Anyone who’s ever travelled cross-country by plane, train or bus knows that feeling of antsy claustrophobia—of having your entire world shrunk down to a seat, a window, and (if you’re lucky) a few inches of legroom. And while the characters in Claire Kiechel’s new play Pilgrims—a motor-mouthed yet secretive young woman (Janelle Villas) and a soldier suffering from PTSD (Ed Flynn)—have a bit more room to move around, their feelings of confinement are even worse.
Stuck in their cabin aboard a colony ship on a 100-day journey to a new planet, the two passengers are left with little more than themselves and their baggage to keep them company. Oh, and a robot. They have a robot, too, played by Brittany Burch. But she’s as much a part of the problem as she is a potential solution. Pilgrims is a play that doesn’t rely on the trappings of sci-fi, but it doesn’t make much use of them either.
Directed by Jessica Thebus and Michael Patrick Thornton, Pilgrims is actually a fairly conventional drama. Strip away its sci-fi trappings and you find a play about two strangers getting to know each other, revealing past psychological wounds and ultimately bonding as a way to cope. The details of the larger world are vague—sometimes to the story’s benefit, but not always. Earth is clearly going to hell, and humanity is in the process of colonizing other planets—with all the attendant violence and misery that colonization involves.
There are dreamlike interludes that reveal more of the soldier’s backstory, featuring some fine sound design (by Christopher Kriz) and lighting effects, including some nifty use of blacklight from designer Heather Gilbert. Narratively, though, they fall flat more often than not, neither advancing the story nor setting the mood. The reason the passengers are stuck in the cabin, we learn, is a possible outbreak on the rest of the ship, a development that never feels like anything more than a plot device.
There’s a sense of vagueness to the entire show. It’s there in the two main performances, it’s there in Thornton’s and Thebus’s direction and it’s there in Kiechel’s script. It’s all fine and well that the world outside the cabin feels somewhat amorphous. The problem is that the world inside the cabin—and on the stage—feels indistinct as well.
The Gift Theatre. By Claire Kiechel. Directed by Jessica Thebus and Michael Patrick Thornton. With Brittany Burch, Ed Flynn, Janelle Villas. Running time: 1hr 40mins; no intermission.