EGN NEWS DESK
Here’s a pitch you haven’t heard earlier than. It’s 2046. Bees within the wild have succumbed to a planet-wide die-off, taking almonds, avocados and honey down with them. But in a subterranean lab, three girls doing “palliative care” with 4 remaining broods make a hopeful if grotesque discovery.
Also, it’s a comedy. Call it “Little Hive of Horrors.”
That’s the setup, if nowhere close to the payoff, of the “The Apiary,” a vivid, unusual and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her skilled playwriting debut with this Off Off Broadway manufacturing. Unlike most such debuts, although, “The Apiary,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving an almost excellent, first-class staging underneath the virtually too good path of Kate Whoriskey.
I say “virtually too good” as a result of a staging so delicate but assured may disguise no matter flaws could lurk within the textual content. So be it: “The Apiary” flies by with a lot good humor and novel eye sweet (I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen a bee lab represented onstage earlier than) that you just barely register the best way the playwright’s thematic focus comes dangerously near obsession.
The bugs are all over the place. To start with, Walt Spangler’s set is dominated by 4 hive packing containers and a huge gauze-walled chamber crammed with little prop bugs I may swear had been swarming. The backdrop contains a honeycomb sample. The flooring, the railings and even the paper within the beekeepers’ desktop inboxes are bumblebee yellow.
It’s not simply the visuals, although. The characters speak bees, stay bees, dream bees. Gwen (Taylor Schilling) is maybe the least emotionally hooked up: As the lab’s manically insecure manager, she’s freaked out by the decline of the broods underneath her care much less as a result of it’d imply ecological collapse than as a result of it’d imply funding cutbacks from “upstairs.” Countering her, the relentlessly optimistic Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) absolutely stans the critters: They are “very delicate and so so good,” she explains merrily to a newcomer. “They dance! They inform jokes.”
We don’t hear these jokes, however between scenes we do see Stephanie Crousillat, in yoga put on and a gasoline masks — the costumes are by Jennifer Moeller — performing Warren Adams’s creepy bee choreography.
The equilibrium of Gwen’s panic and Pilar’s positivity is disturbed by the purposefulness of the newcomer, Zora (April Matthis). A biochemist taking a giant step down professionally to take care of bees, she is a closet zealot who will do something to assist the colonies survive. Having learn in a examine that plastic flowers put queens within the temper for love, she conscripts Pilar into serving to her check the speculation. Later, the hypotheses get extra problematic, each virtually and ethically.
I gained’t go into that additional besides to say the play’s fifth performer, Nimene Wureh, who portrays a sequence of volunteers prepared to take part in Zora’s remaining experiment.
The performances are excellent individually, however are additionally completely calibrated: Matthis all enterprise, Schilling all frenzy, Herlihy simply utterly pleasant. Also completely calibrated are the design components, together with the dramatic lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker), the unnerving sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and the seething music (by Grace McLean). The method Whoriskey orchestrates these components for max expressiveness provides the play knowledgeable sheen that acts as a type of high quality seal, inviting you to slide previous its slight longueurs and loosen up into its oddness.
If you do, you might end up desirous about extra than simply bees. Despite wandering pretty near the electrified fence of an idée fixe, Douglas regularly lets us perceive that the well being of the broods is tied to our personal; seen from a distance, in our downstairs labs with our upstairs overlords, in our social colonies that thrive or endure collectively, we aren’t a lot totally different from them. Our joys at least our sorrows are interconnected.
That these concepts are mere options is without doubt one of the play’s nice strengths. So is its refusal to sharpen its level to a stinger, to slather the motion with an ethical or message. That type of model self-discipline is simply too usually crushed into new works by the heavy-handedness of years of workshopping. Spontaneity and idiosyncrasy are crushed out.
Not so right here. Though the product of a developmental course of involving the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and Second Stage’s personal Next Stage Festival, “The Apiary” has evidently emerged unadulterated. If anybody alongside the best way tried to make this cheery-sad 70-minute thought experiment about loss of life into one thing else, they failed. Its bee theme has been allowed to stay a platform as a substitute of being boxed in, a method of uplifting concepts, not pinning them down.
What the play acquired as a substitute of a thousand contrasting critiques is a top-notch manufacturing, permitting Douglas to see the hive she constructed. In an endangered theatrical colony, that’s the perfect experiment of all.
The Apiary
Through March 3 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater; Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
