X - Flat Earth Theatre
Pictured: the cast of X
X – Flat Earth Theatre
Review by James Wilkinson
X is presented by Flat Earth Theatre. Written by Alistair McDowall. Directed by Lindsay Eagle. Scenic Designer: Darren Cornell. Costume Designer: Erica Desautels. Lighting Designer: Connor S. Van Ness. Sound Designer: Kyle Lampe. Special Effects Designer: Lynn Wilcott. Props & Clock Designer: Jake Scaltreto. Dramaturg: Dee Rogers.
Flat Earth Theatre’s X is a great big beautiful Trojan horse of a production. It lures you onto the thin ice with the familiar trappings of sci-fi tales, (plot points and story arcs we’ve all heard before), all the while building the walls of a much more complex puzzle box around you. By the time you realize that you’re trapped, it’s too late. The ice gives out beneath you and you’re plunged into freezing darkness below. It’s the upside-down spiritual cousin to Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, (one that does away with the philosophical posturing). In Sartre’s play he posited that hell was other people. X runs in the opposite direction, showing us that life without other people ain’t all it’s cracked up to be either. It even does Sartre one better by bringing the audience into the madness, letting the chaos slip in through the cracks under the door until it fills the room and combusts. And it has a rip-roaring good time getting you there. There are moments in X when you’ll start to believe that you yourself are going mad, no different than the characters on the stage before you. You won’t be, (I promise you that if I can make it through it, so can you). On the long walk back to your car from the theater, your mind keeps working at it and you soon realize that the answers were right in front of you from the start.
The play by Alistair McDowall takes place out in the far reaches of our solar system, at a space station on Pluto (which, for the purposes of this production, we’re considering a planet…go on, fight me). A small crew of scientists are stationed there, maintaining a base that’s designed to support life indefinitely. In small drips and drabs provided by the crew’s daily conversation we get a dreary picture of what life is like back on planet Earth, (has there ever been a sci-fi story that painted a positive picture of the future? We seem to collectively understand that we’re speeding toward disaster). The environment has collapsed to the point where trees are considered an oddity. No one at the station seems particularly enthused about the possibility of returning home. All the same, the fact that the ship scheduled to pick them up is months late, with no word of when it’ll arrive, has everyone on edge. Why can’t they get a signal from their superiors? Why are their own communications falling on deaf ears? It’s a situation that should inspire ever-mounting levels of anxiety, but from the beginning, hopelessness is in the air. On some level the characters seem to know that they’ll be living out their days on this cold rock spinning out in the vast nothingness of space. They’ve resigned to it.
That expected anxiety only begins to appear when McDowall introduces a technological mishap into the environment: the clocks have all begun to malfunction. Now left without a way to mark the passage of time and with no concrete idea of how quickly time is passing, everything begins to fall apart. You may have noticed that I haven’t referenced any specific characters in the description of the plot. Well, that’s because, (in a development that would get a smile of recognition from Phillip K. Dick), it’s hard to pin down exactly who or what is real in our story. Are there four crew members on board or five? Are we watching the story through Gilda’s eyes or Mattie’s? Or Cole’s? All of them or none of the above? As the characters’ mental states begin to crumble, so does the storytelling. With each new scene we’re left to shift through the wreckage and piece together the larger story.
It’s a messy snake pit of a plot to fall into, but thankfully with Flat Earth’s production, we have director Lindsay Eagle at the helm. I had enjoyed the production of Antigone that she turned in for Flat Earth about a year a half ago, but X allows her to tap into something that wasn’t possible with that earlier play. It may have to do with the fact that Antigone is an older play based on an even older Greek model. Working with a more contemporary piece of writing has sparked her imagination in a more all-consuming way. It’s the most fantastically muscular bit of direction that I’ve probably seen this year. One that manages to flex its strength without destroying the material in the process. It’s quiet and subtle when it needs to be, loud and raucous when the play cranks everything up to eleven. She gets fantastic performances out of her team of actors, each grappling with their own spiral into madness.
X also manages to be one of the most immaculately designed productions that I’ve recently seen. The senses are constantly getting drawn to subtle details which are drawing out a mood of dread and despair. The thwap-thwap-thwap of the air vents in Kyle Lampe’s sound design begins to feel like a constant flicking at the back of your head. The neon glow from lighting designer Connor S. Van Ness keeps everything looking just a touch unreal. Costume designer Erica Desautels keeps the actors in clothing that’s barely a step up from pajamas (and stamped with the company logo). It all serves to sell the idea that these characters are stuck in limbo, just waiting for time to pass and never being sure if it does. I also have to give a great deal of credit to the production’s special effects designer, Lynn Wilcott. For the sake of spoilers, I can’t go into exactly why, just trust me that you’ll know it when you see it and it is spectacular.
But the supreme pleasure of the play comes when you begin to recognize the mind games it’s engaging in. You didn’t even know you were playing and you’re already four moves behind. As the play chugs along, the scenes you’ve already watched keep getting put into frightening new contexts when you think back on them. Did we just get a glimpse of the future or the past? A repeated conversation seems to suggest separate time lines or maybe it’s just that none of this is real. A board game two characters play has a name that becomes a vicious taunt when you see where the story goes. The play keeps changing on you in a way that, miraculously, never feels like a cheat. Instead, it becomes a way for the audience to completely identify with the plight of the characters. As their reality crumbles, you find yourself constantly searching your own memory for clues in what you’ve previously seen and second guessing what you watched only a few moments ago.
The only disappointment comes towards the end when it seems that McDowall seems to lose his nerve. He pulls back at the exact moment we’re expecting the final crushing blow (characters that have become non-verbal suddenly regain the power of coherent speech). Perhaps he just didn’t know what comes next after having pushed his characters and situation to such an extreme (God knows I don’t have an answer for what should come next). But from that point on, it feels as though he’s flailing, throwing out anything in hopes of gaining some narrative traction. When he does finally land on something, it’s a device that makes a play for our emotions in a way that feels incompatible with what we’ve been watching. What’s made the play so brilliant up until that point isn’t how it works our emotions, it’s the intellectual chess game its been playing with us. To switch gears like this just makes the play fall flat when it was prepared to soar.
Still, that’s a fault I lay at the door of the play and not at Flat Earth’s production. There’s so much here that’s so good, I can forgive a misstep. It’s a blast of a production.
X is presented by Flat Earth Theatre at the Black Box at the Mosesian Center for the Arts, November 1-16, 2019.
For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.flatearththeatre.com
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