Review: In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, Where the End Times Have Never Been Duller

The coasts keep moving inland. They’ve reached Ohio, according to one account. But it’s difficult to know for sure ever since the corporation cut off access to the Internet. Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) and her friends try to get a sense of how much of American is left by reading the shipping labels on outgoing packages at the Wyoming warehouse where they are employed. They’re also looking for the names and locations of lost loved ones so they might someday be reunited. Until then, this small band of Amazon employees is the family they have to (literally) work with.

That’s the basic premise of Sarah Mantell’s In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, now making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons, in association with Breaking the Binary Theatre. A tantalizingly dark premise, it proves to be merely drab under the slack direction of Sivan Battat, dulled further by listless performances. It’s not so much a terrifying look at a possible future as a lethargic glance at the myopic present.

Both climate change and the growing power of tech giants are, of course, real concerns worthy of our attention, but they often feel like background noise to the story of mysterious newcomer Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy) and her budding romance with Jen, who still pines for Barbara (who remains offstage). Things become interesting when we learn that Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart) and the others are plotting to destroy a major expansion of the warehouse. We suspect Amazon is on to their plans when their vehicles suddenly disappear from the parking lot, leaving them with nowhere to go but work. Suddenly, these employees look a lot more like serfs.

One would think that a play about industrial saboteurs raging against a giant authoritarian corporation as the waters rise would be a real thriller — but one would be mistaken. While there is some dramatic build in this mostly meandering play, Battat does little to exploit it through either performance or design.

There’s potential in Emmie Finckel’s versatile industrial set, featuring conveyor belts and a garage door. Mel Ng’s contemporary costumes let us know that this story is set in the very near future. Sinan Refik Zafar’s sound delivers the insistent whir of machinery and offers a further opportunity to put our nerves on edge. But the tone remains frustratingly sedate as the apocalypse approaches and the script falls into a predictable pattern that is only broken by occasional tests of our credulity.

At one point a character decides to mail herself to a loved one in an oversized box (she would almost certainly crash through the cardboard like Mary Katherine Gallagher within the first hour). We are also asked to suspend any knowledge of American topography and accept that the flooding of mountainous West Virginia would be as seamless as the flooding of the Potomac region.

And then there’s the big one: Even in the end times, the play seems to promise, Amazon will fulfill your order. It’s an unintentional endorsement of the logistics genius of the behemoth e-retailer that even its most zealous propagandists wouldn’t attempt. Playwrights can get away with such flights of fancy if they have something interesting to say that gets us to buy into their otherwise fantastical world, but Mantell never does.

The direct address monologues that Mantell writes for each character, offering a glimpse of their lives in the before times, are another largely missed opportunity. Penetrating the darkened house with an ultra-serious gaze, Horowitz (Barsha) asks, “Did you know that ducks have one ovary?” The following monologue is a tribute to the fascinating sexual variance that can be found in nature, but it has little to say about the erosion of both coasts and democracy — and our complicity as consumers.

Of course, Mantell may not be much interested in these subjects. “Because plays are both art and a hiring document,” they write in a program note. “I also wrote this play to increase the number of roles available to women, trans, and nonbinary actors in the second half of their careers when so many artists are just reaching the peak of their abilities.” While we only get a gander at the foothills of what I suspect these performers are capable of, the play does at least succeed in this stated purpose, which has won it some accolades. In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is the winner of the 2023 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Walking away from In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, it’s hard not to suspect that our obsession with identity and self-discovery has only served as a massive distraction from the tectonic shifts taking place in our world. I fear that we will one day wake up and discover that our true selves are not L, G, B, T, or Q, but insignificant cogs in a machine over which we’ve lost all control.