Deirdre Lovejoy and Donnetta Lavinia Grays in In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot. Photo: Valerie Terranova

I was frequently reminded of Nomadland while watching Sarah Mantell’s In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot—Jessica Bruder’s book, which was a quietly brutal look at the depredations of late capitalism and the impossible life choices made in the wake of the Great Recession, more than the Oscar-winning Chloé Zhao movie, which, to my mind, leaned in a little too hard into making quirky individualist triumph out of it all. Like Nomadland, In the Amazon Warehouse portrays a group of economically precarious Americans trying to find sustainable or at least survivable lives in a world that seems to have no stable place for them. Theirs is an America facing not only the “garden-variety” economic disaster of the 2008 recession, or the ever-increasing income inequality and creeping inflation of the past few years, but a perfect storm of social disorder triggered by a tipping point for climate change alongside Amazon flexing its most predatory capitalist muscles. 

As with any piece of science fiction, we need to learn the parameters of the world here; we can’t even begin to grasp the stakes until we understand what’s happening outside the periphery of the immediate plot. So we slowly realize while getting to know the characters–workers in the outbound shipping module of an Amazon warehouse who seem oddly interested in the addresses to which packages are headed–that the seas are inexorably rising, taking new chunks of both U.S. coasts, and then the fairly-far-inland places that have now become the coast, on the regular as Americans retreat toward the continent’s center. Meanwhile, ever-proliferating Amazon warehouses have become one of the few stable sources of income for a displaced and disrupted population, and among that workforce, the people who all too often get the short end of the economic stick–women, queer people, older people, non-white people–are overrepresented. And to top it all off, Amazon has made the executive decision to “cut off access” to whatever remains of the internet or any information source outside what it chooses to share with its staff. Each has a device; the only thing they’re good for is showing their work schedule and delivering bulletins from Corporate. 

The current warehouse is in Wyoming, but the core community of six queer women, nonbinary people, and trans people that comprises the cast has moved from state to state in search of safety. They used to be seven; now Jen (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) can’t stop thinking about her best friend, Barbara, who stayed behind in Pennsylvania to take care of a dying parent, but after the workers lose the ability to communicate with the outside world, they don’t know how to find Barbara again, either.

Everyone in the play is living in their car in the warehouse parking lot–including Ani (Deirdre Lovejoy), a new worker who seems both oddly interested in Jen and oddly uninterested in the efforts of all of the others to mine what information they can from the names and addresses on the outbound packages. For the “luckiest” of them, that car is an actual RV, but for most it’s some sort of SUV or van that didn’t start out as their home. One of Mantell’s most elegant character choices is giving each of them a monologue on the subject of “the first time I slept in a car,” and then building enough nuance into them that they’re much more than a litany of deprivation. We need these monologues to give the characters some texture; in the play’s present, we spend a lot more time with Jen and Ani, who have a complex set of bonds, than with some of the others. Grays and Lovejoy, not surprisingly then, give standout performances, circling each other with tenderness, sparking attraction, ambivalence and the fear of making new connections in a world where it could all be taken away–while also, Lovejoy in particular, struggling to share information they’re afraid to speak about. (Mantell writes in their script note that they’d imagined these roles for actors over fifty who were getting pushed out of the business. But anyone thinking about pushing Grays, Lovejoy, or any of the others, especially Sandra Caldwell’s delightfully dry El and Pooya Mohseni’s vivid Maribel, should have their head examined.)

The world-building on all of this is admittedly a little murky: Are they ordering themselves food and clothing on their walled-garden devices from their employer, or scavenging? Where, for example, are they getting the sugar they’re stockpiling for a plan that slowly takes shape over the course of the play? Could they not get in their cars and leave the parking lot when they’re off shift in search of access to outside information, or are they so far in the middle of nowhere that there’s nowhere else to look? If Amazon has taken over the economy to the degree we sense here, then how do all the people whose packages they’re processing–many of whom must also be displaced climate refugees–live? And where?  

Flashbacks to one particular day in Pennsylvania, to the group before they lost Barbara, also feel a little murky–the group and their dynamics don’t feel different, really, and since Barbara herself never appears onstage, these scenes don’t add anything to our understanding of her.

But all of that matters less and less as the play goes on and we become invested with the characters: with the way they take care of each other and salve one another’s individual losses and griefs, the way they plot together to strike a blow for their shared freedom. The sense of loss and dislocation tracks, and none of it is actually as far as we’d like it to be from our present reality. I referenced Nomadland above, but the alarming parallels just keep coming in this scary season: Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos quashing the paper’s planned presidential endorsement sure feels like a megacorp interfering with our access to information. Hurricane Helene roaring into the Appalachians might not be the same as catastrophic sea level rise, but it likewise brought hurricane flooding to a part of the world that had thought itself safe. And then there’s presidential candidate Donald Trump, at a September rally, in pooh-poohing the risks of climate change: “You’ll have more seafront property. Isn’t that a good thing?”

Mantell and director Sivan Battat are clear eyed about the terrible things that form the basis of this show,  and the institutional bleakness is reflected in Emmie Finckel’s set–a matte-gray box of ultimate nondescriptiveness, with conveyor belts perpetually rumbling overhead, flatly lit by Cha See. And yet, as the warehouse’s roll-up door opens to reveal a majestic Rocky Mountain landscape, there is a little bit of beauty here, in the community these workers—all of them middle aged, queer, women/nonbinary, invisible in a world that itself barely exists anymore—have built. It’s a community under a lot of strain—living in their cars, caravaning from state to state in search of safety, working for Amazon even after it’s cut them off from what remains of the world—but it’s theirs, and it’s a genuine source of support and strength. As Battat says in the press release, “These characters have had no path out of class struggle. One of the most important things about the play is how this community has formed as a result of that—that no one, structurally speaking, is looking out for us, so we’ll do it for each other.” 

There’s so much that’s dark in this vision of America, and it’s pretty hard in this week where an election is about to determine whether we have any hope of slowing climate apocalypse, in this season where mountain North Carolina is “the coast now,” that it’s remarkable that Mantell and Battat are able to inject the piece with some hope: hope in the power of collective action, hope that the individual bonds between people might yet be saved. The play ends with an improbably whimsical moment of optimism, a thread followed out of the play in a single outbound box, picked out by a spotlight as it traverses the ceiling-height conveyors. Maybe there is a way out after all. 

Tulis McCall, Pooya Mohseni, Deirdre Lovejoy, Barsha, Ianne Fields Stewart, and Sandra Caldwell in In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot. Photo: Valerie Terranova.