Review: REYKJAVIC at Stray Cat Theatre

Guest contributor David Appleford offers his take on Stray Cat Theatre’s production of Steve Yockey’s REYKJAVIK.

Steve Yockey writes plays the way some directors make movies: he likes to set up a world that’s already tilting, then see how long you’ll stay on your feet. Watching his scenes unfold is akin to wandering through the narrow streets of a foreign city at night: you’re lost, but the detours are more interesting than the destination.

REYKJAVIK presented by Stray Cat Theatre and now playing at Tempe Center for the Arts until December 20, is Yockey’s snow globe of supernatural unease, shaken until the glitter feels dangerous. He brings out tricks of haunted hotels, shapeshifters, spectral relatives, sudden blood, a raven that becomes a man, then invites you to enjoy the twists and turns even when you’re not quite sure which direction it’s going.

He doesn’t so much write plays as dare you to keep up with him; you’re convinced you know what’s going on until the next turn, when you suddenly realize you don’t. Clearly, the writer enjoys this sort of thing.

The opening is a knockout. It begins in a Reykjavik bar, where an American tourist, James (Ty Klassen) is trying to see the Northern Lights but gets sidetracked by a woman (Raijene Aýme) who’s now passed out, though wakes long enough to declare, “There’s blood! Falling from the sky!” Beside him at the bar are two men (Andrew Gray and Devon Mahon). One of them keeps asking if James “feels good,” and at first, it’s funny, until, through repetition, it’s not. The music is blasting, the dialogue ricochets like stray bullets, and suddenly the whole scene feels like it’s sliding toward doom.

To describe it this way makes it sound reasonably orderly. It isn’t. It’s a scene that could collapse under its own cleverness, but instead it pushes you into that peculiar theater space, somewhere between amusement and dread.

As things continue, the narrative skips like a scratched record. A moment of intimacy mutates into menace, a casual drink spirals into blood, a spectral visitation dissolves into black comedy. What binds these fragments together isn’t logic but mood: the uncanny sense that beneath the Northern Lights, everything ordinary is trembling with supernatural possibility.

Stray Cat’s production team of Dori Brown’s scenic design, Joanna Emmott’s lights, Stacey Walston’s technical direction, and Pete Biss’s sound together give the play a charge that makes you want to sit forward in your seat. As directed by Ron May, it’s theater as amusement park ride: part scary, part funny, part “what the hell is going on here?”

The structure is deliberately puzzling. And yet to its credit, for ninety minutes, no intermission, you’re rarely bored. The pleasure is in the moment-to-moment theatricality: a performance style that’s at once heightened and sly, carried by a production that with atmospheric image projections on a blank white set knows how to spin unease into a visual cinematic-like spectacle.

And if that wasn’t enough, then things get really strange. Six actors, including Aaron Cammack and Elizabeth Broeder play three, four, sometimes five roles apiece, while Jessie Tully’s costumes practically become the seventh cast member, helping you keep a visible track of who’s who. Do the characters connect? Sometimes. But then again, sometimes not. And Yockey doesn’t seem to care if you’re confused. The writer’s plays often behave as though they’re in on a private joke they refuse to explain, one the audience hasn’t been fully let in on. In REYKJAVIK, that joke involves Icelandic elves, Huldufólk, or the “hidden people” who drift through the action, visible and invisible by turns. Unless you’ve recently brushed up on your mythology, some of this will inevitably slide past you.

There’s also a strong sexual current running through the piece; part danger, part romance, all of it startlingly believable because of the naturally delivered performances and, more importantly, essential to the play’s internal logic. The actors navigate this charged terrain with a kind of effortless precision, approaching each encounter with both care and a searing openness. It’s as if the strangeness has its own voltage. It’s the sort of theatrical world that can feel by turns exhilarating and exasperating: you keep wondering whether these figures are meant to snap together in some grand design as it occasionally suggests, or whether we’re simply meant to surrender to the fragments of a cracked kaleidoscope, something that’s glittering, absurd, yet oddly compelling.

And just when the strangeness threatens to topple into parody, there comes a moment of piercing sadness, often revolving around loss and reunion. The supernatural here is not decoration but a way of heightening the rawness of human experience, though at times it’s like watching an anthology series where every episode bleeds into the next, but the season finale never arrives.

But that’s the real trick of REYKJAVIK. Like the Northern Lights themselves, the play veers between obscurity and wonder. Clouds drift in, colors dissolve, and just when you’re ready to give up, the sky clears and you’re staring at something weird and wonderful, even uncanny.  And that’s precisely Yockey’s game: he wants you to wrestle with it, to get lost, to lean into the fog. Sometimes the fog is frustrating, but then it clears, and you’re hit with a moment of theatrical clarity so sharp it takes your breath away.

Ultimately, REYKJAVIK is less a play to be solved rather than a mood to be inhabited. That may frustrate some, but for others, it’s the kind of theater that embraces mystery, that resists tidy endings, that thrives in the uncanny spaces between genres, which, when you consider it, is right up Stray Cat’s alley. You may leave scratching your head, but also feeling strangely exhilarated, haunted by the thought that in the land of fire and ice, reality itself, just like that raven, can shape-shift.

But make no mistake, audiences will be divided. They may admire the audacity but occasionally those not altogether enjoying the ride will yearn for the play to choose a lane, to commit to coherence rather than forever tease it.

This Stray Cat Theatre production helmed by May is like chasing the Northern Lights: half the time you’re staring at clouds, wondering why you bothered, and then, there it is; something shimmering, weird, and wonderful, and you’re suddenly glad you came.

REYKJAVIK runs through December 20th at:

The Tempe Center for the Arts -- https://www.tempecenterforthearts.com/ -- 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ -- 833-ATC-SEAT

Stray Cat Theatre -- https://straycattheatre.org/

Artwork by Erick Turner

Phoenix Awards - Live Stats

Best Musical - Top 3

1. TOOTSIE (Arizona Broadway Theatre)

23% of votes

2. ANASTASIA: THE MUSICAL (Don Bluth Front Row Theatre)

8.6% of votes

3. WE ARE THE TIGERS (Velvet Curtain Productions)

7% of votes

Vote Now!