Theatre in Review: The Ruins of Civilization (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)Penelope Skinner has seen the future and it is wet. If you think Britain is rainy now, wait until you experience its waterlogged version in The Ruins of Civilization. Skinner's drama is set in the near future, when the ruinous effects of climate change are being sorely felt. Huge sections of Europe are now underwater, or soon will be. As a result, the UK has closed its borders, letting in only a handful of guest workers, to prevent a tide of refugees from the lowlands. As a general rule, reproduction has been brought to a halt. Unlike in P.D. James' dystopian novel The Children of Men, in which humanity suffers from mass infertility, here women are actively discouraged from having children. After all, what sort of world would these children inherit? As Joy, a representative from the Government Initiative to Preserve and Maintain Resources for British Citizens, points out, anyone is free to do as they please. But couples who decline to have children receive a government stipend that amounts to full-time welfare; women who get pregnant are dispatched to a council estate. Unwanted babies are sent to a hatch, a kind of human dog pound, where they are discreetly euthanized. In the play's best scene, Joy visits Silver and Dolores, a married couple who are currently on only a half-stipend until they can assure the government of their commitment to no-family planning. Dolores is politely subjected to a barrage of invasive questions: How frequent are your pregnancy fantasies? How often do you imagine getting pregnant by accident? How often do you make plans to get pregnant and pretend it was an accident? And how often do you wonder if your child would be the one to come up with The Solution, thereby bringing a halt to the earth's slow-motion destruction? Dolores aces her test and assures Joy that there is no possibility of getting pregnant, because, as Silver explains, "We make a little routine of taking the pill. She takes it. I check her mouth." If Skinner effortlessly creates a clammy atmosphere representing a world where hope has vanished, she has a harder time explaining how some of women's rights seemingly have vanished along with a good section of the earth's surface, leaving Dolores a kind of Nora Helmer of the future, living in a doll's house with all the latest modern conveniences, along with her smugly tolerant spouse. While Silver toils away at his novel, now in its ninth year of revisions with no end in sight, Dolores dwells in idleness. It is this idleness that sets the plot of The Ruins of Civilization in motion. Looking to make a difference in a world scarred by suffering -- "I already make a difference; I'm writing a book," says the ever-fatuous Silver -- Dolores picks up Mara, an immigrant from one of the bedeviled countries on the Continent. Mara gets by as a masseuse -- by which I mean prostitute -- and Dolores offers her a room to stay in plus the possibility of enrollment in a training course and a path to citizenship. Mara, dazed by this generosity, accepts the offer. Silver grudgingly gives in to this plan, and, when he is away, Mara admits the truth: Having been raped by one of her customers, she is pregnant. This marks the point where The Ruins of Civilization slips out of its speculative-fiction frame into pure melodrama. Mara faces certain deportation, and Dolores' long-suppressed desire for a child takes over: She proposes that Mara have the baby and they raise it in secret. It's a decision that makes no sense, given the social rules that Skinner has established -- simply purchasing diapers is likely to put one under suspicion -- and Silver is unconvincingly bullied into going along with the scheme. But Mara gives birth -- on Christmas Day, no less, making her the un-virgin Mara -- and, for a while, they form a kind of family unit; Silver finally finishes his novel, drawing on Mara's experiences, and literary success beckons. When the arrangement falls apart, it does so for the flimsiest of reasons, allowing Skinner to lecture us about xenophobia; also, she produces one too many times a bottle of cat poison -- for reasons that aren't clear, felines are now considered to be vermin -- leaving us in little doubt as to how it will be used. Leah C. Gardiner's direction is fairly incisive when the material works, less so when it doesn't. As Silver, Tim Daly embraces his character's inherently patronizing manner a little too wholeheartedly, making him pretty hard to take. Rachael Holmes is rather better as Dolores, making clear, in the early scenes, that she is playing along with Silver because she has no other choice, and convincingly giving in to magical thinking when the baby arrives. (She even announces that she may be the one with The Solution.) Roxanna Hope's Mara has a convincingly furtive quality, the product of years of struggling for society. Orlagh Cassidy makes the most of her appearances as Joy, the perfectly anodyne representative of a monstrous bureaucracy. The production benefits from Neil Patel's set, which is all sleek, undecorated surfaces and which believably posits that Danish Modern is the furniture style of the future. An especially chilling touch is the motion capture cameras hung at each corner of the stage, one of many telling details picked out by Philip S. Rosenberg's lighting. Jessica Pabst creates a striking ultramodern style for Silver while dressing Dolores in a rather formal at-home style that hints at her Stepford-wife status. John Gromada's sound design includes the off-stage yowling of cats and crying of infants, and the steady drumbeat of rain. Skinner earns one's admiration for her willingness to tackle what is arguably the most crucial -- and intractable -- challenge of contemporary life, but one wishes she hadn't wedded her very real concerns to such a clunky plot. Her vision of the future seems chillingly plausible; the figures she populates it with, not so much. -- David Barbour 
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