A bizarre science fiction play that had an off-Broadway debut back in March (with nice write-ups in the New York Times, Variety and the New Yorker) is opening up new local runs at Washington, D.C.'s Wooly Mammoth Theater and the Seattle Rep in November. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's Boom features a woman who goes for a Craigslist casual encounters hook-up with a scientist who studies fish sleep cycles for signs of global doom, but their casual sex soon becomes world-changing. Here's how San Francisco-based Nachtrieb describes his play:
Jo, a female journlism student, and Jules, a male marine biologist, meet in a subterranean biology lab for an erotic "casual encounter." But there's nothing casual whatsoever about this particular evening. Will meaningless sex have meaning? What's going on in the fish tank? And who is that woman, Barbara, pulling levers in the corner? Something is about to explode.
And here's how the Woolly Mammoth Theater describes it:
Can the apocalypse be the ultimate aphrodisiac? It certainly ups the ante when Jules, a marine biology grad student (Aubrey Deeker), attempts a random hook up through a personal ad that reads 'Sex to change the course of the world…' When he gets a response from a randy journalism major named Jo (Kimberly Gilbert), they meet at the subterranean lab where Jules studies fish sleep cycles for signs of impending global doom. This simple online connection quickly moves far beyond casual sex into the realms of ontogeny, phylogeny, evolution and extinction — all overseen by an odd docent-like woman named Barbara (Sarah Marshall). In this provocative sci-fi fantasy, the future of humanity hangs in the balance as irreverent young playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb asks: do we control our own fate or is someone else pulling the levers?
You can read the first 20 pages of the play here. [Playbill and Peter Sinn Nachtrieb]