It's hard to hear someone argue that "Nothing means anything anymore," especially in downtown D.C. in this, the utterly surreal year of 2024, and not think about politics. But the writer Steve Yockey, who deploys the line not once but twice in his play "Sleeping Giant," has clearly been pondering bigger things. As in epochally, existentially bigger.
Yockey's eerie, eventually epic story begins with a singularly noisy proposal of marriage staged on one otherwise unremarkable evening at a lakeside cabin: Ryan (Jacob Yeh) surprises his sweetheart Alex (Sydney Dionne) with a massive fireworks display. It turns out Alex hates fireworks, so her immediate response will be rather too profane to cite directly here.
There's a larger -- much, much larger -- bit of fallout, though. Ryan's explosive declaration of affection seems to have disturbed something monstrous and many-tentacled that's been living quietly under the lake's murky waters. As the play unfolds in loosely connected vignettes, expanding beyond the couple's friends and neighbors to entangle strangers well beyond the vicinity of the lake, the consequences of that awakening will reverberate long past the echoes of those ill-advised fireworks.
Yockey, whose television-writing credits include HBO's wonderfully knotty "The Flight Attendant" and Netflix's tragically canceled "Dead Boy Detectives," brings a demonstrated appetite for the off-kilter to "Sleeping Giant," whose events will involve a baking-adjacent suicide, a confession of ritualized public sexual congress, a visit to the afterlife with an ancient deity and -- once the linked stories have circled inevitably back to Ryan and Alex -- a neighbor's insistent invitation to a fraught evening of liturgical dance down by the lake.
What emerges, as Yockey's characters grapple with the ever-spreading influence of the lake monster news, is a contemplation of the manifold ways in which the ancient lizard part of our nominally civilized brains can govern our reactions to the surprising, the perplexing, the unexplained and the unexplainable. The darkly puckish suggestion of "Sleeping Giant" is that our desperate need to find meaning in everything we encounter may well be what drives some of our more curious (dare we say cultish?) choices -- an observation with implications for our understanding not just of politics but religion and social movements, as well.
If you're thinking this sort of material might be right up the Rorschach Theatre's alley -- they're working in a vacant Rochester Big & Tall store at the moment, not in an actual alley, though I wouldn't put it past them -- you're on to something. It's a company with a distinct appetite for the oddball and the otherworldly, an heir in many ways to the transgressively esoteric aesthetic that helped put Woolly Mammoth on the national theater map.
That appetite makes itself gratifyingly apparent here: All of Rorschach's designers (especially costumer Ashlynne Ludwig and props chief Aoife Creighton) meet the script's challenges with a satisfyingly unholy glee, and director Jenny McConnell Frederick makes clarity the watchword with a tale whose intimations assemble themselves indirectly, with key details dropped in passing exchanges and suggestions playing as important a part as specifics.
Erin Denman (sporting a perfectly absurd fascinator and carrying it off quite nicely, thanks) and Robert Bowen Smith (inhabiting that aforementioned ancient deity with a perverse and languid authority) round out the cast, with all the actors assuming multiple roles -- sparring lovers, brunch-bound girlfriends, a visitor spouting lines from the Book of Revelation and so on.
If there's a caveat here, it's that this staging's commitment to clarity comes at the cost of a sense of urgency -- Yockey's 2022 script, newly updated for this Rorschach production, insists that "this all moves swiftly, careening ahead," but that wasn't my experience, at least on opening night. Certain oddities -- a woman stands on a sofa chanting "eyeball" repeatedly, while a kind of animated hat rack gyrates unnoticed in a corner -- contribute more to the play's air of strangeness than to its sense of, well, sense. And even at 85 minutes, "Sleeping Giant" seems a touch long; the material may be complicated, but it makes its points efficiently enough that the evening outstays its welcome just slightly.
Still, there's something to be said for a dark comedy that can employ the mention of religious cannibalism to suggest that our current national conversation owes as much to the (un)wisdom of herds as to a careful consideration of the commonweal. If nothing else, "Sleeping Giant" greets the political moment with an aptly hollow laugh.