In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot Off-Broadway Reviews

Genre fiction is harder than people want to give it credit for, partly because 90 percent of it is world-building. Watching In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, my brain kept jumping to Severance, a TV dystopia that’s got its t’s crossed and its i’s painstakingly dotted. (Just look at how much time that show spends explaining why a character can’t sneak a written message out of the office, even if she swallows it.) By contrast, Mantell’s characters are surrounded by unaddressed blips in internal logic — if the show were a Dungeons & Dragons game, the players would be endlessly riding the DM about loose ends and loopholes.

There’s so much that’s dark in this vision of America, and it’s pretty hard in this week where an election is about to determine whether we have any hope of slowing climate apocalypse, in this season where mountain North Carolina is “the coast now,” that it’s remarkable that Mantell and Battat are able to inject the piece with some hope: hope in the power of collective action, hope that the individual bonds between people might yet be saved. The play ends with an improbably whimsical moment of optimism, a thread followed out of the play in a single outbound box, picked out by a spotlight as it traverses the ceiling-height conveyors. Maybe there is a way out after all.

Composed mostly in relatively terse exchanges that contrast against the reflective monologues, In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot achieves its power by evoking a miserable existence and observing the ways strangers are able to endure it by bonding in familial relationships. How these survivors are variously queer, trans or whatever in nature seems nearly beside the point of depicting the kindly, hardy humanity they share in the awful face of catastrophe.

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.

A little too neatly, if we’re being honest. Mantell’s play suffers from poky pacing and schematic storytelling in its attempt to balance quirky romcom and ecological wakeup call. Despite running only 95 minutes, the piece drags in the middle as the characters each get an obligatory monologue about their experience surviving the disaster. Director Sivan Battat establishes a rather too cozy and laid-back vibe, but the writing’s also to blame as coincidences and heavy-handed plot twists pile up and the plot teeters between semi-surreal and plausible. Still, there are lovely speeches here and there.