Right here's a pitch you haven't heard earlier than. It's 2046. Bees in nature have suffered a dying of the planet, taking almonds, avocados and honey with them. However in an underground laboratory, three girls doing “palliative care” with 4 remaining broods make a hopeful however grotesque discovery.
Additionally, it's a comedy. Name it “Little Hive of Horrors”.
It's the setting, if not near the payoff, of “The Apiary,” a brilliant, unusual, and charming marvel by Kate Douglas, who makes her skilled writing debut with this Off Off Broadway manufacturing. Not like most such debuts, nonetheless, “The Apiary,” which opened Tuesday at Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theater, will get a near-perfect, top-notch staging below the almost-too-good course of Kate Whoriskey .
I say “virtually too properly” as a result of such a delicate however assured staging might conceal any flaws which will linger within the textual content. So be it: “The Apiary” flies with a lot good humor and new eye sweet (I don't suppose I've ever seen a bee laboratory represented on stage earlier than) that you just simply registered the way in which the thematic focus of the playwright comes dangerously shut. to obsession.
Bugs are in every single place. For starters, Walt Spangler's set is dominated by 4 roaring bins and an enormous gauze-walled chamber stuffed with little prop bugs that I might swear had been burning. The background incorporates a honeycomb sample. The ground, the railings and even the paper within the beekeepers' inbox are bumblebee yellow.
It's not simply the visuals, although. The characters discuss bees, stay bees, dream bees. Gwen (Taylor Schilling) is probably the least emotionally hooked up: Because the insecure manic lab supervisor, she is horrified by the decline of the brood below her care much less as a result of it might imply ecological collapse than as a result of it might imply reductions in funding from “upstairs”. Opposite to her, the relentless optimist Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) stans stans the critters: They’re “very delicate and so clever,” she cheerfully explains to a newcomer. “They’re dancing!” They inform jokes.”
We don't hear these jokes, however between scenes we see Stephanie Crousillat, in yoga garments and a fuel masks – the costumes are by Jennifer Moeller – performing Warren Adams' bee choreography.
The steadiness of Gwen's panic and Pilar's positivity is disturbed by the objective of the newcomer, Zora (April Matthis). A biochemist who makes an enormous skilled step for the care of bees, she is a closet fanatic who will do something to assist the colonies to outlive. After studying in a examine that plastic flowers put queens within the temper for love, he recruited Pilar to assist take a look at the speculation. Later, the assumptions develop into extra problematic, each in observe and in ethics.
I received't go into it any additional, besides to say the sport's fifth performer, Nimene Wureh, who portrays a sequence of volunteers keen to participate in Zora's ultimate experiment.
The performances are excellent individually, however they're additionally completely calibrated: Matthis all enterprise, Schilling all frenzy, Herlihy simply fully pleasant. Additionally completely calibrated are the design components, together with the dramatic lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker), the haunting sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and the effervescent music (by Grace McLean). The best way Whoriskey orchestrates these components for max expressiveness provides the sport knowledgeable sheen that acts as a sort of seal of high quality, inviting you to slip previous its gentle lengths and loosen up into its strangeness.
If you happen to do, you could end up fascinated with extra than simply bees. Regardless of wandering fairly near the electrified fence of an idée fixe, Douglas permits us little by little to know that the well being of the broods is linked to our personal; seen from a distance, in our laboratories under with our masters above, in our social colonies that develop or undergo collectively, we’re not very completely different from them. Our joys a minimum of our sorrows are interconnected.
That these concepts are solely recommendations is among the sport's nice strengths. So is his refusal to sharpen his level to a stinger, to slather the motion with an ethical or message. This type of model self-discipline is simply too usually crushed into new works by the heavy hand of years of workshop. Spontaneity and idiosyncrasy collide.
Not so right here. Though the product of a growth course of involving the Eugene O'Neill Theater Middle and Second Stage's Subsequent Stage Competition, “The Apiary” has evidently emerged unadulterated. If somebody alongside the way in which has tried to do that 70-minute thought experiment of pleasure and unhappiness about dying in one thing else, they’ve failed. His theme of the api was allowed to stay a platform as a substitute of being inboxed in, a method to understand the concepts, not pinning.
What the play has acquired as a substitute of a thousand contrasting critics is a first-class manufacturing, which permits Douglas to see the nest he has constructed. In a theatrical colony at risk, that is the very best experiment of all.
The Apiary
By March 3 at Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theater; Manhattan; 2st.com. Period: 1 hour 10 minutes.
