Biology drives the human drama and the post-apocalyptic future of Age of Bees, a poetic new play that finds rays of hope amid manifold fears.
Powerful performances help ground Tira Palmquist’s speculative coming-of-age drama, which opened on Thursday at MadLab Theatre.
Her cautionary fable imagines a world where environmental disaster has reduced civilization, but the former central Ohio playwright wisely focuses on just a few people in a small rural setting: a half-dead orchard.
The moral of the story: Even in a future when bees are no longer around to pollinate apple trees, a girl can grow into a woman. The fertile catalyst: budding romance with an outsider.
Mary Beth Griffith plays tomboyish Mel, short for Melissa, with a blend of innocence and intelligence.
Mel is one of the girls who must climb into the apple trees to personally spread pollen amid the blossoms to ensure a crop. But orphaned Mel is different from the other girls and thus more open to change — which arrives in the form of a handsome stranger who, at first, mistakes her for a boy.
Travis Horseman is sympathetic and nuanced as Jonathan, a compassionate outsider who limps into the orchard in search of life-giving trees and plants.
As Deborah, Lexy Weixel is impulsive and manipulative — Mel’s opposite.
In the least-developed role, Courtney Deuser plays Sarah, an older woman struggling with a difficult pregnancy in a female group dominated by a male zealot.
Strip away its convincing prophecy of environmental doom and other sci-fi trappings evoked through snippets of radio broadcasts, and the affecting core of the play might as easily be set in the early to mid-20th century in Appalachia or the South.
Director Jim Azelvandre helps knit the cast into an organic whole, but the tale seems too predictable and the pace too slow for a two-hour two-act.
More character-based humor might help, but it could undermine the lyrical realism of a cautionary drama whose dominant tone must remain sad.