If you grew up with it, there’s something inherently nostalgic about the sound of cicadas. The incessant chorus, once every 17 years, conjures something primordial, unsettling, country, past. Appropriate, the excellent production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play at the Helen Hayes Theater, plunges its audience into that portal at the show’s onset – all darkness and trilling racket. The sound design, lush and unnerving, is controlled by Bray Poor and Will Pickens.
We emerge into one of the most cluttered, almost cozy, stage set-ups I’ve seen – a cluster of lamp stands, a pile of old TVs, a defunct crockpot, buckets of board games, mountains of books on the stairs, the old mansion living room of a hoarder. Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk and Kimie Nishikawa, known as the multidisciplinary collective dots, did the fascinatingly detailed scenic design. And into the vortex of dysfunction that is the Lafayette family reunion on the eve of an estate sale at their late patriarch’s decaying plantation home in Arkansas, summer 2011, when Jacobs-Jenkins first began writing the play.
