Critic’s Pick
‘Hothouse’
Humans have a habit of averting their gaze from danger, even when it’s upon them. Even when it’s chronic, with one emergency piling atop another.
That’s what Barbara did for years and years, staying with her violent husband.
“Because you want to think it’s — I don’t know,” she says to her daughter, who grew up in that terrifying home. “A blip on the radar. That things’ll go back to being normal. That all this isn’t normal.”
Domestic violence is not a theme you might expect from “Hothouse,” a climate change play from the Dublin-based Malaprop Theater. It’s principally set aboard a cruise ship taking passengers to the North Pole “to say goodbye to the ice.”
But this alluringly strange and spangly show, at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is not solely or simplistically about ecological catastrophe. It’s about self-destruction as learned behavior through generations of safeguarding failures: the harm that parents do to children, who pass that on to their own, and the harm that humans do to the planet, abdicating their duty of care.
It’s like a riff on Philip Larkin’s enduring poem “This Be the Verse” — you know the one, about man handing on misery to man — except that it takes cleareyed exception to Larkin’s grim final lines: “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”
Written by Carys D. Coburn with Malaprop and directed by Claire O’Reilly, “Hothouse” is a lament for the present and an elegy for the past that keeps alight a flame of hope for the future. It’s also yet another bit of smart programming from Irish Arts Center at a time when New York’s theater scene is somewhat starved for contemporary European work.
With its bright colors and retro design (set and costumes are by Molly O’Cathain), “Hothouse” brandishes loopiness and wisecracks to fend off despair, without being afraid of emotion. It’s all there — love, grief, fear, anger, alienation — inside the frame of that cruise, piloted by a captain (Peter Corboy) who functions as both narrator and emcee.
But this play is rooted in the family story it tells: about the young, precocious Ruth (Ebby O’Toole Acheampong); her brutal, alcoholic father, Richard (Blaithin Mac Gabhann); and her frightened, colluding mother, Barbara (Thommas Kane Byrne). Ruth is 9 when her father, in a moment of excellent parenting, gives her a copy of Rachel Carson’s landmark book, “Silent Spring.”
Decades later, sometime around now, Ruth’s furious grown daughter, Ali (Maeve O’Mahony), ends up on that North Pole cruise. When the ship abruptly meets with calamity, evoked by mesmerizing use of an upstage curtain, the captain announces that a piece of equipment that might have helped saved them all is out of order.
“We never fixed something that was so easy to fix,” he says, “because we thought the end was in sight. The only reason it matters is because we thought it didn’t.” LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
‘In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot’
In the near-ish future of “In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot,” the United States has been irrevocably transformed by an unspecified event that made the seas rise. My sci-fi nerd’s money is on a meteorite hitting a polar cap, but who knows? What’s important is that as waters keep going up, the coastlines move farther and farther inland.
Echoing this instability, the characters of Sarah Mantell’s play — which won the 2023 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and is running at Playwrights Horizons — roam what is left of the country in vans, cars and RVs, finding employment at a certain tentacular mega-corporation. (It’s hard to not think of a postapocalyptic version of the film “Nomadland,” in which Frances McDormand’s character lives in her vehicle and wanders from job to job, some of them in Amazon warehouses.)
In this world, what Mantell evasively describes as “access” is not only severely limited but also appears to be controlled by the title company. Scrutinizing the shipping labels on boxes has become “the only way to know what still exists,” Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) tells her new co-worker, Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy), at a warehouse in Wyoming.
“That’s just across the border from Florida,” El (Sandra Caldwell) says, recognizing a town’s name. “That’s a good one. Wasn’t sure I’d see that one again.”
Checking out labels is also a way to look for missing people, as when Jen spots the name of mother of Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart) on one.
Mantell’s fuzzy world-building does not bear close scrutiny and poetic license only goes so far. Questions keep arising, like pesky burrs that prevent a full immersion into the story. I couldn’t stop wondering what it would mean for Amazon to control access, both metaphorical and literal, to the entire world, but the show is not interested in this type of inquiry.
Mantell fares better with the central band of outcasts, whose advancing years made them invisible or who fall outside the boundaries of traditional sexual and gender roles. (The production is presented in association with Breaking the Binary Theater.)
Some scenes take place on the warehouse floor as the characters scan outbound boxes and place them on large carts — Emmie Finckel’s scenic design, which economically suggests industry thanks to suspended belts ferrying packages, is an asset in Sivan Battat’s often confusing production. This is a place of soulless, mechanical work, yet it is also one where friendships can flourish. They are further cemented in the parking lot where our merry travelers congregate between shifts, with folding chairs and coolers. They chitchat about work and snacks, and play a game, led by Maribel (Pooya Mohseni), in which they must spot the werewolf in their midst.
Progressively, we also hear of plans to undermine the corporation, with the characters engaging in sneaky resistance against a nightmarish dystopia.
This defiance is one of several intriguing setups but the play feels like a patchwork of tantalizing leads left to fizzle out. Each person, for example, is given a short monologue about life on the road, the freedom it allows and the caution it requires. “Darker is better for sleeping, better for being unnoticed,” Ani says of parking under the lights for her first night in a lot. “But I was afraid to sleep in my truck in the dark.”
Yet we don’t really get to know these people, who are more like outlines that need to be filled in. The two exceptions are Jen and Ani, who not only have more back story but actually have things to talk about, and desires to pursue. You can almost imagine the other characters grumbling, “We want preposterous coincidences, too — it’s better than nothing.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
The post Two Climate Change Plays Keep the Flames of Hope Alive appeared first on New York Times.
