Last Call, A Play with Cocktails
The conceit is clever: each performance takes place in a real home, the precise address dispatched only the day before, like a speakeasy or secret society. A password grants entry. There’s a frisson to ringing an unfamiliar doorbell in a neighborhood you’ve selected but don’t know, expecting to be welcomed inside. And welcomed you are—by a host (a literal homeowner, not an actor), who hands you a letter (“Congratulations on leaving the comfort and safety of your homes during this crisis…”) and offers wine and chatter before ushering you toward a makeshift audience configuration: a scatter of couches, dining chairs, bar stools, forty-some options in all, arranged with deliberate casualness. Just as you begin to wonder how, exactly, this will become a play, your (bar)Tender arrives. He’s late. He’s distraught. He’s encased—hilariously, ominously—in the hard shell of a full-sized USPS mailbox, which he declares is “protective gear.” (A detail as absurd as it is revealing—after all, in a crumbling state, even the mail must wear armor.) [more]