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Dispatches From the Apocalypse: Safe House and The Barbarians
Two plays that, fitfully and incompletely, get at this moment’s dread.
I thrilled to Walsh’s howling, rough-and-tumble Ballyturk and, in many ways, to his adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers(the one that’s just jumped to the screen starring Benedict Cumberbatch); my experiences of his Arlington, a caged, Orwellian love story, and his Penelope, a laddish riff on the myth of Odysseus’s wife and her oppressive army of suitors, were cooler, more complicated. In Jack Phelan’s video design, more often than not dominating the set’s back wall, sinister snippets play out: a series of dead-eyed birthday parties, a menacing mother, an aunt who was institutionalized (“who cracked because she dreamt”), a leering, bare-torsoed boyfriend muttering frightening temptations, a little girl in a princess dress, a funeral. They are a pair of scientists called Ana Coluthia (Jess Barbagallo) and St. Crispin’s Day Massacre (Jennifer Ikeda); their leopard-sweatsuit-and-Axe-bedecked New Jersey bro of a test subject, We (Naren Weiss); and the “Woman with the Robot Voice” (Chloe Claudel), who’s apparently the AI that controls entry to their lab (“Access: graham cracker,” she says serenely after each positive retinal scan) but who also harbors “a rich and compelling backstory” all her own.
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