Zoë Geltman, Jehan O. Young, and Megan Hill in A(u)nts. Photo: Kevin Frest

Sharply observed if a little fuzzy about its aspirations, A(u)nts!, the perfectly titled new play by writer/performer Zoë Geltman (who is also part of its powerhouse three-person cast), explores the anxieties of being a woman approaching middle-age in a capitalist patriarchy, and tries to conceive a shared escape. Its characters negotiate dating, breakups, the burdens of family, and the seductive pull of cult belonging on their way to embracing the formic (formicular?) collective consciousness of the ant kingdom. In the end, the play spends more time with its all-too-human aunts (and a surprisingly gentle take on the Hare Krishnas, which I didn’t see coming) to really get a handle on its giant humanoid ants. But its characters do find some sense of release, satisfaction, and even joy in occupying, even for a moment, the world of the ant colony: female-dominated, rigorously organized, and structured around shared responsibilities rather than individual fulfillment.

We begin with aunthood. Our three characters, all in their late thirties, unmarried and childfree but replete with nieces and nephews, living in Queens, and working together at a father/son dental practice, have that kind of weird, intense, more-than-acquaintance-but-are-we-really-friends? relationship that develops among longtime coworkers. They share the details of their day-to-day with intimacy–and each might alternately accuse the others of oversharing and of keeping secrets–but they’ve made only tentative forays into socializing outside the office. They don’t hate their job, but they find different levels of meaning in it, and it’s definitely not enough to feel like their life’s purpose–if it’s even possible to know what that is. None of them is miserable with their lives, but none of them feels perfectly fulfilled, either

And each has a different stance on their role as aunt. Renee (Megan Hill) has let herself become a martyr to it, wrangling her seven nephews on demand but feeling taken for granted at every turn. Annie (Jehan O. Young) is blithely distanced—when the niblings are old enough to have a conversation over a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, she’ll be interested. And Sherylann (Geltman) overinvests, inserting herself not only with her actual nieces and nephews but with friends’ children and waxing rhapsodic about the significance of children having adult role models beyond their parents. 

Director Julia Sirna-Frest makes great use of the considerable strengths of her cast. Megan Hill’s Renee is a Big Personality who prides herself on her self-sufficiency; she can say more with a lip twitch or a hair toss than many an actor with a full monologue, and you can feel Renee’s kind heart conflict with her instinct for drama. Zoë Geltman has written herself a role that maximizes her ability to find both the hilarity in her verbose, anxious self-scrutiny and the pathos in her lonely yearning for a different life than the one she’s got: a partner and kids in particular. But she is also able to fully and cheerfully embrace the surreal zaniness of mankind, swapping her bright florals for chic black, a padded thorax, and a giant ant mask (costumes are by Åsta Bennie Hostetter, with masks by Mark Fox). Jehan O. Young’s Annie has perhaps the play’s hardest emotional journey, as Annie finds herself drawn to the sense of piece and belonging she finds in chanting with Manhattan’s toniest Hare Krishnas, but then also has to journey through that and give it up for something even less tangible. Young has a quiet determination that shines through Annie. 

But with each of these characters being performed so strongly and distinctly, we do feel a loss as they fuse and merge into the colony–it’s delightfully weird to watch but not entirely satisfying emotionally or narratively. Sirna-Frest seems to be trying to let the ants sneak up on the audience, with them first presented as tantalizing shadow-puppet-like glimpses in silhouette, creeping around the edges of the aunts–like the heaps of dirt or mulch at the edges of Jiaying Zhang’s set–rather than staking equal claim to the narrative with the humans. 

The preface to Geltman’s script poses big questions: If [a soldier or worker ant] doesn’t have children, is she obeying the imperatives of her biology and society, or defying them? What is biology and what is choice? What does it feel like to live one’s life in service of someone who does have children? A(u)nts! doesn’t dig into these questions as deeply as it might, but it’s a wild and entertaining ride.