Theater review by Adam Feldman
In his program note for The Dinosaurs, playwright Jacob Perkins describes how a support group for alcoholics helped him deal with traumatic memories—including that of being surrounded by a group of men to be “exorcised,” at the age of 8, from a homosexuality that had already become legible to others. In the weekly sessions he attended in a church basement, which have now inspired his elegantly elliptical and tender new play, Perkins also found a community of people wrestling with demons: drawing on one another’s strength to stay cleansed of the spirits, whether liquid or figurative, that once controlled them and which still threaten, at any moment, to slip into their weakest places.
The Dinosaurs | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
This theme becomes explicit only once in The Dinosaurs: When Joan (Elizabeth Marvel), speaking of the mysterious maladies she suffered as a child, compares herself to “that little girl in The Exorcist after she gets possessed by the devil.” Her illnesses were harbingers of her future alcoholism, she later realized, but at that time “my disease was manifesting as restlessness, irritability, discontentedness”—problems that later, frustrated by her inability to control them, she would turn to drinking to escape. Perkins approaches alcoholism not as a physical ailment but a spiritual one. “I didn’t believe that God saw me, that God could ever wanna take care of a person like me,” Joan says, but the community of women she meets with every week has eased her underlying sense of loneliness. “At the core of it all we just wanted to be seen and heard and loved.”
The Dinosaurs | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
Most of the 12-steppers in Perkins’s play get moments to expose their deepest anxieties. But what they say is almost less important than the fact that they are there. Although it is less than 75 minutes long, much of The Dinosaurs is devoted to the quotidian: small talk, snacks, the setting up and removal of chairs. The play takes its time; what’s more, it takes time itself loosely, moving forward (and sometimes back) through years without much concern for markers. The effect—hazy, recursive, cyclical—emphasizes the enduring structure of the group, whose individual members are intentionally confusable. In addition to Joan, Perkins gives us the identically pronounced Joane (Maria Elena Ramirez) as well as Jane (April Matthis), Janet (Mallory Portnoy) and Jolly (Kathleen Chalfant), who later reappears as June. The only exception is Rayna (Keilly McQuail), who is not yet ready to join.
The Dinosaurs | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
At the same time, the women—as in Bess Wohl’s Liberation, another celebration of female support—are crisply individualized, both in the writing and by a first-rate multigenerational cast under the direction of Les Waters. The presiding eminences are the testy Marvel and the patrician Chalfant, icons both of the New York stage, but this is, appropriately, very much a group effort. Together, the performers give fresh breath to the old observation that theater is like a church. Through their congregation, mutable yet constant, the play demonstrates the healing power of other people’s stories.
The Dinosaurs. Playwrights Horizons (Off Broadway). By Jacob Perkins. Directed by Les Waters. With Kathleen Chalfant, Elizabeth Marvel, April Matthis, Keilly McQuail, Mallory Portnoy, Maria Elena Ramirez. Running time: 1hr 15mins. No intermission.
Follow Adam Feldman on X: @FeldmanAdam
Follow Adam Feldman on Bluesky: @FeldmanAdam
Follow Adam Feldman on Threads: @adfeldman
Follow Time Out Theater on X: @TimeOutTheater
Keep up with the latest news and reviews on our Time Out Theater Facebook page
The Dinosaurs | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
