Death of a Prepper
In Safe House by L.B. Browne the apocalypse is almost beside the point. The bunker may be stocked for the end of the world, but it’s the family inside that’s already falling apart.
Theatre Row on Forty-Second Street, just off Ninth Avenue, is a gem of a theatre space along the same stretch as Playwrights Horizons and the Signature Theatre building (where I saw Disruption earlier this summer). It is inspiring to have so much quality Off-Broadway in one place, along the very stretch that housed many of the burgeoning theatre troupes from early in the last century. Those old, run-down theatres gave the block the nickname from which today’s Theatre Row takes its own name.
Upon entering Theatre Four (I feel like they used to have fun names like “The Clurman”), the audience is presented with Forest Entsminger’s perfectly claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit basement, in which we will be locked with this magnificent cast of characters who are unhappy to varying degrees. L.B. Browne’s fast-paced dialogue is ripped from the headlines of Preppers Quarterly, if such a thing existed, and sidesteps common tropes as much as such material can.
(There are many potential spin-off plays within Safe House, and I, for one, would have gladly watched ninety minutes of Marc Kudisch explaining air filtration and generators and so on. That slight limp he affects was a perfect touch, showing us a man who has worked with his body his whole life and may be due for a hip replacement before very long.)
Courtesy: Viktorija Mickute
Kudisch’s Rocky is building a bunker because he is certain that the next election is going to bring about some sort of nonspecific, end-of-days shortage of goods and services bordering on a zombie apocalypse. Browne keeps the specifics vague, which will always help the play age well, and we all know what we are looking at here anyway. Something has made this right-leaning Army vet snap. We later learn it is, in fact, a degenerative disease that causes, among other things, delusions, which right-leaning folk seem prone to in the best of circumstances.
Rocky’s wife, Slipper, a weak and nervous enabler (played by Karen Ziemba like a beaten-down Alice from The Brady Bunch if Sam the Butcher had a dark side), goes from being sympathetic, to irritating in her spinelessness, to borderline unbelievable in some of the things she allows to happen to her daughters. Their eldest daughter, Ashley, is plain vanilla, played perfectly in her polyester pantsuit by the enigmatic Anna Roman, who keeps a fountain of emotion bottled up as tight as the bun on her head.
Then the thing happens, and the thing is, their estranged teenage daughter, who disappeared a year ago without a word, decides to turn up. (Again, their frantic search for her is a whole other play: their relationship with law enforcement and the media; was there a website? Was there a reward? Do they declare her dead? And Ashley’s change of plans to live at home and help out is reminiscent of George Bailey staying behind to look after the old Building and Loan.)
Once Claire shows up, the playwright turns up the gas, and all the secrets of the day must come spilling out as the stakes are raised and raised again, with the father’s mental condition worsening and Claire, the teenage runaway (it’s always Claire, amiright?), having brought home more than a few problems.
I don’t usually love flashbacks, especially to dead, abusive fathers, as it has been done and done again. But, in this case, I think the play benefited from it, especially in its counterpoint between the flashbacks with Rocky and Young Claire (Julianna Layne in a standout performance).
I was walking down the block later, talking about the play with my friend. Does anyone else observe the two-block rule, which states that you can’t talk about the play you have just seen until you are two blocks away? I never make it a whole block, but it is important to try. I was smashed in the face by the play’s similarities to Death of a Salesman: a father’s descent into madness by trying too hard to take care of a family, trying to prepare them for a world he no longer entirely understands; the two children, same-sex siblings, both loving and hating their father while coming to understand him as a human; and the dead-father flashbacks (!), all while the hapless mother wrings her hands off to the side.
Courtesy: Viktorija Mickute
Not to oversimplify.
Ms. Browne, if you read this, I say go for it. I also feel the shackles of the ninety-minute, no-intermission plays Off-Broadway seems to call for. Make it the three-hour shit show it wants to be, like Miller or O’Neill would have. I bet the audience would come along for the ride.
