In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot
Playwrights Horizons (Artistic Director Adam Greenfield, Managing Director Casey York) announces the cast and creative team of Sarah Mantell’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, a Playwrights commission directed by Sivan Battat and presented in association with Breaking the Binary Theatre (Founding Artistic Director George Strus), October 10–November 17 (opening October 29).
Seamlessly merging bracing apocalypse fiction, playful heist narrative, and queer love story, Mantell’s play imagines our country transformed into an Amazon warehouse-dotted landscape, narrowing daily as the oceans take the coasts. In their respective Off-Broadway debuts, Mantell and Battat create a fast-paced, funny, and moving work of theater about the search for home in a volatile world.
Cast included Barsha (f/k/a Debra Barsha; composer: Radiant Baby, Sophie, Songs from an Unmade Bed) as Horowitz, Sandra Caldwell (Broadway: Buddy the Buddy Holly Story, Sophisticated Ladies; Off-Broadway: Charm) as El, Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Playwrights: Men on Boats; Broadway: The Skin of Our Teeth, In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play) as Jen, Ianne Fields Stewart (TV: Dash & Lily, The Bold Type, Pose) as Sara, Deirdre Lovejoy (Broadway: Lucky Guy, The Gathering; TV: The Wire) as Ani, Tulis McCall (Off-Broadway: What Everywoman Knows, How We Love/F*ck; Regional: Running with Scissors) as Ash, and Pooya Mohseni (TV: Law & Order: SVU, Madam Secretary; Regional: White Snake) as Maribel. The creative team included Emmie Finckel (scenic design), Mel Ng (costume design), Cha See (lighting design), Sinan Refik Zafar (sound design), Gigi Buffington (voice and text and dialect coach), Zeina Salame (dramaturg), and Alex Might (intimacy coordinator). Ryan Gohsman was the production stage manager, and Holly Adam was the assistant stage manager.
Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield said, “If there’s a common thread among plays in our new season, it’s that each of these works is driven by its characters’ search for some connection with other humans in a time that feels isolated and callous. Sarah’s play imagines a not-so-far-fetched future in which capitalist values have bloated to Orwellian proportions, and climate disaster is a daily threat. And yet, what Sarah finds there is a hard-won hope, focusing on this ensemble of warehouse workers: a pack who travel together and look out for one another. In this way, they assert their human-ness in defiance of an inhumane world, a rebellion that’s sweet and decidedly queer.”
