Natalie Breitmeyer and Patrick Allcorn in “Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom” at WET
In Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, which opened last weekend at Washington Ensemble Theatre (Thurs.-Mon., 7:30 p.m.; tickets $12-$18), playwright Jennifer Haley sets up two disparate concepts–violent zombie video games and suburban angst–as a pair of mirrors reflecting one another in a twisted dual-metaphor. Suburbia is a paranoid, isolated world of desperate souls struggling to survive the decline and fall of civilization, much like the heroes of pretty much any zombie scenario. Violent first-person video games, in turn, provide a license and outlet–and a frequently disturbing one at that–for the rage and sexual tensions that a buttoned-down, tidy society (like the suburbs) suppresses.
If that sounds a little juvenile, it is. Haley’s view of suburbia has more in common with Nineties grunge and contemporary punk rock than with more the staid, “adult” explorations of suburban anomie we get from writers like Rick Moody. But somehow, it works. The story centers on a video game called Neighborhood 3 that all the teenagers are addicted to. Using satellite imaging technology, the game puts you in a horrific zombie scenario in your own neighborhood. The twist is, it’s not entirely fictional.
The play calls for a cast of four: two teenagers (a “son” and “daughter,” the latter of whom occasionally plays a boy) and two adults (“father” and “mother”), each of whom stands in for any child or parent in the entire subdivision. I imagine this is intended as a comment on the bland sameness of suburbia. Scenes alternate between the teens acting out brutal fantasies (cat killing, sexual violence) within the context of the game, counterpointed by a tour through a suburban hell of alcoholic dads, single parents, pill-popping moms, and angry, disaffected, occasionally whorish or closeted teens, until the division between the two collapses.
WET’s cast does a pretty fine job covering such diverse territory. Patrick Allcorn’s performance as the father figure is probably the most adept. As a distracted single dad who’s lost control of his daughter, Allcorn manages to be both sympathetic and comically pathetic, while in another scene he starts off channeling Gregory Peck’s reassuring Atticus Finch before layering on repressed anger and violence that’s simmering to the surface. As the son, Josh Aaseng comes off as stilted and awkward in the first scene, but by the end he proves capable of passionate drama.
The female characters are surprisingly less dynamic and interesting than the male ones. Haley has written all her female characters to type, which proves limiting. As the daughter, relative newcomer to the Seattle stage Natalie Breitmeyer does a fine job, but she’s essentially switching between empathetic, insightful daughter and rebellious whore. The mother character is even worse. For Haley, there’s no hope for suburban women, and though Kelly Hyde’s performance in the last scene of the play is perhaps the best in the entire show, every character she steps into is some form of a put-upon, chemically dependent mom who’s out of touch with her kids.
In the end, Neighborhood 3 suffers from the same sorts of problems a lot of edgy contemporary theatre does: big concepts it can’t quite fill out, a lack of subtlety, and being a little too clever for its own good. But hey, it’s intellectual satire, and WET’s production, from the performances to the staging to the design, is top notch, offering up a funny, entertaining show that makes its points amid nervous laughs and clips along at an engaging pace.
