DISASTER THEATER

Upon exiting The Brick after Carol’s Disaster Theater, a stampede of inebriated Williamsburg bros came skirmishing down Metropolitan Avenue, like a site-specific sequel to the show’s chaotic intermezzi. The ability to experience that moment as such is a testament to how Skye Fort and Mike Steele’s finely crafted devising, in tandem with their performers’ relentless commitment, hyper-sensitizes their audiences to understanding dystopia no longer as an imagined future, but as an embodied present.

Structured like a Rubik’s Cube, the play consists of distinct and tangentially related elements that cycle in and out of cogency. Characters, stories, references, motifs, actions, and performative modes are arranged in time and space in a similarly cubist staging which fragments the familiar into stark, tragicomic juxtapositions. It is presented primarily as a radio play, and yet is extremely visually expressionistic in its use of film noir, sci-fi, sitcom, and B horror aesthetics, packaged in a sequence of self-described “severed parts,” comprising a dramaturgical four-course meal – “appetizers” (physicalized stage directions), “entrées” (rising action), “junk food (climax), and “leftovers” (recapitulations).

The set is anchored by a refrigerator that functions like the TARDIS of Doctor Who. Performers, clad in beige jumpsuits, speak desperately into the freezer, which contains a camera that live feeds to a monitor on the kitchen table (which later opens into a digestive tract). Characters enter and exit from the refrigerator like Dick Van Dyke stumbling over his ottoman. Another monitor plays “Public Sadness Announcements,” in which vulnerable sentiments struggle for air amid scenes ranging from cruel to grotesque.

A loose theme of survival ebbs and flows, beginning with the famous 1951 animate civil defense film Duck and Cover, echoed later by Tony Jenkins who, as a lizard, instructs humans to get out of harm’s way by parting with replaceable body parts through the incredibly stoic practice, “Cut and Run,” complete with a catchy dance move. Other scenes involve a mysterious plague, an ode to picking scabs, and a family imploding on its perverse secrets, culminating in a rapid-fire doomsdaybucket list recitation between Fort and Steele before passionately feasting on an ice cream fish filled with spaghetti and meatballs.

Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” scores the curtain call at an inscrutable intersection of earnestness and irony that nonetheless urges us to resist our increasingly imminent existential threats with a fervent, maniacal love for life that oscillates between Epicureanism and full-throttled hedonism.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Jonathan Matthews-Guzman