air con uninvented August. We’re uninventing issues on a regular basis. Simply the improper issues, you already know. We might simply uninvent all of this and hold August. I sort of favored August.
It’s a candy, touching second in a play that loves its characters and retains the actual villain offstage. To make sure, these performers are simple to really feel affection for, together with Sandra Caldwell because the sly and feisty El; Barsha because the kvetch-prone Horowitz; Tulis McCall because the cranky Ash; and Pooya Mohseni because the motherly Maribel. Other than a love affair that blooms late within the story, the interactions amongst our working-class protagonists are oddly sexless. Not that everybody must be hooking up, however giving every of them extra persona and battle can be appreciated. Even when particular person characters come throughout as weightless and sketchy, the affability of the performers compensates. Grays and Lovejoy handle to imbue their scenes with a welcome diploma of pressure and tenderness.
I wished to be shocked and galvanized by the collision of company cruelty and human kindness, however Parking Lot peters out in its climactic scenes. Jen permits herself actually to be boxed and shipped to freedom, whereas the others try and “uninvent” the warehouse in a far-fetched re-wilding gambit. With a bit extra boldness and urge for food for hazard, Mantell’s darkish whimsy might need resulted in a companion piece to Anne Washburn’s still-astonishing Mr. Burns, a Publish-Electrical Play (which additionally ran at Playwrights Horizons). Each works are about Individuals adapting to disaster (extra copetopian than dystopian), making an attempt to carry on to their humanity, however right here the stakes really feel weirdly low. Amazon and its homeowners could also be amoral and short-sighted, however one thing tells me that when civilization falls, these behemoths would be the first to go.
Within the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot | 1hr 35mins. No intermission. | Playwrights Horizons | 416 West forty second Road | 212-279-4200| Purchase Tickets Right here
