A review by Norah Vawter

Shipwreck: A History Play about 2017 is having its U.S. premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Showing through March 8, the play is ambitious, timely, and open to interpretation. When the show ended—in what I can only describe as a dazzling, surreal display, because I don’t want to give away the surprises—I was still trying to figure it out. Shipwreck, which starts out as a conventional drama about a group of old friends gathering together for a weekend, meanders its way from the mundane to the surreal. It wanders deliberately and just as deliberately leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.

Shipwreck was written by Anne Washburn, who has a long-standing working relationship with Woolly Mammoth’s artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes. (In fact, this is her second play to premiere at Woolly: Mr. Burns, a post-electric play had its world premiere here in 2012). This production of Shipwreck is a co-production with New York’s Public Theater. It is directed by Saheem Ali and stars Jeff Biehl, Jennifer Dundas, Anna Ishida, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Alyssa Keegan, Jon Hudson Odom, Tom Story, and James Whalen.

A group of old friends, liberals in their 40s possessing varying degrees of privilege, gather in an old farmhouse in upstate New York. One couple has just bought the house, which was owned by the same family for over two centuries. This is supposed to be a fun weekend, an opportunity to reconnect, enjoy good food and good wine. But it’s 2017: the characters can’t get Donald Trump off their minds. Baffled at the state of the country, they feel angry and helpless. Then a snowstorm hits, stranding them inside and at the mercy of their anxiety. As their night plays out on stage, we are treated to a parallel narrative: the story of the family who used to live here. A white couple—conservative, Christian, the last of an old farming family—and their black son, who they adopted from a Kenyan orphanage. This family is also preoccupied by the problems of society, but instead of Trump, it’s race, racism, and the legacy of slavery. We see similar helplessness at play, and we are reminded that our country’s problems didn’t start in 2016.

Shipwreck rambles its way into the surreal, as the absurd intrudes on the seemingly mundane and normal. I don’t want to give away the surprises, but know that just as you are lulled into thinking that you know what to expect, you will be shocked and awed. I think the playwright wants to remind us, with these out of the ordinary elements, of the absurdity of the times we are living in (and the absurdity of our reactions).

The set design is artful and austere, giving us the bare bones of this old farmhouse. At the back of the set, huge windows hint at the world outside. I particularly like the way the snowstorm flickers on the windows so that it feels palpable: we get the sense of being trapped. Deceptively simple staging techniques allow two stories to play out in the same space: lighting shifts, the liberal friends freeze, and then the black son or the white father will begin talking, sharing a memory of the boy’s coming of age. We’re also treated to a couple of big scene changes, in which the set shifts rapidly and seamlessly, so that we see into new worlds, perhaps worlds that only exist within the characters’ imaginations. The structure is loose and unconstrained: it feels like this night could go on forever. At over two and a half hours, this is a long play, and I did feel it dragging towards the end. I’m sure that the slow pacing is deliberate, but if it were tightened and shortened, the play would be stronger.

Shipwreck is very much an ensemble play, and it’s a strong ensemble. There are no weak links, but there are standouts. Mikéah Ernest Jennings gives a subtly emotional performance as Mark, the adopted son from Kenya. Jennifer Dundas is funny but also poignant as the shrill, super-liberal, social media-obsessed Allie. James Whalen plays two parts—he is both the current and former owner of the house, and he differentiates the characters so well that I initially thought they were played by different actors. But if there is a star of the evening it is Jon Hudson Odom, who plays Louis, a brilliant and wealthy one-percenter with secrets. Odom has a way of letting intensity build within his voice and body, slowly at first, until it overwhelms.

This is an unapologetically political play. It is clearly liberally-minded, but it speaks about Trump voters (though not Trump, or his administration, or his policies) in fairly sympathetic, humanizing terms. It also bills itself as a history play, though it’s set only three years in the past, just after James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Washburn wrote the first draft back in 2017, during a silent retreat, taking advantage of the opportunity to step away from the frenzy in order to reflect on why everyone around her was so upset all the time. She landed on the idea of helplessness. Speaking to the New York Times about writing the play, she said, “It was enjoyable to feel I had some measure of control over the situation. It’s the helplessness that makes people crazy.”

Early in the night, Shipwreck asks us whether a play can make a difference in the world. Is art created during a certain time period meant to interact with that moment in time, or can art only make sense of the past? The play doesn’t definitively answer that question—or any of the difficult questions it raises. Instead, it asks us, the audience, to think for ourselves. Personally, I think a play can make a difference. I think that’s the great promise of art. My takeaway from Shipwreck: to pay attention to the horrors of the world, but also to my own reactions. What’s making these characters unhappy is not simply the scary reality they’re living in, but their own helplessness and inaction. They’re stuck, going round and round in loops, feeling like they can’t do anything but look at screens, complain, look at screens again, and complain more.

But the play asks us to consider whether this narrative of helplessness, of being stuck, is a lie we tell ourselves. Could these characters do something to make a difference in their world? Giving into the false narrative that they are powerless—that’s the real shipwreck. As Andrew tells Allie—when she goes into a rant about how her friends have just rolled over and let the country fall apart—“What exactly were you doing? You were posting hysterically on social media. … Why didn’t you do some actual thing in the actual, real world? Using your actual body?” 

Towards the end of the play, there’s a startling exchange about how we might view this time in history in a different way.

Jools: Don’t you think there’s something about these times which is ... beautiful? Things are awful, so awful, and surreal but, everything is important right now. Everything is at stake. This is an important time to be alive ... . It feels like now is a time when we can actually, if we really bear down on it, if we don’t freak out when we can actually ... now is the time to actually work to make America what it has always promised it could be, when the struts of everything are laid bare.”

This idea is quickly forgotten as the conversation on stage turns once more, but in my mind I keep going back to that moment. I keep thinking about our capacity for action, for movement, for imagination and wonder and compassion. Yes, now is the time to work.

Shipwreck: A History Play about 2017 is playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 8, 2020.

Run time: 2 hours 45 minutes with an intermission.

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is located in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, DC at 641 D Street NW. You can purchase tickets online or by calling (202) 393-3939.

Norah Vawter is DCTRENDING’s Local Authors Editor. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University. She has published articles, fiction, and poetry in The Washington Post, Healthline, Scary Mommy, The Nassau Review, and Stymie, among others. Norah is querying her first novel, an excerpt of which was shortlisted for the RopeWalk Press Editor’s Fiction Chapbook Prize. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.