In Sarah Mantell’s play, a group of itinerant Amazon warehouse workers spend their days moving packages from conveyor belts to utility carts, and their nights in what could be called a marriage of conveyance: The half dozen older women, trans and binary characters hang out with one another in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, near their cars, which is where they now live. A combination of climate catastrophe, corporate monopoly and downward mobility have broken up their families and driven them from their former homes.
While on the job, they read aloud the labels on the packages, in hopes of finding their loved ones. 

“In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot” imagines a dystopian world in the near future as a cautionary pile-up of current-day problems that have all gone past their tipping point. The playwright hasn’t worked out the internal logic of such a world: Much is vague; what few details exist can’t withstand much scrutiny. But the production captures both a growing sense of dread and the characters’ persistent struggle to find hope, maybe even love, or at least joy.  

These competing feelings are visualized in a set that alternates between the loud, busy warehouse featuring a couple of nonstop mid-air conveyor belts underneath which the characters work, and a sunset-streaked mountain range under which they share scrounged-up food and liquor, play party games like Werewolf., and dream.

In a program note, Mantell tells us that plays are “both art and a hiring document,” and so wrote this one “to
 increase the number of roles available to women, trans, and nonbinary actors in the second half of their careers, when so many artists are just reaching the peak of their abilities.”

While it’s refreshing to see such a seven-member ensemble, only two of the characters they portray come into sharp focus: Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) and the newcomer Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy) who first irks Jen. But they eventually fall in love – before Jen learns of their secret connection with one another. 

Other things happen. A few of the workers engage in sabotage, putting sugar in the concrete, so the Corporation can’t build their extensive new wing, D Section.  They are all forced to move again. They learn how much more the coasts are encroaching, as more and more land sinks into the sea.   One finally finds their loved ones. Although this leads to an optimistic ending, little of what unfolds beforehand seems to occur with any urgency. 

Perhaps this reflects the characters’ underlying resignation, rather than the playwright’s irresolution — a way of warning us against such complacency. In one of the lyrical monologues in which the characters recall what life used to be like, Jen says:

“The first night I slept in my van I thought nothing could ever feel so small
 I missed the sound echoing off the walls of my old room
I missed central heating
I missed my mother 
I missed the sound of the bathroom door and the smell of the coffeemaker
I missed the lawn, mowed within an inch of the dirt
I missed so many things 
But you get used to something smaller
Little by little
The way you get used to the coasts being in Maine then in Ohio 

“It’s shocking and then completely normal all at once “

In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot
Playwrights Horizons through November 17
Running time: 95 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $62.50 – $102.50
Written by Sarah Mantell
Directed by Sivan Battat
Scenic design by Emmie Finckel, costume design by Mel Ng, lighting design by Cha See, sound design by Sinan Refik Zafar, voice and text and dialogue coach Gigi Buffington, dramaturg Zeina Salame, intimacy coordinator Alex Might
Cast: Barsha as Horowitz, Sandra Caldwell as El, Donnetta Lavinia Grays as Jen ,Ianne Fields Stewart as Sara, Deirdre Lovejoy as Ani, Tulis McCall as Ash, and Pooya Mohsen as Maribel.