What we’ve got here is documentation of Christopher Chen’s You Mean To Do Me Harm. Capturing these was like trying to bottle smoke, which is exactly what theater photography is, right? Catching light that’s already dying, freezing bodies mid gesticulation in some desperate attempt to prove the thing actually happened at all.
Chen keeps digging at the same thing, and the thing is this: the paranoid math of being around other people. The certainty that everybody you know is in a group chat you’re not in, and the group chat is about ending you. Sounds like something to work out in therapy. It isn’t. It’s the reason a nice living room can start to look like a car halfway off a bridge, all that furniture, nobody screaming yet.
Bill English directing. Angrette McCloskey did the set, and Angrette is my friend so take this however you want, but she’s built a mousetrap. Doors that know things. I got stuck on the doors for a while.
Here’s what I like. Chen doesn’t flinch and doesn’t hand you the easy version, and also doesn’t hand you the cool version, the pre-chewed nihilism that’s on the menu everywhere now, the kind you can nod at and then sleep eight hours. What’s actually onstage is worse and more familiar. People doing the calculation. Is somebody out to get me, or have I been building the room I’m scared of, one thought at a time, with decent lighting and a mortgage.
Brooke Jennings’ costumes are doing the same quiet work as McCloskey’s sets. Nothing announces itself. You just look up at some point and realize the dread got in while you weren’t watching.