As the oceans rise, a band of queer warehouse workers travel from job to job, running from the encroaching coastline. An unlikely love story, and a startling new work of speculative fiction, In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is a quietly revolutionary tale of queer aging, chosen family, and the search for home in a volatile world.
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.
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.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Playwrights Horizons Off-Broadway Premiere Off-Broadway |
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