Boom with a View

by Jack Craib, New Rep Reviewer

New Rep‘s “boom” is a blast. The current production from the pen of playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is a hybrid of Thornton Wilder‘s “Skin of Our Teeth” and an episode of “Twilight Zone” on speed. Nachtrieb clearly draws on his degrees in both theater and biology, creating an apocalyptic view that speaks loudly and clearly (not to mention hilariously) to the very topical argument of evolution vs. creationism. His satire on “existential anxiety” is indebted to author Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale” in which Dawson works backward in time via our “concestors” (apes, monkeys, mammals, invertebrates) and writes that “life evolved out of nearly nothing, some ten billion years ago after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice”. Obviously Nachtrieb is mad, as he does just that. He’s convinced not only of the fact, but of the absolute inevitability of evolution, asserting that it would happen exactly the same if we were to start all over again.

The place: indeterminate. The time, as Nachtrieb references elsewhere: “when we least expect it”. The characters: a wholly unholy trinity faced with the imminent impact of a civilization-threatening comet. Scott Sweatt is Jules, a young marine biologist living in a subterranean biology lab who placed an ad for a “casual encounter with intensely significant coupling”; Sweatt makes the angst of this hysterical visionary palpable, never losing his zany focus on the immediate threat of annihilation. Zofia Gozynska is Jo, a skeptical journalism student who answers the ad as part of an assignment to write a story that “made you feel honest genuine hope”; she provides a very believable antagonist for our hapless hero. Karen MacDonald is Barbara, who we come to learn is a natural history docent, complete with name tag, who spends much of the play pulling levers and playing the timpani. Barbara is, in her own words, “passionate about (her) stories. Passionate.” And so is MacDonald. Can this truly be the same actress who so recently broke hearts in the Huntington Theater’s “All My Sons”? With her well-known talent for mimicry and pantomime, she displays an astonishing arsenal of gestures and exclamations rather than words to convey her character’s combination of vulnerability and drive. It’s difficult to tell where her own versatility and the superb direction by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary begin and end; it’s a seamless collaboration, but difficult to describe without divulging too much. Equally seamless are the lighting and sound, both crucial to the impact of this production.

For an off-the-wall fantasy, this work deals with serious issues, as Thornton Wilder did in acknowledging that there is “something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being”. Not only is “boom” concerned with the beginning of life, and its end, it posits that knowledge of our common past is essential; the very future of humanity depends on it. It confronts us with the dilemma of fate or randomness in the course of one’s own existence and life in general. And it does it with a healthy dose of wit, whimsy and wackiness. Don’t delay sharing the hilarity; see it ASAP, before the play’s run ends or the comet hits. Whichever comes first.