Loren Noveck

If you like your musicals to run on an engine of bigger, louder, faster, MORE, The Lost Boys is for you. Dane Laffrey’s set is a mechanical marvel that not only stretches up three full stories into the heights of the Palace Theatre’s fly space and includes a functioning elevator but creates a sunken level, often sinking with actors on it, and Michael Arden’s production fills all of that vertical space ingeniously, usually operating on at least two levels at once. It doesn’t entirely make sense that there would be a functioning elevator in an earthquake-damaged ironworks, nor why vampires who can fly would need to travel in it anyway, but coherent worldbuilding was never part of the charm of The Lost Boys on stage or screen, and it’s a cool effect.

The play Reddick has built on the foundation of that experience, Cold War Choir Practice, is a coming-of-age fantasia that embraces a wild array of genres and styles, leading us down a path filled with farce, music, and suspense to some stark truths that ring as true now as they did in the play’s 1987 setting: Institutional power can steamroller over individual choices, every time.

Bughouse’s use of technology feels more sophisticated and sharper than what you’d see in one of those “immersive Van Gogh” art exhibits. Alongside the projections, Arthur Solari’s sound design and Christopher Akerlund’s lighting effectively build a liminal world. But as a theater piece, it’s shockingly inert. Even at barely an hour long, it repeats itself, in a way that I imagine is meant to speak to Darger’s recurring preoccupations but instead feels like a heavy-handed way to zero in on his central traumas.

I don’t know that the play ever really explains how these people came to be the people they are; Shawn isn’t all that interested in the causal chains of human relationships. He’s interested in secrets, the secrets we keep from others and for ourselves. And he’s interested in the moral compromises and choices we all make to live in a society: what we did before our moth days, after all, is our whole lives. What We Did Before Our Moth Days is, in a weird way, a kinder, gentler Wallace Shawn: there’s no searing indictment of society a la The Fever or subtle Nazi sympathies like Aunt Dan and Lemon or rounding up of intellectuals like The Designated Mourner. But even in that gentleness, there are constant flashes and flares of the darkness at the heart of people; of the ways our own self-interest blinds us to the needs and the humanity of others. In that way, it’s maximal Shawn.

I saw What the Constitution Means to Me on the day Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018. At the time, I said, “I started out not wanting this review to be entirely about politics, or at least not about my politics. But the show—like America right now—blends the personal and the political in ways that are as inextricable as the conversations I can’t seem to stop having.” I can’t help having some of those same emotions right now.

It’s all building to that inevitable moment when the knock will come, when the running will begin. And yet that moment, despite a sickening plot twist, thuddingly effective and faintly manipulative all at once, is not what struck me most deeply in A Knock on the Roof. Rather, it’s the monologue about waiting that I quoted earlier: “Here in Gaza, nothing is yours. You are absolutely looted. The sieged land besieging you. Time feels endless but none of it belongs to you.” It’s the sense of the life Mariam could have–should have–had.

Is it gimmicky? Absolutely. Gimmicky on multiple levels at once, even: the treadmills, the time clock, the merch table. It’s chaotic and splashy and overwhelming and silly. But it’s nonetheless built on a foundation of real emotions: on the one hand the “runner’s high” of thinking you’ve cracked the code of doing it all; on the other, the weary recognition of the deep, exhausted pit of burnout. (The show introduces each performer with a graphic that includes their current stress level.) And while there’s something serious at the root of it, and the performers enact their tasks with utmost sincerity–even the most ridiculous elements–the overall tone also embraces the absurdity of the whole endeavor. (And they cap it off with a little pop of joy in the form of a treadmill-based dance number that you may recognize from a music video a while back.)

There’s so much that’s dark in this vision of America, and it’s pretty hard in this week where an election is about to determine whether we have any hope of slowing climate apocalypse, in this season where mountain North Carolina is “the coast now,” that it’s remarkable that Mantell and Battat are able to inject the piece with some hope: hope in the power of collective action, hope that the individual bonds between people might yet be saved. The play ends with an improbably whimsical moment of optimism, a thread followed out of the play in a single outbound box, picked out by a spotlight as it traverses the ceiling-height conveyors. Maybe there is a way out after all.

For one thing, they get a number of laughs out of the various ways to prop a foot on a desk drawer handle for maximum manspreading posture. Yes, even at 75 minutes, this gets a little baggy about two-thirds of the way through. Yes, the creators can’t resist throwing in a splashy closing scene that feels more like an excuse for a few video effects. But for pure silly fun, Cellino v. Barnes hits the mark.