Apartment Living
Reviewed by Taylor Kass
Playwrights’ Arena & Skylight Theatre Company
Through April 24
It’s been two years, but is it still too soon for pandemic art? As we struggle to contextualize all the ways in which COVID-19 has altered us forever, the world premiere of Boni B. Alvarez’s Apartment Living offers an all-too-familiar summary of the early pandemic days but never quite provides catharsis.
Apartment Living is a slice of life in 2020 – we meet Cassandra (Charrell Mack) and Alex (Gabriel Leyva), an engaged couple who start to think that maybe they should postpone their upcoming wedding, just until this is all over. Their neighbors are Dixon (Andrew Russel), who stocks grocery store shelves on the night shift, and his mother Easter (Gigette Reyes), who works in a hospital and is among the first to realize that there’s something different about this illness. This talented, multi-racial cast, performing under Jon Lawrence Rivera’s capable direction, has a tight-knit chemistry as their characters fight against the isolation and claustrophobia that threatens to break them apart.
However, while Apartment Living taps into the gut-sinking anxiety of re-living the slow-motion car crash that was the early pandemic, it never fully sinks its teeth into what makes its characters tick. A shocking storyline between Alex and Dixon is carefully set up but never carried out to its conclusion, and the widening cracks in Alex and Cassandra’s relationship are ultimately glossed over. By tasking its characters, as sharp and charming as they are, with speaking for the universal 2020 experience, their individual stories are diluted.
COVID exposed the best and worst parts of humanity and certainly does so for these characters. But as the seventh character in this play, COVID is a faceless adversary that doesn’t really provide enough dramatic tension. And although vaccines have brought us significantly closer to a post-COVID reality, Omicron and its subsequent variants (that are even now threatening to land once again in the U.S.) prove that this pandemic isn’t yet in the rear-view mirror.
Jokes about Tiger King and quips about Zoom fatigue garner chuckles, but Apartment Living is at its best when it lets us in on all-too-fleeting moments of human connection – when Cassandra unexpectedly finds common ground with a chatty White Lady (Rachel Sorsa) at the grocery store or when Dixon lovingly prepares an overly spicy meal for his mother. Apartment Living attempts to neatly encapsulate the surreal experience of living through 2020, but maybe we won’t truly have perspective for several years to come. Maybe the best we can do is cling to the very moments we’ve been missing.
Skylight Theatre, 1816 1/2 North Vermont Ave., Los Feliz; Sat. 8:30 p.m, Sun. 3pm, Mon. 7:30pm.; through April 24. https://skylighttix.com or 213-761-7061. Running time: 1 hour, 20minutes with no intermission.
