Waterworld

T he crux of this new play by young
playwright and Harvard alumnus Ashlin Halfnight is a question: What, in
the end, is dispensable? Halfnight poses this problem in a
postapocalyptic underwater bunker, where little—animal or
object—survives. The play wonders what, in the end, we can keep.
Bits of cultural nostalgia: the last remaining Polaroid camera, menus
from a once popular restaurant chain called the Cheesecake Factory, or
an instrument known throughout history as a trumpet? Which scraps of
our theatrical canon? Or our more basic needs: sex, food,
relationships? Who gets to make the decisions when resources are
scarce? In Artifacts, the audience is handed only a fraction
of this burden—it votes on what bits of classical theater to keep
in storage and which to flush away—and watches what happens when
divergences between one’s closest personal priorities and the most
critical global responsibilities are at stake.

The theatrics begin not onstage, but at the ticket counter: Price of
admission gets you a name tag, a ballotlike flip card marked “Approve”
and “Deny,” and a series of greetings. The first comes in the
foyer—an instructional video informs audience members of their
new roles as “artifact evaluators”—and the second from a
gun-toting Lara Croft character (Lindsey Valitchka as the
tough-but-not-unbreakable Minna) who addresses each person by name
before personally seating him or her.

The script is as precocious as it is heartbreaking, at once science
fiction (a look at the suffering we, with any luck, will never have to
endure), a romantic tragedy (a look at the suffering we willingly
inflict upon ourselves), and a comment on the broader discrepancy of
haves and have-nots (a look at the suffering the powerful inflict on
the powerless). Central to the story is the hopeless flirtation between
a refreshingly ingenuous 17-year-old Ari, the filing assistant who has
lived the majority of her life in isolation from the outside world, and
Theo, the first man with whom she comes into contact. Comic and adept,
Adrienne Clark exudes childlike exuberance as Ari, despite the age
discrepancy between her and her character (the actress, though
youthful, is beyond her teenage years). Spike Friedman plays the
lovable, droopy-eyed, and spineless Theo, who, in the play’s only nude
scene, is forced to disrobe at gunpoint. (He is also forced into sex by
the lustful and persuasive Ari.) The duo and a delightful set of
“actors”—enigmatic drones who enact pieces of theatrical
antiquity for the assessment of the artifact
evaluators/audience—bring humor to an otherwise doleful state of
affairs.

The issues are timeless, the delivery is smart (there is not a
single weak link in the eight-character cast), and the set, equipped
with waterworks, never-ending abysses, and underfoot lighting,
convinces us that we have entered the story’s bleak sanctuary. The
conglomeration of these pieces results in a slickly choreographed ride
(throw in some nausea-inducing motion simulators, and it might be
suitable for some sort of macabre theme park). At an hour and 40
minutes long, there is no intermission, but the audience, held both
captive and captivated, did not seem to notice.