In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot – 22 October 2024

In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot pokes fun at and subtly challenges the idea that we know what data corporations have about us and what they intend to use it for. A cast of queer warehouse workers wander their corporation’s apocalypse, connecting and bonding with one another, while harboring a sincere belief that the corporation can be taken down with stockpiled sugar. Life, love, and loss bind these characters to each other and to their warehouse jobs, in which they use shipping addresses to monitor which parts of the country still exist and which have slipped into the underwater ether. They persist on the fervent hope of finding comfort in the name of a lost loved one should it happen to appear on a shipping label. In the meantime, they cling to each other, bonded across ages and geographic origins by their resilient nature, survival skills, and determination to make meaning out of an existence that seems futile.

In many end-of-the-world stories, action predominates and the end of the world is coming about in a big, dramatic way. Playwright Sarah Mantell brilliantly reimagined an apocalypse of apathy, in which people knowingly or unknowingly fund and work for a corporation that is, in some way, manufacturing a slow slide in which the coasts of the country slip away and “everybody is looking for somebody” because people are just lost. The corporation cuts off access to communication to keep people in the dark about their impending doom as their world slides away. They don’t realize the corporation is to blame, or they don’t care. They keep ordering things. Or at least, that’s what I thought while I was watching the performance. Towards the end I began to have another theory. What if the people ordering items were trying to communicate their safety to the warehouse workers in the same way that the warehouse workers were trying to ascertain the safety of their loved ones? What if continuing to order packages was not a lazy, morbid contribution to a tragic demise but rather a hopeful sign of resilience and resistance, putting trust in the hands of the warehouse workers because humanity had not given up yet?

Ultimately, the war to stop the end of the world isn’t exactly won (or winnable). But it was powerful to put this story in the hands of queer women+. More than any other facet of the queer community, masculine women+ live in the shadows and sidelines. In life, as in this play, queer women+ can (and do!) perform the jobs of men, and yet we will always be slightly different. We are tough—both physically and emotionally. We have strong survival skills. We instinctually take care of others, often at the expense of ourselves. We isolate and insolate from the things we cannot allow ourselves to feel. We walk contradictions with strength in our footsteps and determined tingles in our fingertips. We love one another, but, as exemplified in In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, we frequently leave it unsaid. We squelch and suppress and then time passes, but there are no outbursts, only reckless plans that get us where we need to be, even if it’s not exactly where we planned to be going.

Every character in this play was an embodiment of those commonalities—regardless of age, race, assigned sex at birth, geographic origin, or length of time knowing each other. It was beautiful to see a play directed (Sivan Battat) to show these qualities rather than tell them. The monologues interspersed through the show gave each character a moment to tell the story of when they started living in their vehicles. A conversation about gender was never needed, and it remained in the subtext. I think that’s actually where it belongs. These characters had more to their stories than being queer. Queer culture wasn’t part of this show. Rather, Mantell showcased how a particular group of individuals would exist under the duress of a particular situation. Queer women+, particularly those who are masculine, are seldom the glitter and rainbows version of queer existence. We’re the quiet, do-what-it-takes-to-make-it-work, do-not-put-me-in-the-spotlight types. At the end of the world, I do think we’d be the perfect people to lead the resistance. We live in societal boxes just enough to escape detection. I think we’d get the job done.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.