“Tender Napalm” at Theaterlab (Photo: Emilio Madrid)

Two lovers find themselves clinging to fantasy at the edge of an implied hellscape in Philip Ridley’s 2011 play Tender Napalm. Whether that hellscape is actual warfare or something closer to home is up for debate, but the two unnamed characters cannot bring themselves to face it or to step outside the sealed space where they’ve taken shelter.

In this revival, their sanctuary is Theaterlab’s white box and a thin strip of green flooring (is it grass?) on which they plunge into their imaginings. Director Rory McGregor and scenic designer Brendan Gonzales Boston have rendered an anonymous space in keeping with the play’s shifting, unknowable reality. Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Brian Hickey’s sound design bring in some of the outside world (or at least what the characters remember or make up), but just as quickly pare it away. Lighting and sound are ephemeral and, as the play shows us, so is memory.

Ridley’s earlier plays are filled with violence and savage dialogue. Tender Napalm, now a teenager, only flirts with the real barbarism of his earlier work, but there’s still blood and guts in the writing – and in the acting. Ben Ahlers and Victoria Pedretti nearly rip themselves apart over the play’s ninety minutes. Ahlers is very physical, throwing himself around the tiny space, sweating through his shirt. His character is working overtime to build the fantasy and insulate his partner. 

Pedretti’s performance is more contained, but the force comes from deep inside her and then breaks the surface. In the play’s final moments, it’s astonishing how much she looks like an entirely different person. You can see the exhaustion and the hopelessness on her face – how are the characters going to keep up this level of playacting? It’s clear from Pedretti’s face that they’re not.

Ahlers’ vocal performance is remarkable as well. He paints the world with a sonorous lower register or punctuates the tale-telling with screams of war, of fear, and of ecstasy. He also finds a new way to voice an extraterrestrial that isn’t the “take me to your leader”-style impression so commonly used. McGregor and Ahlers know when the play needs just a sprinkle of levity.

The most impressive aspect of this revival, though, is how easily Ahlers and Pedretti drop the artifice when the characters are being truthful with each other. So much of Ridley’s play exists in the fantasyland and, despite the excellent acting, it does verge on tiresome. But when they fall out of the fakery and the two characters speak to each other or in monologue about their past, the play becomes quite tense. Their reality, whatever it might be, feels so terrifying because of how fully they have been wrecked by it. In these quieter, honest moments, it’s apparent why they create their dream scenarios – it’s distraction from agony.