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Review: ‘In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot’ Tries to Think Outside the Box

How sadly apt, to attend In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot the day after Jeff Bezos ordered The Washington Post to refrain from endorsing a Presidential candidate. Seems the world’s richest man didn’t want to endanger lucrative government contracts should a serial bankrupter gain reentry to the White House. Was Bezos bought, or is he pre-bribing Trump? As the little girl in the meme says, “Why not both?” Regardless, here we are, watching a play set about 15 years from now, when catastrophic sea levels are swallowing American states east and west. The U.S. is going under, yet Amazon still delivers.

Sarah Mantell’s future fable takes place in and around an Amazon shipping center in rural Wyoming—dry land for the moment. Friendly and chatty Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) works a shift with taciturn newbie Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy). Boxes of various sizes trundle down a conveyer table; the yellow-vested laborers scan labels and stack boxes on a large utility cart. If you knew nothing about the play, everything would look normal. Jen reads each address label out loud—“Flagstaff, Arizona” and so forth—complaining when Ani doesn’t do the same. “How will you know what’s going on out there?” Jen asks, ominously. That’s when you realize the workers are gauging how far the ocean has crept by which cities are still receiving. It’s a clever device, emblematic of Mantell’s graceful way of juxtaposing banal detail with apocalyptic horror. We also learn the corporation cut “access.” No email, no phone to the outside. Everyone lives out of their truck, does their shift, and unwinds in the parking lot with games and chitchat. It’s the end of the world, and we’re still in a late-capitalist gig economy with zero security.

Despite the cli-fi backdrop, Mantell’s baseline genre is workplace dramedy. It’s a queer world, too: in this co-production by Playwrights Horizons and Breaking the Binary Theatre, all performers are women or female-identifying. The colorful characters have banded together because of shared interest, traveling from warehouse to warehouse to escape bad management or deadly waters, from Albany to Ohio to Pennsylvania. Ani is the straight exception, an Oregon escapee who lost her husband to the floods—but her journey goes in unexpected directions. We follow two parallel plots: Ani’s hidden agenda—which involves Jen, and covert sabotage undertaken by Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart), who hoards sugar and dumps it into concrete mixers, slowing construction of Section D. Queer desire and industry jamming intertwine neatly.

A little too neatly, if we’re being honest. Mantell’s play suffers from poky pacing and schematic storytelling in its attempt to balance quirky romcom and ecological wakeup call. Despite running only 95 minutes, the piece drags in the middle as the characters each get an obligatory monologue about their experience surviving the disaster. Director Sivan Battat establishes a rather too cozy and laid-back vibe, but the writing’s also to blame as coincidences and heavy-handed plot twists pile up and the plot teeters between semi-surreal and plausible. Still, there are lovely speeches here and there. Working a shift with Sara, Ani floats the idea that the warehouse and all the technological progress it represents might need to go:

We’ve invented a lot of stupid things. But anything we invent we can uninvent, right? We uninvented handkerchiefs with Kleenex. We uninvented free time with hobbies. Air conditioning uninvented August. We’re uninventing things all the time. Just the wrong things, you know. We could just uninvent all of this and keep August. I kind of liked August.

It’s a sweet, touching moment in a play that loves its characters and keeps the real villain offstage. To be sure, these performers are easy to feel affection for, including Sandra Caldwell as the sly and feisty El; Barsha as the kvetch-prone Horowitz; Tulis McCall as the cranky Ash; and Pooya Mohseni as the motherly Maribel. Apart from a love affair that blooms late in the story, the interactions among our working-class protagonists are oddly sexless. Not that everyone needs to be hooking up, but giving each of them more personality and conflict would be appreciated. Even if individual characters come across as weightless and sketchy, the affability of the performers compensates. Grays and Lovejoy manage to imbue their scenes with a welcome degree of tension and tenderness.

I wanted to be shocked and galvanized by the collision of corporate cruelty and human kindness, but Parking Lot peters out in its climactic scenes. Jen allows herself literally to be boxed and shipped to freedom, while the others attempt to “uninvent” the warehouse in a far-fetched re-wilding gambit. With a bit more boldness and appetite for danger, Mantell’s dark whimsy might have resulted in a companion piece to Anne Washburn’s still-astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (which also ran at Playwrights Horizons). Both works are about Americans adapting to catastrophe (more copetopian than dystopian), trying to hold on to their humanity, but here the stakes feel weirdly low. Amazon and its owners may be amoral and short-sighted, but something tells me that when civilization falls, these behemoths will be the first to go.