Review: X at Third Rail Repertory Theatre

X is not the type of show you sit back and enjoy. It will put you on edge, drag you into dark places, and leave you thinking for days. If you're that kind of theatergoer (and I certainly am), the journey is well worth it.

Alastair McDowall's 2016 speculative sci-fi play, now on stage as the final show in Third Rail Repertory Theatre's 20th anniversary season, puts a small crew of astronauts on a research station on Pluto, sometime in the distant future after an environmental apocalypse on Earth. They've lost contact with mission control. They send messages out, but none come back. They don’t know why. They don’t know when, or if, anyone is coming to rescue them.

That premise alone would make for a tense evening. But X goes somewhere stranger and darker than a simple survival story. As the waiting stretches on, the crew's psychological distress curdles into hallucinations, distortions of time, fractures in reality. The play slides between darkly funny and genuinely frightening, all soaked in existential dread. If rescue isn't coming, why keep going at all?

The whole production is designed to make you uncomfortable, and it succeeds completely. Alex Meyer's set, Carl Faber's lighting, Mark Valadez's sound, and Trevor Sargent's videos all work together to keep you slightly off-kilter. A prominent clock watches over everything. Director Rebecca Lingafelter, a Third Rail Company Member and founding member of Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, unafraid of weirdness and discomfort, is the perfect person to have at the helm.

The cast is full of familiar faces, none of whom could be accused of holding back when it comes to emotional gut-punches. Bruce Burkhartsmeier is Ray, the aging captain who is the only crewmember who remembers what Earth used to be like before the collapse. His feeling of futility sets the play’s drama in motion. Maureen Porter plays Gilda, a geologist who finds herself trying to hold the crew together through sheer force of will by convincing them, and herself, that help is on the way. Mike O'Connell is Clark, the comms specialist who responds to a problem he can't solve by pretending it doesn't exist, spending his days in his underwear bouncing a ball around the kitchen while everyone quietly blames him. Olivia Mathews is Mattie, responsible for keeping the station's systems running, and the one with the most to lose. She’s the youngest of the crew, staring down a potentially permanent state of being stranded in space. Austin Michael Young plays Cole, who channels his anxiety into a quest to work out an algorithm for time, which isn't working the way you expect it to. Junior Company members Rosie Kashinsky and Fiona Kashinsky round out the cast, making their professional theatre debuts alternating in the role of Young Mattie.

The title, X, works the way the variable does in math. It stands for something different depending on who's holding it. Time. Loss. The way memories fade until you're not sure what's real. Disconnection. Silence. Violence. The play is full of mysteries, and reality keeps shifting. Everything is open to interpretation, so you'll need to be okay with ambiguity. My partner and I talked about it for a long time after we left, went to sleep, and picked the conversation back up first thing the next morning. I’m not sure we've worked it out yet.

This show demands your full engagement. Like the crew on that station, you won't make it out unscathed, and you will probably find yourself still processing it days later.

X runs through June 7. Details and tickets here.

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