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.
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.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Playwrights Horizons Off-Broadway Premiere Off-Broadway |
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