Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
What do we talk about when we talk about the climate crisis?
Mantells approach is more straightforward, more eager to move us, and ultimately less moving.
Strangely, their note spends next to no time reflecting on their characters context a corporate-ruled, disaster-ravaged future.
If you dont read the labels, how will you know whats going on out there?
says Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) to newcomer Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy).
Everyone reads the shipping labels, she says.
We share them, always.
This realization is supposed to hurt when it hits, but my mind was elsewhere.
What does it mean that Amazon, now ostensibly a totalitarian nation-state, cut off access?
But how does the corporation control travel, between warehouses or beyond them?
How can it stop employees from going elsewhere, if theres even an elsewhere to go to?
Is there still a government?
IsJeff Bezospresident for life?
Katy… Zaynab… Samira, says El (Sandra Caldwell) sorrowfully as she scans.
Delante… Talia… Leslie.
But a justification built on audience emotion, not on character reality, is writerly contrivance only.
But if Barbara knew the groups system, why not just order something from Amazon?
Im happy to have such quibbles explained away, but Mantell leaves a lot of explaining to do.
I wanted to like that line.
Theater takes its place and spreads its wings.
How is it Ive disappointed you more than him?
The shame if I left you behind, the struggle if I took you …
The rules were different.
[Men] were these I dont know, like hurricanes, or earthquakes.
You couldnt live with them, talk to them, you just coped with them.
And maybe you got so used to coping you forgot you didnt have to, that you shouldnt.
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable the inferior or detrimental?
Ruth, rapt, reads aloud from Rachel CarsonsSilent Spring.
Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?
The great human power to accustom, to literally acclimatize ourselves, is both gift and possibly fatal curse.
Here, Coburn imagines beyond the inferior and detrimental, the patterns weve all grown far too used to.
Being only half as fucked up as the ones who came before us isnt enough and never was.
We have to stop coping, and start taking care.
