Cast Set For IN THE AMAZON WAREHOUSE PARKING LOT at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons has announced the cast and creative team of Sarah Mantell’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, a Playwrights commission directed by Sivan Battat and presented in association with Breaking the Binary Theatre (Founding Artistic Director George Strus), October 10–November 17 (opening October 29). Seamlessly merging bracing apocalypse fiction, playful heist narrative, and queer love story, Mantell’s play imagines our country transformed into an Amazon warehouse-dotted landscape, narrowing daily as the oceans take the coasts. In their respective Off-Broadway debuts, Mantell and Battat create a fast-paced, funny, and moving work of theater about the search for home in a volatile world.

A quietly revolutionary ensemble portrait of queer aging and family, In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot’s cast includes Barsha (f/k/a Debra Barsha; composer: Radiant Baby, Sophie, Songs from an Unmade Bed) as Horowitz, Sandra Caldwell (Broadway: Buddy the Buddy Holly Story, Sophisticated Ladies; Off-Broadway: Charm) as El, Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Playwrights: Men on Boats; Broadway: The Skin of Our Teeth, In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play) as Jen, Ianne Fields Stewart (TV: Dash & Lily, The Bold Type, Pose) as Sara, Deirdre Lovejoy (Broadway: Lucky Guy, The Gathering; TV: The Wire) as Ani, Tulis McCall (Off-Broadway: What Everywoman Knows, How We Love/F*ck; Regional: Running with Scissors) as Ash, and Pooya Mohseni (TV: Law & Order: SVU, Madam Secretary; Regional: White Snake) as Maribel. The creative team includes Emmie Finckel (scenic design), Mel Ng (costume design), Cha See (lighting design), Sinan Refik Zafar (sound design), Gigi Buffington (voice and text and dialect coach), Zeina Salame (dramaturg), and Alex Might (intimacy coordinator). Ryan Gohsman is the production stage manager, and Holly Adam is the assistant stage manager.

In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is presented in association with Breaking the Binary Theatre, whose third annual Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival Playwrights Horizons will host, October 21 - 27, 2024, in its Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot follows a band of queer warehouse workers as they travel in their vans from job to job, escaping the encroaching coastline, and searching for signs of the people they’ve lost along the way. The play celebrates warmth and care in an unlikely tribute to the resilience of queer community. 

Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield said, “If there’s a common thread among plays in our new season, it’s that each of these works is driven by its characters’ search for some connection with other humans in a time that feels isolated and callous. Sarah’s play imagines a not-so-far-fetched future in which capitalist values have bloated to Orwellian proportions, and climate disaster is a daily threat. And yet, what Sarah finds there is a hard-won hope, focusing on this ensemble of warehouse workers: a pack who travel together and look out for one another. In this way, they assert their human-ness in defiance of an inhumane world, a rebellion that’s sweet and decidedly queer.”

Mantell explains, “So many of our important revolutionary movements have been sparked and sustained by people I rarely see at the center of our stories. Because plays are both art and a hiring document, I also wrote this play to increase the number of roles available to women, trans, and nonbinary actors in the second half of their careers when so many artists are just reaching the peak of their abilities. The plays we write create jobs, and if we’re lucky, those plays create a lot of jobs. Our industry is made up of the people we’ve bothered to imagine and shuts out the people we haven’t. I began this play in a moment when I was having a hard time picturing a real future for myself—and I realized part of the reason is that we’ve pushed out a lot of the people who are aging ahead of me. It means a lot to me to write for this intergenerational company of extraordinary actors, many of whom are older than me."

Says Battat, “A lot of the people who are forced to live as itinerant workers are doing so because they don't have other choices, because our country has fundamentally failed them. One thing in your life can go wrong and suddenly you’re stuck in a cycle, doing manual labor into your 70s. These characters have had no path out of class struggle. One of the most important things about the play is how this community has formed as a result of that—that no one, structurally speaking, is looking out for us, so we’ll do it for each other.” 

Mantell adds “Women, trans, and nonbinary artists deserve to be center stage. The canon has always held white male actors from cradle to grave and we deserve those kinds of futures too. I have been reliably informed that this was one of the most extensive casting processes in Playwrights Horizons history and I believe it. Come see what our extraordinary company of artists has made. Similarly, I haven’t seen a lot of playwrights who the field perceives as female get a career break over the age of 40. It’s something I have honestly been scared about—and I don’t know if I would have had the chance to put a play like this into the theater world in this big way if I was perceived as closer to the age of my characters.”

Battat has conceived the production to highlight the physical nature of characters’ labor—with actors themselves moving elements of the world they inhabit. For the play’s design, she worked with Mantell and scenic designer Emmie Finckel to find the meeting point between utopia and dystopia. Battat says, “This play is in so many ways set in the edge where utopia and dystopia meet. For instance, we’ve gone through around 15 different versions even of the expanse of sky behind them — asking whether they’re in the most dystopian wasteland or against the most gorgeous mountains of Wyoming. We asked, as Sarah did when writing, what is the place where the worst version of this future meets something sublime and beautiful?” 

Brimming with compassion, invention, and comedy, the season’s limitlessly profound works center humans approaching darkness with a drive to find each other within it. Other works this season include Gabriel Kahane’s Magnificent Bird/Book of Travelers (September 24–October 6), Francesca D’Uva’s This Is My Favorite Song (Fall 2024), Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities (Winter 2025), Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water (Spring 2025), and a co-production TBA with Soho Rep.