Review: Mining a Whimsical Absurdist Vein in ‘The Trees’

Change implies movement: from here to there, from then to now, from one thing to another and perhaps back again. But in Agnes Borinsky’s new play, “The Trees,” it is represented by immobility. After all, the two central characters are physically rooted to the ground. They do not evolve much over the course of the show — it’s those around them who do.

Returning from a party with her brother, David (a one-note Jess Barbagallo), Sheila (the ever-engaging Crystal Dickinson) jokes that they should just stay where they are — that is, a Connecticut park — for 10 years, or maybe even 100. Suddenly, a drunken flight of fancy becomes reality as the pair sink into the floor down to their ankles and stay there for the entire show, stationary fixtures watching the friends, lovers, family members and even strangers drawn to their orbit.

As fraught as the situation might conceivably be, Borinsky (“A Song of Songs,” “Ding Dong It’s the Ocean”) stays clear from existential dread à la Samuel Beckett, whose apocalyptic “Happy Days” famously centers on a woman half-buried in a mound of earth. Rather, she attempts to mine a whimsical absurdist vein that feels like a creaky Eugène Ionesco plot device filtered through the sensibility of the writer and performer Taylor Mac, whose queering of theater aesthetics and quasi-spiritual questioning of community looms large over “The Trees.”

The show, which opened Sunday at Playwrights Horizons, does not tell us much about David and Sheila besides the fact that she had been visiting from Seattle and he makes movies — sorry, “films,” as he is prompt to remind her and everybody else. Poor Sheila, stuck next to this humorless pedant. You can see why David’s boyfriend, Jared (a scene-stealing, amusingly arch Sean Donovan), would jump on this unexpected opening and break up with him. Well, sort of, because like several others, Jared keeps being pulled back to the siblings’ orbit — he even helpfully suggests they be classified as trees so they won’t be evicted for staying on public land overnight.

The production by Tina Satter (“Is This a Room”) can be cryptic, from Enver Chakartash’s boldly colored costumes to a set, by Parker Lutz, evoking a Greek amphitheater stripped of adornments and thus left as a characterless husk.

Similarly, practical details about David and Sheila’s daily existence are brushed aside like inopportune reminders of reality (so normie), including a fleeting reference to inheritance money and an even zippier one to how the siblings eat and defecate. Somebody mentions a Kickstarter campaign to help them, though one of the visitors, Tavish (Pauli Pontrelli), is critical of offering perks for donations: “It’s this fake-polite capitalistic masquerade and a total perversion of the spirit of mutual aid,” they say.

An astute point from Tavish, but it is brought up and abandoned as quickly as, say, the references to the environment. Rachel Carson this is not.

As a diverse ecosystem can thrive around trees, an ad hoc family of blood and affinity grows around Sheila and David. Borinsky alludes to a kind of utopia in which the world’s pedestrian rules are kept at bay, but mostly leans on a vagueness that might claim to be poetic but ends up noncommittal. The siblings did not choose their fate, or maybe they did. They are miserable in their spot, or maybe they’re weirdly thriving in their new community. You could say their grandmother (Danusia Trevino), who speaks only in Polish and Yiddish, represents a different type of rootedness, in this case to the past, just like a child (Xander Fenyes) embodies a young leaf off a tree that is hope in the future. Borinsky invites guesses; the problem is that we might not care enough for any of the people or ideas onstage to bother hazarding them.

The Trees
Through March 19 at Playwrights Horizons; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes.