How sad to be there In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot the day after Jeff Bezos ordered The Washington Post to avoid endorsing a candidate for the position of President. It seems the world's richest man didn't want to risk lucrative government contracts if a broke man was back in the White House. Was Bezos bought, or did he bribe Trump? As the little girl who invited you says, “Why not both?” Regardless of where we are, we are watching a game set about 15 years from now, when catastrophic sea levels swallow up the Americas east and west. The US is going under, yet Amazon still delivers.
The tale of Sarah Mantell's future takes place in and around an Amazon shipping center in rural Wyoming—now arid land. Friendly and chatty Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) works in turn with taciturn newcomer Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy). Boxes of various sizes wrap around the shipping table; yellow-clad workers scan labels and stack boxes on a large utility cart. If you didn't know anything about the game, everything would look normal. Jen reads each address label aloud—“Flagstaff, Arizona” and so on—complaining when Ani doesn't do the same. “How will you know what's going on there?” Jen asked nervously. This is where you see the workers checking how far the sea has stepped on the cities that welcome us. It's a clever device, exemplary of Mantell's graceful way of juxtaposing banal details with apocalyptic horror. We are also learning to cut the “reach” of the organization. No email, no phone outside. Everyone sits outside their truck, does their work, and relaxes in the parking lot with games and chitchat. It's the end of the world, and we're still in a late capitalist economy without security.
Despite the cli-fi background, Mantell's primary genre is the workplace drama. It's a tough world too: in this Playwrights Horizons and Breaking the Binary Theater collaboration, all the performers are women or identify as women. Colorful characters banded together because of a shared interest, moving from warehouse to warehouse to escape bad management or deadly water, from Albany to Ohio to Pennsylvania. Ani is different, a refugee from Oregon who lost her husband in a flood—but her journey takes unexpected paths. We follow two parallel plots: Ani's hidden agenda—which involves Jen, and the secret sabotage by Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart), who collects sugar and dumps it in concrete mixers, undermining the construction of Section D. Queer desire and industrialization collide. well.
A bit too neat, to be honest. Mantell's play suffers from poky pacing and contrived storytelling in its attempt to balance quirky romcom and ecological wakeup call. Despite running for only 95 minutes, the piece pulls in as each character gets the obligatory monologue about their experience surviving the disaster. Director Sivan Battat creates a very cozy and laid-back vibe, but the writing is also to be blamed as coincidences and complex plot twists pile up and the plot shifts between semi-surreal and plausible. Still, there are some interesting comments here and there. Working in turn with Sara, Ani floats the idea that the archive and all the technological progress it represents may need to go:
We came up with a lot of silly things. But whatever we invent we can invent, right? We invented handkerchiefs with Kleenex. Let's dedicate free time to hobbies. Air conditioning was not invented in August. We are always innovating. Just the wrong things, you know. We can just name all of this and save August. I fell in love with August.
It's a sweet, heartwarming moment in a play that loves its characters and keeps the real villain off the stage. Certainly, these actors are easy to feel love for, including Sandra Caldwell as the cunning and cruel El; Barsha as the kvetch-prone Horowitz; Turis McCall as cranky Ash; and Pooya Mohseni as Maribel the mother. Aside from the romance that blossoms late in the story, the interactions between our working-class characters are strangely asexual. Not that everyone needs to meet, but giving each of them more personality and conflict will be appreciated. Even if the individual characters seem weightless and sketchy, the likability of the actors makes up for it. Gray and Lovejoy manage to imbue their scenes with an acceptable level of tension and compassion.
I wanted to be shocked and enthralled by the clash of corporate brutality and human kindness, but Parking Lot coming out of its climactic scenes. Jen allows herself to be boxed up and sent to freedom, while the others try to “invent” the warehouse in a remote recreated location. With more courage and a willingness to seek danger, Mantell's dark streak could have resulted in a piece with Anne Washburn that still amazes. Mr. Burns, Post-electric Play (which also ran at Playwrights Horizons). Both works are about Americans adapting to disaster (more copetopian than dystopian), trying to hold on to their humanity, but here the stakes feel oddly low. The Amazon and its owners may be moral and unseemly, but something tells me that when civilization falls, these behemoths will be the first to go.
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot | 1 hour 35 minutes. There is no rest. | Playwrights Horizons | 416 West 42nd Street | 212-279-4200| Buy Tickets Here
