Benjamin Lindsay

Other than the music and Chastain’s extremely emotive performance, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is a parody of minimalism in the theater. Props are banished. A few minor characters have been dropped. The actors all wear black (very Banana Republic), the costumes designed by Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash. Gilmour’s set is not really a set, but an empty stage that has been painted the ubiquitous black, with a band of white spread across the bottom of the upstage brick wall so that Jon Clark’s severe lighting can occasionally throw the actors’ silhouettes against it. When the music isn’t cueing the portentousness of it all, huge banks of lighting equipment are lowered and then raised to signal ever more impending doom.