Company One Finds Life at the End of the World
Keiko Green’s surreal tragicomedy is as funny as it is moving
“I’m here to tell you how the world died. It’ll be mostly fun.”
It’s an odd promise for a play about climate change and terminal illness. Yet against all odds, Keiko Green’s play makes good on it.
You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, directed by Shawn LaCount for Company One Theatre, walks a delicate tonal line. The play circles catastrophe — environmental, personal, existential — yet it remains consistently, disarmingly funny.
The evening is guided by M (Kai Clifton), a glitter-dusted emcee who introduces the story with a cosmic flourish before narrowing the lens to something painfully ordinary: a doctor’s office and a diagnosis. From that moment on, Green’s play moves restlessly between narration and scene, spectacle and domestic chaos, as one family absorbs the news that Greg (Michael Tow) — husband, father, reluctant prophet — is dying.
But the diagnosis doesn’t exactly settle over the household with total solemnity. It knocks everything off its hinges. Viv (Jade Guerra), Greg’s wife and M’s mother, meets catastrophe with a ferocious need to manage it. Greg, meanwhile, begins drifting toward something else entirely as late-night nature documentaries turn into feverish hallucinations, leading him to believe that the terminal cancer inside him and the damage being done to the planet might somehow be connected — an idea that sends the play spinning outward into a lively orbit of relatives, boyfriends, support-group confidants, and even animals.
Around Greg’s ever-expanding conclusions gathers a gallery of sharply drawn figures: Will (the excellent Nicholas Papayoanou), M’s earnest boyfriend whose dinner-table monologue about corporate carbon emissions tips into an uncanny comic rant; Janet (Alex Alexander), a flinty support-group veteran who meets Viv’s brittle composure with bracing bluntness; and Lila (Anjie Parker), Viv’s wellness-obsessed sister, forever arriving with organic carrots and dubious miracle cures. Under LaCount’s direction, the ensemble slips between these characters — and a host of others — with remarkable agility. What might feel like theatrical whiplash instead becomes part of the production’s pleasure. Before long, the play pushes into stranger territory, as Greg’s theories about the planet’s fate summon extinct animals, environmental prophets, and other unlikely visitors.
LaCount’s staging embraces the play’s restless shape rather than trying to tame it. The production moves with a loose, inventive energy that allows Green’s leaps of tone — from grief to absurdity and back again — to land without strain or silliness. Remarkably, it all feels both believable and faintly bewitching — a tribute to LaCount and his cast. Inventive projections (by Nitsan Scharf) help expand the modest playing space into something far more vivid.
Michael Tow makes Greg’s strange awakening deeply convincing. Faced with the blunt fact of his own mortality, Greg begins noticing things he once ignored — the trees outside the house, the dirt beneath his feet. We believe this man is dying. Just as importantly, we believe that he believes the increasingly wild conclusions he draws about the fate of the planet. Tow plays the role with an open, unaffected sincerity that keeps Greg human even as the play sends him down some improbable paths.
Kai Clifton’s M presides over the evening as its emcee. But the performance reveals its real strength in the quieter moments, when the narration drops away and M is left inside the family’s private grief. Where another actor might push toward anger or operatic sorrow, Clifton goes smaller, weighing each thought before letting it land. That restraint makes the grief feel real. In a late hospital scene, as M speaks to Greg, the performance reveals its deepest current: a child realizing their parent is disappearing before they’ve fully figured each other out. Jade Guerra gives the play its emotional ballast as Viv, and is especially impressive when that composure finally slips, revealing something far more fragile underneath.
LaCount’s ensemble cast is a constant source of surprise. Nicholas Papayoanou proves a comic force of nature, sliding from M’s awkwardly endearing boyfriend to a parade of unexpected figures — a blustering Army Guy, an ominous nature-documentary narrator, even an extinct rodent — each drawn with such crisp specificity that the joke never wears thin. Alex Alexander is just as deft, creating sharply etched characters, from a nurse with the bedside warmth of a parking meter to an outraged neighborhood Karen. But Alexander’s finest moments arrive as a roofer whose wife is dying — bristly at first, then broken, and finally unexpectedly kind. Anjie Parker is equally memorable as Viv’s sister Lila and again in one of the play’s more surreal turns as Greta Thunberg — yes, Greta Thunberg.
Green’s play is not a tidy piece of dramaturgy. It sprawls, detours, and occasionally wanders into territory that feels a little loony even by its own surreal standards (and the closing dance-party coda is in desperate need of a choreographer). Yet the strangest thing of all is that it works. Somehow all the oddness — the heightened narration, the climate parables, the sudden leaps into theatrical fantasy — gathers into something unexpectedly moving, imperfect but marvelous.
Beneath all its eccentric detours, the play keeps circling a simple question: how people live with the knowledge that everything ends. It can look like a climate parable, a surreal family drama, even a kind of theatrical ritual for confronting grief. Again and again, Green’s play shows people trying to make sense of catastrophe — turning fear, grief, and bewilderment into stories, jokes, arguments, and rituals. In other words, the evening makes good on its promise: a story about the end of the world turns out to be, against all odds, mostly fun.
You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World. Through March 28 at Company One Theatre at the Boston Public Library. companyone.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
Well said!