Review: "Packed" and "Don’t Push the Red Button" Bring a Pair of "Close Encounters" to Circle Festival 2025
Packed
Written and directed by Elise Wilkes
Don't Push the Red Button
Written and co-directed by Zachary Mailhot
Directed by Chris Cavazza
Presented by RJ Theatre Co. in partnership with The Actor Launchpad at AMT Theater
354 W 45th St., Manhattan, NYC
August 30-October 19, 2025
Opening the double bill is writer and director Elise Wilkes's Packed, in which two women, Gail (Katie Gilhooley) and Dina (Wynn McClenahan), meet for the first time as they pack up an apartment that had been occupied by Kim and Anna, who have broken up after a period of living together. Gail had gone to college with Kim and Dina with Anna, but science major Gail, we learn, has not yet graduated and works in a factory, while Dina has finished her English degree but works as a secretary. Gail overtly embodies the double marginalization of queer women in a patriarchal heteronormative society; "raised," she says, "to be the perfect wife," she has not yet returned to college because she hasn't saved up enough money and, since the play takes place in the early 1970s, still legally needs a man to co-sign on a loan (the 1970s would of course go on to see important gains by both the women's and gay rights movements, but such overlapping oppressions have far from disappeared in our contemporary moment). Dina, who has a more traditionally femme presentation than Gail, feels that people see her wrongly and oversexualize her–Anna excepted, for which she feels indebted. That Gail questions this indebtedness represents one example of how, while packing the apartment, Gail and Dina end up unpacking themselves and their lives, although not without friction. Helped perhaps by the wine and prosecco that Dina brings along, the two women eventually share enough of themselves to come up against big questions like what they want in life (and love) and, as importantly, what is holding them back. (The sexual infidelity involved in Kim and Anna's breakup leads to questions about both of these areas.) Is it possible that they can choose to be done packing? Packed offers a lot of hilarious moments–including the women ceremonially letting go of a certain left-behind item–but also moments of passionate anger and vulnerable tenderness, to all of which both Gilhooley and McClenahan lend compelling authenticity and complexity. In the context of this play and these performances, it is fitting that a simple hug takes on enormous emotional and symbolic weight and potentiality.
The characters in Don't Push the Red Button, from playwright Zachary Mailhot, have experienced a rapid transition from not knowing one another at all to spending every minute together. When we meet Mason (Chris Cavazza) and Eli (Shaun Shaunghessy), another outwardly contrasting pair, they have been together in Mason's bunker for five months. Mason, a prepper type who talks about the rise of the "shadow government" and keeps files on cryptids, brought Eli, who was merely camping nearby, inside the bunker when it seemed that something apocalyptic was about to occur. Months later, Mason, heavily bearded and wearing a ghillie suit, the artificial leaves with which it is covered swaying and fluttering mesmerizingly with his movements, focuses on his collecting data and running post-apocalypse-related models, while Eli, sporting a waist-length kimono, writes poetry about their situation and interacts with Captain Spud, his potato-cum-military-hero-friend (Mason has fashioned his own sort of companion from less appealing material.) Both men eat a lot of canned beans. Both men also contemplate the titular red button, which will open the bunker, which Eli is in favor of while Mason argues that they must resist the temptation offered by the button. As the pair hash out this central conflict, they undergo their own process of opening up, not unlike the characters in Packed. Their fears particularly take center stage over the course of the play–fears not just of dying from radiation or the agents of the shadow government, but also, again similarly to the characters in Packed, of being misunderstood, of being alone, of being unable to control important aspects of their lives. Conspiracy theories, of course, like Mason is interested in, provide a feeling of mastery over a confusing and frightening world, as do his attempts to tame the (unconfirmed) apocalypse outside with his mathematical models and predictions. But, as Mason's disagreement with Eli over whether to push the button prompts us to ask, at what point should risk prevail over or freedom outweigh safety? Cavazza and Shaunghessy make a great comic odd-couple duo, but they also infuse their performances with intensity when required, including in some impressively choreographed moments when Mason and Eli's disagreements turn physical. As a double bill of two-handers that come at questions of human connection from different but equally funny angles, Packed and Don't Push the Red Button offer an inarguable reason to leave your own apartment–or bunker.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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