Mayhem ensues when a surprise being appears on board a corporate research vessel in Axis Theatre’s Specimen (photo by Regina Betancourt)
SPECIMEN
Axis Theatre Company
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Wednesday – Saturday through June 6, $10-$40, 7:00
www.axiscompany.org
Randall Sharp’s Specimen is not a cautionary tale of where America is heading; instead, it’s a frenetic sci-fi satire warning us that it’s already too late to save the ship and its crew.
“We are dead in the water. We’re just floating. Communication is out,” Overholser (Britt Genelin), an engineer aboard the US VitaNavis Nomad, says early on in the seventy-five-minute play. “All we need is a little push to get to the earth-pull zone for home. I hope we don’t just smash into it! Plus I could use a decent med clinic. And a haircut. I feel sick. I feel tired.”
The corporate research vessel Nomad, named after people who move around from place to place — for example, undocumented immigrants and refugees — is on a mission to collect valuable living specimens more for their potential financial value rather than their scientific worth. The crew is a ragtag “bunch of morons,” as Lt. Commander Gordon (Julian Rozzell Jr.) refers to them. Gordon has annoyed his team because he has fudged critical reports. The ambitious and energetic Overholser has been beaten up by the severely ill King (Spencer Aste, only seen on video). Dr. Gardener (Andrew Dawson), the chief medical officer, says, “I know what I’m doing” without any evidence to support that. Medical assistant Longshore (Jon McCormick) asks a lot of questions but provides no answers. Louden’s (Jim Sterling) primary responsibility is to greet newcomers, but he can’t get anything to work. And Capt. Gonickeau (Lynn Mancinelli) is hiding in sick bay, not wanting to confront any kind of problem at all.
An endless stream of glitches plagues the Nomad: Ironic, familiar pop songs come and go on the speaker system. The monitors flash on and off with reckless abandon, broadcasting a bright, sunny commercial with the VitaNavis president (Robert Ierardi) that quickly goes bad, as well as private video diaries that are not meant to be seen by others, a melding of the captain’s log and social media posts. The food supply, from saltines to what they call “SUP,” is running dangerously low. And various odd smells are wafting about. Patience is wearing thin even with Earth so close.
The Nomad’s archnemesis, the stellar Jericho, is nearby, rumored to have a pair of prize specimens that are likely to make them win the battle once again. (In the lobby case is a previous trophy the Jericho won, along with a roster of its crew, featuring one member who becomes central to the plot.) It seems like the Jericho, whose name in Arabic means “fragrant” and the Bible calls “the City of Palms,” can do no wrong, the polar opposite of the Nomad, as if one is the dream of America, the other the current reality, one an oasis, the other a boiling inferno.
But when a mysterious being (Brian Barnhart) suddenly arrives in a pod, all hell breaks loose as the crew fights over whether the creature is a fabulous Andro-Primatus specimen worth millions or jokester Jay Marlin, a doctor from the Jericho who is in need of medical help. The doctor’s last name could be a sly reference to the large fish Santiago catches and struggles to bring back in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, believing it will turn his luck around. “It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers,” Santiago says to himself.
The ramshackle set, by Sharp, McCormick, and Mancinelli, is like a bizarro-world merging of the starship Enterprise, the Discovery from 2001, and the Nostromo from Alien, with a nod to Tom Sachs’s DIY NASA installations. The white uniforms, designed by Karl Ruckdeschel, have fun touches, such as the character’s job stenciled on the back in big letters. David Zeffren’s lighting and Paul Carbonara’s sound and original music, along with Nicholas Guldner’s video design, maintain the low-tech atmosphere of impending doom.
The exemplary ensemble, consisting of Axis company members and returnees, somehow manages to keep straight faces despite all the absurdist mayhem taking place, led by Rozzell Jr. (Our Planet, Father Comes Home from the Wars) as the determined lieutenant and Genelin (Twelfth Night, Washington Square) as a kind of bruised and battered ingénue in an ill-fitting spacesuit. Each actor also sports fantabulous hair, riffing on the obvious wigs worn by the cast of the original Star Trek movies.
Sharp, who has previously adapted such classics as High Noon and Dead End and written and directed such new works as Worlds Fair Inn and Last Man Club, orchestrates a clever balance between farce and fright as the proceedings continue and the crew has to figure out who or what the specimen is and what to do with it.
It’s a subtle but ripe parody of a bumbling administration that prefers money over science, with little interest in aiding immigrants, giving their employees proper training or affordable health care, or fixing a spacecraft that is falling apart.
When the pod first pulls into the port, there is no sign of anyone there. “Hello!! Maybe . . . maybe it’s not American?” Dr. Gardener asks. Gordon replies, “Of course it’s American. What else would it be.”
Oh, this is America all right.
Over and out.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]