Dead in HereSmock Alley Theatre – Black Box\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606<\/p>\n
Who remembers life before our current doomer era? When the twentysomethings of Dead in Here, a funkily sly work by playwright CN Smith and director Dominic O\u2019Brien, are seen singing karaoke, someone looks back on the recent past as if it were already a separate, carefree age: \u201cLet\u2019s party like it\u2019s 2019!\u201d<\/p>\n
In a wealthy English family\u2019s estate, Millie (Allie O\u2019Neill) cagily observes one of her Irish guests: Brian (Samuel Coyle), a brash partier who barely conceals his Anglophobia, and an obvious freeloader. \u201cMaybe she\u2019ll have us over someday,\u201d ponders his girlfriend Georgia (Lora Hartin), about one of Millie\u2019s other grand properties.<\/p>\n
Inspired by The Decameron, the 14th century story collection where young people decamp to Florence during the Black Death, Smith\u2019s group waits out a Covid-19 lockdown. Amid several echoes of calamities (it\u2019s as if Smith and O\u2019Brien are taking a temperature-check for Gen Z), it is Brian\u2019s reluctance to move in with Georgia that the play seizes on; he cites an insurmountable housing crisis as an excuse. A working actor recruiting others into improvisations, he ends up acting out a fantasy that comes under Millie\u2019s control, depicting a domestic life that turns disappointing and violent.<\/p>\n
I was also reminded of Appropriate, Branden Jacob-Jenkins\u2019s play where inhabitants of a house discover clues of racist atrocities. Notably, a B-plot in Dead in Here concerning the house\u2019s caretaker involves the casting of a different actor of the global majority in each performance.<\/p>\n
Courageously, Smith\u2019s playscript refuses to be explicitly about its world catastrophes, as if doing so risks narrowing its possibilities. Instead, we get an admirably shapeless dread of people inheriting irreconcilable crises. \u201cShould I want to know how I\u2019m going to die?\u201d says someone, of a generation who can\u2019t seem to push the question from their minds. <\/p>\n