Did You Charge Your Phone for the End of the World?
It doesn’t start with an earthquake or tidal waves, though those will follow, an asteroid heading for Earth, detected a year ago but its presence kept a closely guarded secret, impact due in only three months and calculated to be Brooklyn, the government waiting until they have a suitably uplifting and reassuring campaign before releasing the news.
“Unburdened by integrity,” the Brooklyn Project (a pun on the Manhattan Project but with lower rent) is a boutique advertising agency run by novelist Lorimer Clancy, fashionista Nico Deluca-Graham and actor Del Morgan which has been approached, in on the secret but out of ideas create a jingle to spin a borough of three million becoming a smoking crater into something positive with the clock ticking on a deadline which cannot be extended.
Set in the year 2034 and performed by Collin Dennis, Lucy Boisvert and Fletcher Michael, New York’s Infinite Monkey Theater, it is difficult to tell whether it is the knowledge of the coming apocalypse which has suffused Did You Charge Your Phone for the End of the World? with indifferent nihilism or whether ennui is the natural state of the artistes who find their talents stagnating, even Del’s drug dealer’s moving forward with an MFA at UCLA.
Previously performed in their native city, the show still plays as though it is in tryouts, finding its feet as it evolves towards what it has the potential to become, Michael’s script good but the performance lacking energy, only really coming together in the smart lyrics of the frequent musical numbers, the narrative about urgency and impact but lacking either, at times as flat as if the asteroid had already landed on the city.
