REVIEW: Precarious (Mosaic Theater Company)
Welcome back to summer in the DMV! It’s hot and the air steams you alive. But the good news is that it always passes, as conflicts usually do. Mosaic’s latest centers the conflict versus the environment, framed via a mother-daughter drama, in their latest world premiere, Precarious.
Book
Steph Del Rosso constructs a shaky but well-intentioned one-room comedy in this piece. Drew and Tillie are a couple sharing a tiny one-bedroom in New York City during a major heatwave. Drew, an aspiring screenwriter, is on a tight deadline, and Tillie juggles a teaching job with temp paralegal work. Things are already tight and the stress continues to rise with the thermometer. So of course things reach fever pitch when Vi, Tillie’s bubbly yet solitary mother, arrives unannounced to crash on their couch while her home is being sold. Unlike many Boomer-Milliennial conflicts that brew in modern media, a welcome twist is less conservative-liberal and instead takes on a more specialized focus in the context of a looming climate catastrophe. Vi, you see, has been a lifelong bleeding-heart tree hugger. Her arrival beckons a lot of sudden changes: no plastic bowls, humane rat traps (to mitigate the issue brought by her insistence on composting), and a reluctance to use window AC units. But as a struggling Millennial, Tillie just can’t afford to pay for such surface-level mitigations, as “helpful” to the environment as they are; especially evidenced by her temp work being on a Chevron legal case on the side of the oil company. There definitely is potential in this book, which is frequently quite funny in its inter-generational quips, but Tillie feels the most developed seemingly by accident. Vi demands the most attention as a complex, well meaning mother with her ideals in the right place, but unable to let go of her daughter to the future she built. Yet, in all of her busyness, the character feels more like a pitiful grandmother than one with takeaways and lessons of her own in the same way Tillie does by the end. (And I may be biased as a fellow Drew, but I was pretty curious about his development, which is kind of there as script decoration.) 5/10
Acting
Kim Schraf is dynamite in this as Vi, the former hippie under delusion about how to solve the climate crisis. The performance is fragile but welcoming, and intelligent but slightly selfish. I enjoyed Jonathan Del Palmer’s Drew, too, who suffers from a lack of characterization more than anything. Zoe Walpole is charming, if not slightly rigid in much of her deliveries, but shows consistent signs of serious warmth during the more tense moments. 7/10
Production
Director Jaki Bradley makes familiar out of a hotly uncomfortable environment for the characters. The set by Misha Kachman is positively constricting, creating a claustrophic environment that lets the pressure grow and the stakes feel more extreme over the 110-min runtime. Despite its size, clever lighting creates more rooms than meets the eye, letting the space informally breathe and making things less visually two-dimensional. 8/10
Viz
The calm demeanor on the key art of an elderly woman boredly leaning on a fire escape suggests some languish, sure, but the cool lighting doesn’t do it any favors. But you know what does? The much more firey lighting (by Minjoo Kim) that the play starts with, like an infernal ambience leaking into the space, making the warm-feeling environment more directly warmer. 7/10
Verdict
Precarious is a fine, but uneven outing from Steph Del Rosso, which has a solid central performance but leaves a lot to be desiredin the actual material. 27/40
