Theater review by Alex Huntsberger
The Large Hadron Collider at Switzerland’s European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) is both as the setting and the central metaphor of Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes. When the machine was brought online in 2008, it sparked concerns that it could open a black hole; scientists dismissed that issue out of hand, but Kirkwood traces how such do-gooder arrogance can wreak its own kind of havoc. At once thrillingly ambitious and exhaustingly overstuffed, Mosquitoes is an unruly work that even a great production would have trouble wrangling. The dull Chicago premiere, directed by Jaclynn Jutting, has all the urgency of nuclear decay.
Mosquitoes revolves around two English sisters: Alice (Cindy Marker), a scientist at CERN, and Jenny (Julia Siple), a telemarketer who tends to the pair’s aging mother (Meg Thalken) back home. When Jenny and Mum visit Geneva, mere weeks after the death of Jenny’s young daughter, their presence throws a wrench into the already creaky workings of Alice’s home life. Alice’s bright but troubled son, Luke (Alexander Stuart), has been acting out at school, and Jenny’s boozily chaotic presence inspires him to push even further. Unable to reckon with her sister’s grief or her son’s loneliness—especially regarding his absent, mentally disturbed father—Alice finds that her professional brilliance leaves her poorly equipped to deal with human messes.
Two hours and 40 minutes long, Mosquitoes brims with ideas and data points on subjects ranging from the anti-vax movement and revenge porn to the eventual heat death of the universe and the search for the Higgs boson—a particle embodied here as a kind of apocalyptic docent (played by Richard Costes). Kirkwood’s efforts to weave these concepts into the play’s more straightforward dysfunctional-family drama are only partly successful. In some scenes, the integration is seamless; in others, the characters lurch from one topic to the next like anxious speed daters.
Unlike Kirkwood’s strange and surprising eco-drama The Children, Mosquitoes continually branches off into tangents and asides, and Jutting’s production seems lost from the start. Stellar performances by Siple and Peter Moore (as Alice’s stupendously Swiss boyfriend) are swallowed up by perplexingly bad staging. The show’s design elements are all over the place: Sotirios Livaditis’s supercollider set, Brandon Wardell’s moody lighting, Kevin O’Donnell’s space-age soundscapes and Stephan Mazurek’s scattershot video projections all work at cross-purposes. Given that the play so urgently stresses the need for intellectuals to communicate their ideas, it is frustrating just how little of Mosquitoes this production is able to put across at all.
Steep Theatre. By Lucy Kirkwood. Directed by Jaclynn Jutting. With Julia Siple, Cindy Marker. Running time: 2hrs 40mins. One intermission.