Post-apocalyptic plots are hard to screw up. Throw bedraggled survivors into dangerous situations, question civilization’s future, and your audience is hooked.
But while all these elements figure in Adam Rapp’s new play, “Through the Yellow Hour,” they add up to a grinding slog. Amazingly, it’s possible to make a story about a bombed-out New York overrun by militant Muslims seem tedious.
This should surprise Rapp’s fans. His many plays — including Pulitzer finalist “Red Light Winter” — can be emotionally and physically violent, but they’re not boring. Rapp is the rare writer who can turn a pessimistic world view into thoughtprovoking theater.
But this show is a big stumble.
To create a sense of full immersion, Rapp, who doubles as director, and set designer Andromache Chalfant extended the play’s squalid environment into the theater’s walls and aisle.
The action proper takes place in the devastated East Village apartment of Ellen (Hani Furstenberg). There’s graffiti and rubble, a bathtub in the living room, and a half-collapsed ceiling.
In other words, the place looks like an Alphabet City squat from the 1980s.
A big difference is that here, New Yorkers live in terror of the Egg Heads, so nicknamed for their helmets. They castrate the men, and make the women wear bonnets.
Background info is slowly parceled out, but we never get a clear idea of what the Egg Heads’ master plan is. All we know is that babies are a precious commodity, and Ellen just obtained one from a junkie named Maude (Danielle Slavick).
Eventually two mysterious characters come to trade it for a 14-year-old (Vladimir Versailles).
Why? No idea. Couldn’t we just have had a plague of zombies and called it a day?