Review: Worry, Worry, Super-Scurry to Fletcher Michael’s “did you charge your phone for the end of the world?”

did you charge your phone for the end of the world?

Written and directed by Fletcher Michael

Presented by Infinite Monkey Theater Company at wild project

195 E. 3rd Street, Manhattan, NYC

April 4-19, 2026

L to R: Collin Dennis, Fletcher Michael, Lucy Boisvert. Photo by Nicholas Barris & editing by Lucy Boisvert.
Tonight at wild project, the phone rings long before it connects. In Fletcher Michael’s did you charge your phone for the end of the world?, presented by Infinite Monkey Theater Company as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, catastrophe is a matter not of if or when, but of messaging. An asteroid is on its way to Brooklyn, and the public will not be told until a boutique advertising agency can find the right tone; the end of the world, here, must be properly branded before it can be properly known. Give me schtick or give me death.

Three creatives, Del Morgan (Fletcher Michael), Nico Deluca-Graham (Lucy Boisvert), and Lorimer Clancy (Collin Dennis), circle one another in a stripped-down warehouse space: two chairs, a table, and a bowlful of tennis balls, suspended in a cool blue netherspace that feels both imminent and already arrived. As a perpetual referent and frequent punchline, Brooklyn hums as an offstage presence, not simply a setting but a brand, a mythology, a nomenclature, and a looming casualty.

Hovering over all of this is the unseen Client, an omnipresent authority whose demands arrive through the ringing phone, harkening back to the faceless and unquestionably vertically oriented power structure of 2009 meta-horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods. As in that film, destruction is administered through systems that manage knowledge, delay revelation, and maintain a carefully calibrated distance between those who will die and those who shape the terms of their death. The phone here, much like in Cabin in the Woods, becomes the play’s most charged object, a conduit for power, a site of dread, and a reminder that the apocalypse, like everything else, is subject to process.
L to R: Fletcher Michael, Lucy Boisvert, Collin Dennis. Photo by Noah Simon Jampol.
As the phone organizes the play vertically, a bouncing tennis ball inscribes the production’s collapsing horizontal axes. At first, the performers inhabit a spacious, almost playful geometry, a choreography of sustained distances, rotation, and exchange bounded by the ball bouncing between ideas and ideaters. As impact nears, that space closes; the pattern compresses; the cool choreography gives way to indomitable external pressure. What begins as a system resolves into a crucible.

Within that tightening frame, the play locates its human center. Boisvert’s Nico carries a buoyant moral clarity without tipping into admonishment, her frustration emerging as lived response rather than lecture. Dennis’s Lorimer offers something more unsettling, cultivated smarm giving way to visible fracture, his arc perhaps the steepest descent of the three. And Michael’s Del (perhaps a shoutout to UCB?) anchors the production with a performance of striking scale and generosity, capable of filling the space while still allowing the ensemble to cohere. Their comic timing, physical command, and willingness to let self-loathing flicker beneath the surface give the production its most sustained energy. Recalling some of Trevor Moore’s finest work, Michael walks the line between bravado and generosity with rare aplomb, their restraint encouraging ensemble over runaway performance.

The relationships between the three resist easy genre inheritance. Though the play borrows from horror frameworks – the trapped group, the looming threat, the ticking clock – it quietly discards the punitive sexual telos that traditionally informs many such narratives. There is no moral calculus of who deserves to survive; instead, intimacy, friendship, and the possibility of care persist, even as the surrounding machinery insists on something colder. The result is a work that is deeply cynical about systems yet unexpectedly generous toward the people caught inside them.
L to R: Lucy Boisvert, Collin Dennis, Fletcher Michael. Photo by Noah Simon Jampol.
The show’s production leans fully into its comic lineage, with rhythms drawn from sketch and improv traditions: bits, roleplay, escalation, and language that pivots into song without warning. A sequence like “Handsome Stranger” lands not as diversion but as method, theatre games colliding with the practical nightmare of state-sponsored messaging. Jokes arrive quickly, delivered with a precision that suggests both training and risk, underlining how the production’s humor does not relieve pressure so much as metabolize it. These are not merely ad workers cracking jokes in the face of extinction; they are artists whose sharpest tool (language) has been conscripted into the softening of catastrophe. Pop art, branding jargon, pitch logic, and even the promise of the “big idea” fall woefully short – and can even be made to feel obscene – when scaled to planetary violence. The gatekeepers of the end of the world are charismatic, clever, and utterly unequipped.

These tensions sharpen in the final movements, where questions of responsibility can no longer be deferred. To leak or not to leak. To act as an artist or as an employee. To accept the terms of the contract or refuse them too late. The play does not resolve these questions so much as expose the cost of asking them within the wrong structure.

By the end, the tennis ball, once contained within the system of the play, is sent outward, into the audience, uncatchable. It is a small gesture, but it lands with force. The rhythm that once belonged to the characters now belongs to us. The message has been delayed, shaped, and delivered. The impact is imminent. And whatever we might do with what we now know, it is already, in some sense, too late. Perhaps it’s time to give someone else a chance.

-Noah Simon Jampol

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