Daniella Deutsch ’17 and Zachary Cohn ’16

The End of the World (As We Know It)

By: Molly Breitbart ’18

Boxes. The audience walks into a room cluttered with a myriad of boxes. Perhaps this is someone’s attic, perhaps it is your neighbor’s apartment—the one who’s lived in the building for close to five years, but has never quite finished unpacking. Or, perhaps it is a bunker, tucked away beneath a university laboratory and stocked for impending Armageddon. Perhaps.

In a barely perceptible moment, the audience recognizes that the door to Studio A has been locked, and that two actors are frozen onstage. The cacophony of voices and the crinkle of programs die out, but the actors remain petrified. It is only after several minutes of this silent, peculiar behavior that we become aware that we are observers, physically locked into what seems to be an exhibit.

Zachary Cohn ’16 and Daniella Deutch ’17

Directed by Danielle Turner ’15, Peter Sinn Nachtreib’s boom was a meta-theatrical experience: part museum exhibit, part production. The story follows the post-apocalyptic misadventures of journalism student Jo (Daniella Deutsch ’17) and male marine biology grad student Jules (Zachary Cohn ’16). Originally brought together under the pretense of Craigslist-enlisted “sex to change the course of the world,” the duo find themselves the survivors of an apocalypse that Jules himself predicted through extensive studies of the behaviors of tropical fish. In order to preserve the human race, Jules draws up an elaborate plan to sleep and survive the coming days with whichever woman answers his personal ad, despite identifying as homosexual. Jo however, searching only for casual sex and a non-clichéd story to turn in on Monday, has other ideas. As Turner reminded her cast during rehearsals, “Life doesn’t follow a script.” This sentiment applies differently to each character as they respectively attempt and avoid procreation: Jules must come to terms with his intricate plans failing to fall into place over the course of the nine months the pair spends in confinement. At the same time, Jo is forced to recognize that although life may not follow a script, our actions and choices have implications that can damn, but can also save us. As her prospects of casual sex quickly sour, she wonders aloud: “What if I’ve set a series of events into motion that will doom me to be trapped forever in some desperate monotonous life and in my last breaths, when I look back at all the mistakes I’ve made, I’ll remember this moment?” Yes, it is a loaded statement, but it is poignant in its perceptiveness: even the meaningless is potentially meaningful, and things may turn out the way we least expect them to.

However, the plot line involving Jules and Jo is a story-within-a-story. In the outer frame of the show, Jo and Jules are an exhibit (Turner suggested that maybe the pair are automatons) in futuristic natural history museum, maintained by an eccentric docent named Barbara (Erica Schnitzer ’18). Barbara keeps their existence at equilibrium while interjecting her own concerns for her job and passion about her expertise. Both realities—that is, Barbara’s life as a docent and Jules and Jo’s pre-plotted live—are irrevocably intertwined, with Barbara playing god. Barbara, Jo, and Jules each grapple with questions of loneliness, their individual relationships with the rest of humanity, what it means to believe, and most importantly, how to preserve hope in seemingly Sisyphean situations.

The cast collectively describes Boom as a dark comedy in that it accurately acknowledges the despair and woe that inherently exist in our world, yet it successfully manages to lift us from the abysmal. On working on Boom, Deutsch says, “One thing that’s been so rewarding about playing Jo is that she’s so subtly comedic. Although she has a very heavy side to her, I’ve gotten to play with her comedic side, which is something I haven’t done before.” Thought-provoking, hilarious, and at times sobering, Boom left audiences with laughter lines etched around their mouths and the knowledge that all actions have consequences. Ruminate, rinse, and repeat.

Zachary Cohn ’16 and Erica Scnitzer ’18

This article originally appeared in print in the Fall 2014 Skidmore Theater Newsletter.