Esco Jouléy and Dorcas Leung in Last Call. Photo: Fred Charles

The world building in Last Call: A Play with Cocktails–a new site-specific piece, written and co-directed by Hansol Jung and being performed this month in private homes around the city–is a little fuzzy around the edges: There are lockdowns and curfews and an undue number of funerals; going outside requires elaborate safety protocols and protective gear, but we don’t know whether the threat is environmental, medical, political, or some maximally terrible combination of all of the above. But it doesn’t take much in the way of specifics to set a mood of doom and dread these days, does it? And the conditions of attending the show add to the edginess: Each performance takes place in a different home; you can select a neighborhood but the precise address is given only the day before the performance, with a password provided to secure admission. We’re ringing a stranger’s doorbell and expecting to be invited in.

Each audience member is given a hand-addressed letter upon entry: “Congratulations on leaving the comfort and safety of your homes during this crisis,” it says. “This venue is protected from curfew police.” Welcomed in by the homeowner, we’re offered wine and a few moments of chit-chat and told to find a seat (out of thirty-some spots designated on couches and extra chairs and a few floor cushions). Once we’ve all been seated for just long enough to start wondering how this is actually going to work, our (bar)Tender (Nicole Villamil) rushes in. (The show is performed by a rotating cast of two; I saw Villamil and Esco Jouléy.) She’s disguised as a mailbox. Yes, a full-size U.S. Postal Service blue mailbox: “protective gear,” she says. (Given the current dysfunction of the USPS, I’m not sure how long those mailboxes would remain commonplace in a national-level crisis, but that’s okay–she also makes trash cans, fire hydrants for the kids…)  She’s running late because she missed the train; she missed the train because she was at a funeral. Her husband’s funeral. It’s okay, though–who among us hasn’t buried a spouse lately? And as she talks, she unpacks her kit and starts constructing a specialty cocktail and offering it to the audience, drawing us into the evening with polished patter that includes trivia questions, cocktail history, and a bartender’s instinct of just how intimate a given customer/audience member wants to get. 

As in any show with substantive audience participation, there’s a little flex built into the proceedings, with moments playing out differently based on audience response. (And in addition to rotating locations and casts, there are two different versions of the script with different cocktails and thus histories and anecdotes as the starting point, because Jung and co-director Dustin Wills apparently want to raise the difficulty level on site-specific theater: I saw the version featuring a Vieux Carré and an Aviation as the signature cocktails; the other calls for a Hanky Panky and a daiquiri. Both come to the same ending(s), but they make different stops along the way) 

The world of Last Call is constructed out of elements we remember from peak pandemic—lockdown, mistrust of government motives, isolation—but with the desperation and paranoia and loneliness ratcheted up another several notches. Curfew is 6 p.m. in this mirror world, and all of us in the audience have taken a risk to come out to a private gathering. Our Tender makes a living hosting them—part party, part performance art; a chance to be in a room with people in a way that used to be the epitome of normal. The conceit is a little gimmicky, but enjoyable enough to hang an evening on: watching an expert bartender mix a complex cocktail is choreography almost as intricate as close-up magic, and at any moment, you might get to try one. 

But then there’s a call on the walkie-talkie–an unexpected and possibly dangerous intrusion? When Nicole sneaks out to investigate, someone else sneaks in: Nicole’s dead husband, Esco, who was also her business partner / cohost at the parties. 

The cleverest thing about Last Call is that while Esco can see and sort of interact with Nicole, Nicole can’t see Esco. Only the audience can–and once Nicole becomes aware, through our reactions, that Esco’s ghost is in the room, audience members become the conduit for communication between the two. It’s a dynamic that does depend on at least one audience member to step way up into the narrative, but that also adds an intriguing level of uncertainty, and a verisimilitude to the ghostly quality of the husband that would be hard to script. And that genuine aura of unpredictability helps to get us over the gaps in the world building (it does seem odd, for example, that Nicole–even if she is having a uniquely vulnerable day–would put her fate in the hands of a room of strangers in the way that she does) and some clunkiness in the reveals of Nicole and Esco’s backstory. Still, Villamil and Jouley sell the danger; the intrusion from the outside world at Esco’s entrance is a real jolt. 

“You could say ghost, you could say memory, you could say convenient theatrical device… Either which way I’m the fun one.” We’ve got it all wrong, Esco says. Nicole has left out critical parts of the story. And in Jouléy’s charismatic hands, the husband is the fun one: Villamil’s host feels almost professorial, cool, and in command; the personal revelations are genuine, as is her grief, but also a tiny bit strategic, angling for tips. Jouléy’s bartender is flashier, more playful, more of a flirt with the audience–but, it soon becomes clear, also nursing a deep wound. Because there’s a deep incompatibility between their tales of how Esco died, and we in the audience are going to be asked to judge whose tale is true. And no matter how we choose, there will be consequences…and we might very well be wrong. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that Jung, Wills, Villamil, and Jouléy throw one final twist that lands hard. 

Of course, you won’t see exactly the same show I did—I can’t do the math on the different possible permutations of actors, location, script, and all the internal audience-based forks in both scripts. You might see a show that’s different in almost every particular than the one I saw, in fact. I hope that its aura of ghostly strangeness remains constant, though. Last Call may not fully flesh out its world, but like any good site-specific piece, it brings something more to the table: intimacy, unsettlingness, the ability to make us question our own judgment.