Photo Credit: Scornavacca Photography
‘Recursion Of A Moth’ – Written by Brandon Zang. Directed by Katie Brook. Sound Design by Audrey Dube; Lighting Design by Grant Powicki; Scenic Design by Cleo Brooks; Costume Design by Cleo Needleham; Produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, ‘Recursion Of A Moth’ runs from February 27st – March 9th at 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215.
By Charlotte Snow
The audience walks into the house, filled with incongruous electronic audio, to find a blank stage except for a leather chair adorned with notebooks, two podiums pushed upstage, and a constantly looming giant white semi-circle screen at the center. It’s a disarming and almost chilling effect that promises its audience a unique and singular theatrical experience.
The play follows two time-traveling bureaucrats, Icarus and Mikey, who are in an off-again-on-again relationship. They’re tasked with recording the mundane moments in the lives of geniuses. However, their most recent case quickly becomes personal and goes off the rails when they are assigned to Chrys, the woman whose research would live on to lay the groundwork for time travel.
It’s a fascinating premise that, in its best moments, lead to some visceral and shocking reveals. Playwright Brandon Zang’s mind is truly expansive and there’s a valiant effort made to bring science-fiction and genre storytelling to the stage. However, it is detrimental to the script that Zang didn’t start smaller and simpler, with a little more heart instead of science fiction concepts. Full disclosure: I’m a huge nerd who loves time travel stories: the tropes, the rules, the circular storytelling, and how mind-bending the genre can be.
However, within the first major dialogue-driven scene, multiple concepts are introduced, one after the other. There are too many big ideas, too fast, and all at once for an audience member to properly keep track, much less determine how those concepts affect the characters’ interpersonal lives. It blocks the audience from properly connecting with the rest of the action, as we’re too busy trying to decode the ‘how and why’ of what just happened. Even when new plot developments are introduced, they unfortunately unravel upon further scrutiny.
That said, the script earns its wings when the action zeroes in on its message and the fraught relationships between the three characters. Zang’s poetic dialogue shines throughout the play and is a testament to his intrinsic talent. The themes of free will, intergenerational trauma, and the immigrant experience bring clarity and perfectly marry character development with the fun and plentiful sci-fi tropes. These moments are quite grand, providing the heart and skeleton of a great play that may someday deserve to be in discussion with Caryl Churchill’s work, but sadly, its current iteration, those moments are far too sparse.
Katie Brooks’ direction is powerful, sleek, and always aims for the personal. Her design team takes on the herculean labor of bringing this spectacle to an intimate stage. Audrey Dupe’s sound design is chock full of immersive white noise and, at the other end of the spectrum, bombastically epic cues. Grant Powicki’s lighting design gracefully bounces back between realistic and imaginary worlds while convincingly selling a lot of the time-travel special effects. Cleo Brooks’ set design is incredibly versatile and ingenious, even if sometimes it struggles to differentiate between locations.
The performances from Alexander Holden, Jenny S. Lee, and Jaime José Hernández bring a lot of dynamism and personalization to their respective roles. I had the thought that if this play was a television series, I could see Lee and Hernández taking ownership of their roles for years to come.
Overall, Recursion Of A Moth remains what it promised to be: a unique and singular theatrical experience. Even though the script feels early in its life, I’m hopeful that this production will provide opportunities that continue its development. One must applaud Boston Playwrights’ Theatre for their continued dedication to serving writers and delivering fresh, yet-to-be-seen plays to the Boston theatre scene. If I had a choice between seeing a well-done staging of a conventional play or seeing a new ambitious story about love and time travel… I’ll choose the latter.
For more information and tickets, go to: https://www.bostonplaywrights.org/our-24-25-season/#MOTH
