It’s a world without grownups. In fact, it’s a world without pretty much anyone at all.
We don’t really know what happened to everyone in “The People’s History of Next,” which TheatreFIRST is presenting through this week at Berkeley’s Live Oak Theater. We just know that everybody died suddenly and seemingly disappeared without a trace. The cataclysm is represented in Ben Euphrat’s marvelous video design by a patchwork of teary farewell video messages (with cameos by a lot of terrific local actors who aren’t otherwise in the play).
We follow three teenagers in the same town who, as far as we or they know, may be the last people alive on Earth. Each is so wrapped up in personal trauma that the three connect only glancingly as they pursue their individual obsessions.
Anton, played with compelling agitation by Justin Howard, is an African-American science whiz obsessed with somehow bringing his father back through playing video games, never mind that his dad died of a lingering illness long before the apocalyptic event. Dee (skittishly panicky Leela Kiyawat) is a sometime high school radio DJ seemingly lost without her overprotective Indian American family and running in circles hoping to find survivors.
Tara (palpably anguished Unity Tambellini-Smith) is a white, secular Jewish survivor of a previous horrific calamity, stricken with traumatic memories and wallowing in self-loathing.
A collectively created theater piece, “People’s History” reportedly includes work from more than 500 students from Oakland Tech, Oakland School of the Arts, Contra Costa School of the Arts, Chabot College, Skyline High School and Stagebridge, facilitated by Awele, Anthony Clarvoe and Cleavon Smith. TheatreFIRST artistic facilitator Jon Tracy arranged and directs the piece.
Tracy’s production is wonderfully atmospheric, often haunting and occasionally horrifying, with Mark Jensen’s grim lighting and Kristoffer Barrera’s eerie sound effects accentuating the unease. The whole theater looks as if it’s under construction, covered with plastic sheets and scaffolding that’s used to good effect in the story.
A number of characters appear only on-screen as if haunting the onstage characters — or at least two of them, while the third has her own kind of visions to contend with. Occasionally one apparently flesh-and-blood adult (Awele, with a mysterious urgency) does dart through the plastic sheets to interact briefly before disappearing again. She seems to be pretty definitely there but maybe isn’t, and she functions in much the same way as the ghostly presences in the projections. We just can’t know if there’s really anyone else out there.
There are frequent references to the three kids’ families having been more or less dead at heart, and in some cases dead in actuality, long before the mass extermination, which makes the whole situation feel like a metaphor — which of course it is, but even in the world of the play it’s hard to know what if anything to take literally. That lack of solid ground makes the end of the dreamlike narrative frustratingly hard to grasp (not just what’s really going on but even what exactly is being suggested).
Even if what’s going on here isn’t any clearer by the end than at the beginning, the portraits of the three characters just become more compelling as the play goes on. The script is packed with some great and thought-provoking lines that more often than not take a grim view of life and the world. (Almost like Easter eggs, there are also occasional references to the subjects of recent TheatreFIRST plays, such as Colonel Tye, Henrietta Lacks and “Animal Farm.”)
Some of the most interesting observations are about all the conventions of society that probably aren’t even “a thing” anymore because society is gone. That may seem like an obvious point, but it’s also an essential one. Whatever the world is going to be now, it’ll have to be because they choose to make it so.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF NEXT’
By Everybody, presented by TheatreFIRST
Through: Dec. 22
Where: Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $10-$30; www.theatrefirst.com