Editor’s Note: This conversation on Sarah Mantell’s ‘In the Amazon Parking Lot’ focuses on the resonance of casting in the play and across the production, responding to the playwright’s note, written as follows, in the program: “Because plays are both art and a hiring document, I also wrote this play 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. The plays we write create jobs, and if we’re lucky, those plays create a lot of jobs. Our industry is made up of the people we’ve bothered to imagine and shuts out the people we haven’t. Part of the reason I’ve had such a hard time imagining a future is that we’ve pushed out a lot of the people who are aging ahead of me.”
Christine Mok: In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is an ensemble play that focuses on seven queer women of color and their experiences in a future where oceans have risen and taken back the coasts. America is in ruins. Amazon has become ‘The Corporation.’ It seems to be the only infrastructure giving shape to life in the unfolding human-made ecological disaster.
Ashley M. Thomas: Within this story, the ensemble discovers love, community, and purpose as they grapple with belonging and betrayal.
CM: All while dealing with the shifting actions of the Corporation. But our femmes have some counter-moves up their sleeves!
Mantell structures the play so that in between scenes that are set in the present and scenes that are set in the past, we get confessional-style monologues through which we come to know individual characters. These monologues offer us insights into the first night after the apocalypse for each femme—A night they all spent unhoused. When we meet them in the present, they live out of Sprinter vans, Broncos, and trucks, all while working in Amazon warehouses that crisscross the middle of the country.
Immediately after the play, you posed some questions about the mechanics of the setting. Is this the apocalypse or the post-apocalypse?’ You posed questions about the world and the plot, in particular about the future that we are presented within the play.
One could go down an entire path trying to figure out exactly what happened, and when, what didn't happen, what’s working, what’s not working, who’s there, who isn't? How did the Corporation take over? When did the Corporation deny the country’s remaining citizens access to the internet and other forms of connection? To what extent and how?
We can ask those kinds of questions, but the play and this production seem less interested in them. To be a generous viewer is perhaps to accept what has been offered — the world that Sarah Mantell created and the creative team imagined for us. This goes back to a quote you attributed to Catherine Sheehy, chair of the dramaturgy program at the Yale School of Drama, which is an injunction: ”Meet a play where it’s at.”
In this play, worlds have ended, and yet, things persist—things like work, warehouses, and an even later stage of capitalism. The private infrastructure of the Corporation remains. There seems to be no state or federal government. It's less that I'm incredulous about what's going on, but I'm mindful of some other bedfellows of this play that are also speculative, post-apocalyptic, and elliptical about these circumstances. I'm thinking here of Caryl Churchill's Far Away and Lucy Kirkwood's The Children. Both of these plays are set in a future where something has happened, and we are in the aftermath of that. We don't know all the rules.
AT: No, we don't. This is where time comes in because Mantell’s script specifies that the play takes place ‘15 to 20 years in the future.’ I want to return to our previous offline conversation… the Marsha P. Johnson shirt. So, 15 to 20 years in the future puts these characters as millennials.
CM: To give some context, Horowitz, the character played by the actor Barsha, has a very distinctive part of her costume (designed by Mel Ng) because it is a graphic tee with text and the rest of Ng’s contemporary costumes use texture and pattern to evoke character. Horowitz wears a Marsha P. Johnson t-shirt that, though distressed like everyone else's clothes, is incredibly identifiable to us.
AT: Yes, the timeline puts Millennials, and perhaps elder Gen Zs onstage. It’s interesting to consider what it means to see these two very internet-savvy generations age in a post-apocalyptic society and to see how their ethics and morals, which are very different from how Gen Xers and Baby Boomers unfold onstage.
CM: Yes, if not for the script telling us this is 15 to 20 years into the future, I wouldn't be able to make that kind of generational leap. One thing I noticed was that the Amazon boxes onstage—the packages, the tape, the actual boxes themselves—all have the same Amazon logo that we see in real life today as if the Corporation hadn’t changed its identity in 20 years. In the era of the Internet, rebranding seems to happen at an even faster rate. So there is blurriness between our present and the play’s future. And I am curious about the productiveness of that blurriness.
What you name as different generational ethoses comes to the fore for me in terms of how racial politics plays out onstage and the way we read race as an audience. I want to offer that there is something extraordinary about watching a play that focuses on seven characters. (To think we are living in a moment where seven actors on stage feels huge). All seven are queer femme characters and most are members of the global majority. I’m here for that; I'm really excited about it.
The way the play considers their queerness is really heartening. But there is this fascinating push and pull with intersectionality. The components of their lives that are not about sexuality—though they are interlocking—are underdeveloped if not absent.
So much is left to us, the audience, to unpack. I mean that both ironically and unironically. Like Jen’s final action in the play, prompted by Ani (Deidre Lovejoy), when she gets in a giant Amazon package and mails herself to an unseen character who Jen loves. There is no way for me to see Donetta-as-Jen, a black performer mail themselves, without thinking about Henry “Box” Brown. Who mailed himself to freedom to escape slavery in the mid-19th century. The production leaves us dangling in that analogy of the past in a play about the future.
AT: I think that's the tension in Sarah Mantell’s compelling program note about wanting their play to be a hiring document that casts a wide net. In the character note of the script, Mantell writes: "We have made these actors rare, and that's a tragedy. Please find them and cast them. I'm leaving the individual character descriptions as open as possible so that different productions can cast the particular humans who make each role sing. Whoever you are, I'm searching for you." Except the script does make two race-conscious choices.
CM: Crucial ones. Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) and Sara (Ianne Fields Stewart), who is the youngest of the seven, are both to be cast, according to the script, with people of color. I find this interesting, and I have questions. There's a relationship—or rather, there is a really pivotal scene, the most harrowing scene of the play that seems predicated on this embodiment.
In an earlier conversation, you asked me which of these characters I was drawn to. I said that the production has a wealth of strong performances, but Jen is the lead; Grays is a force who carries the show. Jen is a character who searches, seeks, yearns, and finds what she never expected, and Grays gives an extraordinary performance – I want to see everything she is in and deeply regret not seeing her perform before – amongst tenderly rendered performances.
The aforementioned cataclysmic emotional moment occurs in a scene between Jen and Sara, in which Jen fails Sara twice.
Ultimately, it’s a scene of betrayal. And I understand that Sara, the youngest in this troupe, might not yet grasp the force of their pain when it's inflicted on someone else. However, watching this scene was both harrowing and discordant—that two women of color would be the ones to cut each other down.
AT: Agreed. This scene felt untrue, especially because women of color most often understand that it’s the system doing the harm, not necessarily each other. In my own communities, we recognize that when a transgression happens among us—especially one caused by a corporation—it is not always intentional. We don’t let systematic harm hold enough power to create friction in our interpersonal relationships.
CM: Exactly.
AT: That’s where we both got hung up, particularly with Jen being the androgynous, butch, masculine character, and specifically noting that Grays is a dark-skinned person with coarser textured hair.
CM: I think the play’s open-hearted gesture in casting and representing a spectrum of queer femme lives on stage is commendable but then there is this last minute dramaturgical need to create conflict and betrayal such that Jen becomes the sacrifice.
AT: 100%. This ties back to the character note. I understand the playwright's struggle to create an open hiring document for actors “deemed too queer, too fat, too old, or too disabled to be cast.” But we also have to consider the very real power dynamics at play regarding gender and race. We discussed how the power dynamics would shift depending on casting.
CM: There are histories of both coalition and conflict between different communities, for instance, Black and Asian communities.
AT: Right. We mustn't let open casting overshadow the nuances; they matter. It's crucial, especially as the show continues its life, that different audiences interpret it thoughtfully. We don’t want a future scenario akin to the controversy around Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop with a white actor in a pivotal role. We need to specify race and gender, as those elements are fundamentally important.
CM: I keep hoping we learn that lesson in theater.
AT: Part of our task as reviewers involves mining our critique of the moment, understanding what's happening and why. In reviewing the script, we notice the timeline set 15 to 20 years in the future, along with distinctions in character identities—like Jen's androgynous butch masculinity and Sara's trans-feminine high femme identity, with both being people of color.
CM: I hope the industry has learned something from those discussions. However, we still grapple with colorblind casting and color-conscious casting, and how to balance universality with specificity.
AT: Absolutely. This raises questions about what we're trying to teach audiences.
CM: What do we want the audience to unlearn? And how much context do we need? It's about finding that balance—how do we visually represent the future while grounding the audience in the present? I think that’s a critical question for this production moving forward.
AT: Absolutely. I appreciate the ambition of the piece, and I think it has the potential to spark important conversations about identity and community. But it also needs to navigate those complexities thoughtfully.
CM: Agreed. Overall, I think the play makes significant strides in representing queer experiences, but there’s room for refinement. There’s so much richness in what it could offer, and I’m excited to see how it evolves.
AT: Yes! And that’s what makes theater such a powerful medium. It has the potential to push boundaries, challenge perceptions, and spark vital conversations about identity and representation. Here’s to hoping we see more of that moving forward.
CM: Yes! Here’s to more!
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‘In the Amazon Parking Lot’ is directed by Sivan Battat. The world premiere production runs at Playwrights Horizons, in association with Breaking the Binary, until November 17.
