The Collapse

A new play by Selina Fillinger

Or: Death and Honey

“You Hep Cats want to know how the world ends?” Always an intriguing way to start a play, especially when underscored by a smooth jazz trio with a hint of buzz to it (snaps to composer Brian Lawler). Doubly so when the speaker is a Beatnik Bee (Pearl Rhein), ready to smoke, smolder, and lay it out for the lonely warm bloods out there, reminding through rhyme and sultry illusion the sweet and sticky ways of nature, all slick with sex and smelling of death.

Our apian poet serves as master of sermons and onstage band to the action of Selina Fillinger’s Sloan Commissioned play The Collapse. Set in a wild-fire plagued Californian summer on a rural research station, we meet Viola (Gretchen Corbett) a renowned entomologist with a passion for bees, one of their truest defenders. Viola is kept afloat by her staunch hearted assistant Olga (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and this summer’s intern Alice (Sarah-Anne Martinez), whose packing some secrets along with her net and gloves. Add to this the struggles with Viola’s naighbor and ex-husband Leo (Roberto De Felice) and his fiancé Taylor (Heidi Armbruster) and you have a web of secrets, loves, and passions linked from each to each by tenuous filaments, the makings of a small hive about to swarm.

The lives of Entomologists, the lives of any scientist, is harder to tell stories about then it should be. The passion, the story, the sensuality, the treasures of any life is there, married to the infinite wonders of the natural world. But it’s so hard to translate it to playable action or enrapturing words, especially when in the shadow of extinction. What Fillinger does so beautifully is capturing the wild world of bees and other pollinators and the threats laid against them by agriculture and climate change, laid in shadow play against the human struggles that are neither jargon filled nor over simplifying nor make you want to walk out and throw yourself under a bus.

Instead we are treated (under the direction of Margot Bordelon) to Fillinger’s symphonic speech that’s blend of dramatic writing, natural without being tedious and poetic without being flowery. Her scenes hum with the same riveting fission (the same anticipatory buzz) when her characters are in the middle of seduction or a battle or watching the wild fires creep closer to the camp. The Collapse is replete my favorite theatrical device, when something unsaid passes under a characters word and they and their audience come to the realization at the exact same time (particularly for Alice, for whole Martinez skates swiftly over the ice of her past and future, trying to outrun the cracks).

Bordelon is an apt collaborator for such a play. In the confines of a Zoom performance (and this play begs to be put on the stage where skin can touch skin and the gasps and cackles of the audience can echo) she’s coaxed a living intimacy. Particularly with Corbett (a performer so magnetic as to make the viewer her scene partner almost,) and Szadkowski whose deft hand for comedy underscores a perfection for understatement and yearning. Their chemistry takes us away from a zoom play and puts us into a theater of the mind, the small intimate space with all of us sharing the same air, the same heat, just with the audience having really, really good seats.

De Felice also gives a performance of note, the farmer made good who’s pulled, drone like, into a relationship he knows will ruin him, showcasing both the arrogance that destroyed their marriage and the sweetness and care to show what Viola still sees in him. A point where she finger-feeds some of her hives treasure for a sore throat (“You know where I keep my honey.”) detonates a storm of butterflies in the stomaches of the stoniest of viewers. And Armbruster is a delight, leaping from the screen with radiant energy and peeling away Taylor’s Good Ol’ Gal grit to something perpetually surprising. She particularly relishes in the plays sharp jabs of dialog that either tickle us to gaps or leave us with breath cut short.

The Collapse is that perfect science play that teaches indirectly, that opens the eyes to the natural world and forces us to take interest, real interest in the works of others, and not be so done up in our cycles of avoidance. You have to listen with a little less mammal and a little more bee,” Rhein grins over her microphone. It doesn’t just tell a story but a parable, of energy released, the relinquishment of our driving fears in the name of connection with our wildly unknowable fellow creatures.