Review: Dark Comedy "Failsafe" Turns Off the Safety Catch

Failsafe

Written by Phil Carroll

Directed by Lily Goldman

Presented at The Tank

312 W 36th St, Manhattan, NYC

December 8-14, 2024

Poster photography by Kobe Gillespie

New play Failsafe, from playwright Phil Carroll, begins with its cast of two performing some impressionistic movement together, accompanied by a voiceover that calls to mind the ill-fated "bumble of joy" in Edward Albee's The American Dream (1961), evoking from the outset the concerns with familial dysfunction, toxic relationships, and death shared by both plays. Following this opening, dreaminess gives way sharply to reality as Ivy (Grayce Toon) forcibly wakes up Jones (Johncarlo Zani), who promptly and quite realistically vomits. The pill bottles scattered around the tarp-covered set testify to this moment as the aftermath of yet another suicide attempt by the pair, part of a string of such failures that form an unsettled seam running through the abovementioned reality. With dark humor and psychological acuity, Failsafe delves compellingly into the dynamic between two damaged, angry, desperate individuals, leading ultimately to a denouement that simultaneously ends up somewhere pretty unexpected and takes us full circle.

Ivy and Jones went to the same high school, and now, in their twenties, the former with a deceased mother and the latter isolated and jobless, they share a severe disaffection with life. By the time that we meet them, they are embroiled in a suicide pact that, due to their failure so far to succeed in self-murder, has become a sort of morbidly inflected friends-with-benefits situation. Ivy's and Jones's perspectives on this development, we learn later, do not exactly align. Despite these setbacks, the pair keep trying - at one point, for instance, arguing like Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, over who will try to hang themselves first - learning more about one another and their pasts the longer they remain unwillingly alive. Eventually, Ivy's insistence that a gun is the only thing that will work sets in motion a plan that accelerates some already budding changes in their relationship and leads to a confrontation that lays bare the way in which Ivy and Jones, especially in their mostly deeply seated motivations, are not as similar as they earlier appeared.

Ivy's plan, of course, may cause one to reflect not only on gun violence more broadly but also on the fact that suicides make up the majority of gun deaths in the United States. But, arguably, Failsafe is more concerned with how people externalize and displace their own pain - Jones engages in an act of casual cruelty with some empty beer bottle in one scene, for example, a discomfiting hiccup in the audience's developing sympathy for him - as well as with how some people need to make others unhappy if they themselves are unhappy and with how people can change but can also refuse to change, to hang on to and even to weaponize their suffering. Toon is terrific as Ivy, often truculent and abrasively defensive but at the same time clearly wounded and afraid of being actually alone, as in a stand-out scene when Ivy erupts at Jones over their relationship. In that scene, the equally impressive Zani ensures that we see and feel the burden of Jones's pain weighing more heavily on him with each word that Ivy speaks, and throughout the play he adeptly exudes the awkwardness and yearning that are entangled with Jones's desire to die. The production's use of sound is minimal outside of some birdsong early on - another family, Ivy guesses, that, like her own, draws her ire - and several voiceovers, while the lighting design is more assertive, with bold shifts in color taking us at one point into the water and at another into a particular emotional atmosphere. Failsafe's arresting performances and infusions of the comic into the tragic and the inexplicable into lived reality add up to a production that is every bit as successful as its characters' attempt to fatally overdose is a failure.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards