The Wasp

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There’s a morbidly enthralling natural horror pulsing at the core of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp—a fact so ghastly and so perversely poetic that it could only have been plucked from the darker recesses of the natural world. The titular creature, the tarantula hawk wasp, is a biological nightmare rendered with such casual precision it verges on allegory: the female wasp paralyzes her victim, lays her egg within, and leaves her offspring to consume its host from the inside out. The larva’s first meal is the tarantula’s living flesh; its last act, to emerge into adulthood, triumphant and terrible. And if that weren’t enough to chill the blood, we are reminded that this fiendish insect also boasts one of the most excruciating stings on Earth—a detail so extravagant in its cruelty it feels almost theatrical in itself.

Happily—or perhaps mercifully—no actual wasps or spiders make an appearance on stage (save for the ominously framed specimens adorning Heather’s pristine living room wall, glinting in the light like silent witnesses). Instead, Malcolm crafts a human counterpart to this grisly symbiosis: two women locked in a psychological duel of dominance and dependency, each alternately predator and prey. The question that hovers, tantalizing and unresolved, is this: who, in the end, is the wasp, and who is the spider?

Heather (Colby Minifie) and Carla (Amy Forsyth) reunite after decades of estrangement, their meeting thick with the tension of unspoken history. Heather, composed and brittle in her middle-class domesticity, extends an invitation—or perhaps a provocation—to Carla, an exhausted, cash-strapped mother of four (soon to be five) whose hard-lived exterior masks deeper wounds.

Their class divide is audible before it is visible—etched into every syllable they utter. Heather speaks in the careful cadences of the dinner-party elite, each vowel polished to a fine, brittle sheen, while Carla’s speech carries the grit and immediacy of someone who might have wandered in from a hinterlands production of Look Back in Anger. Rodrigo Muñoz’s costuming underscores this linguistic chasm with cruel precision: Carla, in her sagging track bottoms and scuffed trainers, seems almost to absorb the grime of her surroundings, while Heather, immaculate in Vogue’s business casual, wears her privilege like armor.

What, one wonders, could possibly bridge this 20-year estrangement between predator and prey, bully and victim, the haves and the have-nots? The answer, when it arrives, is as shocking as it is grotesquely logical. Heather, we learn, is miserably ensnared in the gilded cage of her marriage—and, recalling Carla’s youthful cruelty toward small creatures, decides to exploit that darkness for her own liberation. What begins as an innocuous proposal soon metastasizes into something far darker. With a kind of manic serenity, she offers a proposition: 30,000 pounds, in cash, to murder her husband. “As if 30 grand isn’t something you’re desperate for,” she goads, clutching her handbag like a trophy of temptation. Against all better judgment—and with the haunted weariness of someone cornered by circumstance—Carla accepts.

Malcolm’s gift lies not merely in the plot’s mechanics, but in the psychological sinew beneath them. The play’s sting is not in the act itself but in the motivation: why these women do what they do, and how the ghosts of adolescence can fester into adulthood’s cruelties. The production, mounted by Little Engine Theater, is deceptively elegant: Heather’s tastefully appointed living room (a carve-out in a fifth floor loft in NYC’s financial district) serves as both domestic fortress and emotional battleground.

Malcolm proves she understands the intricacies of female rage and resilience. Heather and Carla begin as social archetypes—the brittle hostess and the rough-edged survivor—but under Rory McGregor’s taut direction, they evolve into creatures of startling complexity. As their confessions spill forth and the power dynamic oscillates like a pendulum, we realize how little we truly understood them at all. Every revelation is a small act of violence, every shift in control a tightening of the web.

McGregor conducts a taut, pulse-quickening production within an unconventional and faintly claustrophobic space, whose corner Tony Award–winning scenic designer Scott Pask has deftly reimagined as Heather’s tastefully macabre sitting room. The palette—dominated by bruised greens and murky olives—suggests both affluence and rot, a cultivated aesthetic tinged with decay. On the walls hang display cases of pinned insects, their grotesque stillness echoing the moral paralysis of the play itself. From a stereo in the corner drifts a muted nocturne, its gentle strains oscillating between lullaby and lament (sound design by Brian Hickey), wrapping the scene in an atmosphere of fragile menace.

Stacey Derosier’s lighting design locates that elusive chiaroscuro—dim enough to suggest secrecy, yet luminous enough to capture every twitch, every micro-expression that betrays a shifting power dynamic. The result is a production that feels improbably sleek, even luxurious, despite the modest dimensions of its found-space setting. That such technical precision and aesthetic cohesion can emerge from a corner of an unconventional venue is, in itself, a small theatrical marvel. The decor’s calm veneer belies the chaos that will soon erupt within it. By the play’s fevered conclusion, both women have been stripped of pretense, and what remains is something raw, primal, and disturbingly familiar.

The Wasp is not for the faint of heart. It confronts the audience with themes of mental illness, domestic violence, and sexual trauma, yet resists the easy descent into nihilism. For all its darkness, there is a fragile thread of mercy woven through the play’s venomous fabric—a suggestion that even amidst cycles of cruelty, one might still choose compassion. Malcolm leaves us with the uneasy sense that the line between victim and aggressor, between wasp and spider, may be far thinner than we care to admit.

And so, like the sting of its namesake, The Wasp lingers long after the curtain falls—sharp, unsettling, and impossible to forget.

The Wasp (extended through November 23, 2025)

Little Engine Theater

16 Beaver Street, floor 5, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www littleenginetheater.com

Running time: 90 minutes without an intermission