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