IN THE AMAZON WAREHOUSE PARKING LOT Finds Hope In a Bleak Future — Review

Off-Broadway

Deirdre Lovejoy and Donnetta Lavinia Grays | Photo: Valerie Terranova

By
Juan A. Ramirez
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October 28, 2024 9:00 PM
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Reviews

With a title like that, Sarah Mantell’s play  In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot instantly clears an impressive level of thematic interest and contemporary resonance. Receiving an attractive world premiere at Playwrights Horizons, having already won last year’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, it presents a fascinating (though morbid) view of the near-future, though one which could use a bit more drama. The one-acter envisions a world where the big-box corporations have won: they’re the country’s only employers, able to shift schedules as easily as they can uproot you to the next warehouse,  and those are already decreasing, given that climate change has eroded coastlines to the point where only the Midwest remains. The seven workers we meet – all queer women, nonbinary, or trans, and mostly of a certain age – read aloud the addresses on outgoing boxes as the only way to keep up with the outside world. Work wholly consumes them, and they spend their time off pooling together tubs of peanut butter and fifths of whiskey to pass the time.

Hope springs for Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) with the arrival of Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy), who renews their devotion to finding a lost lover who might still be out there. The others workers (played by Barsha, Sandra Caldwell, Tulis McCall, Pooya Mohseni, and Ianne Fields Stewart) all step forward to break the fourth wall and describe how they adjusted to this new way of life, providing well-rounded glimpses of what a slide into a nationwide disaster might look like for everyone. Mantell notes in their author note that a play is as much a “hiring document” as a work of art, and it is moving to see this ensemble of often undervalued actors take centerstage. But the slightness and slowness of the narrative begins to get sleepy, though the production’s tender core never collapses. And some of the dystopian elements (talk of guards seizing property; a metered doling out of information as to how the future will work) struck a particular YA chord that has always induced an eye-roll.

The Company | Photo: Valerie Terranova

Sivan Battat’s staging shifts cinematically between the sterile factory floor, above which scenic designer Emmie Finckel has placed two conveyor belts of constantly moving boxes (ingeniously and sadistically evoking children’s locomotives), and an expansive mountain range upstage. It’s a well-designed production, but I wonder if the requisite smallness of the work – it demands to be populated by people whose inner light has been all but dimmed, which this cast beautifully delivers – would benefit from the intimacy of a close-up, rather than the proscenium. Still, that gorgeous backdrop represents the wide-open escape Mantell dares to dream, even as the situation they create becomes increasingly bleak. This world is devised with an unsparing and clear-eyed vision that is startling in its perceptiveness, disheartening in its accuracy and, against all odds, rousingly optimistic in its final moments.

In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is in performance at Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

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Juan A. Ramirez

Juan A. Ramirez writes arts and culture reviews, features, and interviews for publications in New York and Boston, and will continue to do so until every last person is annoyed. Thanks to his MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University, he has suddenly found himself the expert on Queer Melodrama in Venezuelan Cinema, and is figuring out ways to apply that.

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Off-Broadway
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