Theatre in Review: The Apiary (Second Stage/Tony Kiser Theatre)

	Carmen M Herlihy, April Matthis. Photo: Joan Marcus

In The Apiary, the state of the climate is disastrously fragile, almost as much as playwright Kate Douglas' knack for dramatic construction; as it conclusively demonstrates, a provocative premise can take a writer only so far. It is approximately 2046 and the environment has worsened, with colony collapse disorder drastically reducing the bee population worldwide. This means, among other things, no more avocados and almonds; largely left unsaid are the direr things that are almost certainly coming. The action unfolds in a synthetic apiary run by a nameless corporation, where two workers concoct a macabre method of boosting the bee count while, as Ebenezer Scrooge might put it, reducing the surplus human population.

Pilar, a sad sack with an emotional attachment to her apian charges, and Zora, a wildly overqualified biotechnology researcher, work diligently, but ineffectively, at arresting a seemingly irreversible decline of the species. (An experiment with artificial flowers, which produced good results in a German study, proves impossible to replicate.) Then, in the first of many unmotivated twists, a former colleague is found dead on the floor. (She is an apparent suicide, having been diagnosed with stage four cancer; why she chose her workplace to end it all remains a mystery.) Before an ambulance can be called, Zora discovers that bees have infested the corpse; immediately, the apiary's population spikes upward. After experimenting with various animal parts as hosts, Zora hypothesizes that dead human bodies are needed. Without informing Gwen, their hard-charging supervisor, she and Pilar launch a search for candidates. Cece, a young woman with cancer, agrees to participate: Taking a fatal drug cocktail, she will leave her body to science.

The experiment is a stunning success: The bees are burgeoning, Pilar and Zora are busy harvesting additional candidates, and the Nobel committee is dropping by for a look-see. Gwen, who takes forever to figure out what is going on -- does she never notice the corpses littering the workplace? -- is so thrilled with the results (and the rewards from management), that she agrees to receive a shipment of five million bees. Of course, that will require a dozen or more dead bodies a week, so it's time to set up a "dying assistance" program, which produces a mile-long waiting list.

A cautionary tale woven from strands of climate disaster, unchecked capitalism, and assisted suicide, The Apiary is so poorly constructed that it barely makes sense. Anytime Douglas approaches a plot hole, she simply drives around it, ignoring it and hoping we will, too. It beggars belief that Pilar and Zora could carry out their program in secret for as long as they do. Even more strangely, when their method goes public, there is no social pushback; indeed, the apiary becomes the subject of a laudatory documentary. In an especially questionable twist, the process arbitrarily starts to fail, not for any understandable reason but because the playwright needs to manufacture a crisis.

And, anyway, who are these people -- all women, apparently, played in a highly assured series of turns by Nimene Wureh -- volunteering to check out before their time is up? (Pilar says most of them aren't sick, merely bored. Really?) The inclusion of choreographed sequences doesn't help; the sight of Stephanie Crousillat, running around in tights and a bee mask, only calls to mind Susan Cabot in the unintentionally hilarious Roger Corman chiller The Wasp Woman.

The director Kate Whoriskey has found formidable talents for her three leads, each of whom is almost wholly defined by a single trait. Carmen M. Herlihy leans into Pilar's most pathetic qualities -- her loneliness and body-image problems -- assuming an air of false cheer until, ailing and overwhelmed with sadness, she makes a startlingly self-destructive choice. April Matthis' Zora has an engaging intelligence, although her decision to throw over a lucrative, respected career to become a low-level bee maintenance worker is hard to credit; still, she does a reasonable job of working out her character's ice-cold logic. Gwen is a one-note middle-manager joke, but at least Taylor Schilling gives her a fearful undertone that plausibly explains her gruff exterior.

This relatively intimate piece unfolds on a large-scale set, designed by Walt Spangler, that combines an outer playing area with an inner lab wrapped in netting; a transparent yellow cube functions as the bee graveyard. Amith Chandrashaker's solid lighting makes good use of the units built into the apiary's walls. Christopher Darbassie's sound design includes selections from Earth, Wind & Fire and Dionne Warwick for, I suppose, ironic purposes; these are later supplanted by electronic music composed by Grace McLean. Jennifer Moeller's costumes mostly consist of jumpsuits worn on the job.

The Apiary underscores the problems posed by trying to dramatize climate change; the most serious issue of our time, it happens slowly and incrementally, making it hard to credibly depict onstage. (Bess Wohl's hilarious Continuity, about a film crew shooting an Arctic action thriller in the New Mexico desert, is a rare exception.) Even so, Douglas' approach is especially frustrating; she wants to unnerve us without laying sufficient groundwork. One hates to see such a vitally important subject bungled in this way. The Apiary should be terrifying; instead, it is mostly illogical. O bees, where are thy stings? --David Barbour