The events that inform Craig Wright's play are not as recent as they were on Sept. 11, 2001, a date forever inscribed in infamy, but they are quite as tragic. That evening, Waverly (a perky, cutely flaky Christina Aimerito), still in her bathrobe and wet hair, is expecting a blind date, a self-described wishy-washy bookshop manager (safely and sanely essayed by Zach Fehst). Upstairs neighbor Ron (literally and figuratively a devil-may-care Tasmanian charmer, Jonathon Buckley) invites himself along because there's a naked girl sleeping in his apartment, and the pull of the TV images are so devastating that just watching the Twin Towers crime scene requires one to be with people who are awake, preferably with drinks in hand. The late-appearing, sleeping naked girl, Nancy (a coolly contemporary Emily Goldman), iPod headphones cemented into her ears, isn't into verbalizing, until novelist Joyce Carol Oates, Waverly's great aunt, presenting as a sock puppet on Nancy's hand, puts in a goodly few dollars worth of wit and wisdom about chance or choice, the Jeopardy question of the moment.
Adding to the horror of the attack on America is Waverly's news that her twin sister may have been at work in the Twin Towers when the terrorists' planes toppled them. No news is terrifying news in this hellish situation, and a dead phone line and a hysterical mother on speed dial add despair to anxiety.
Director Demetria Fehst has her terrific cast well cued in to the immediacy of the now-7-year-old situation, reconstructing those shocking hours out of real time as if they were yesterday. The actors are a decade younger than the characters Wright originated (Fehst suggests they are Generation Why) and a bit of theatre magic and a few fine-tuned performances make that work quite effectively. The silly card and beer-bottle-popping games they play to pass the time and the genuine ingenuousness of the scarcely adult players caught up in world-shattering events make scary sense, considering we are still in the shadow of 9/11.
The practical set design is attributed to A. Groupeffort. The backstage stage manager, who tries to make us believe a toss of a coin determines the direction of the play's action but then takes it all back, is an effective Bryce Morrow.
Presented by Theatre Yawp at Stages Theatre Center,
1540 N. McCadden Pl., Hollywood.
Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m. Jun. 26-Jul. 26.
www.theatreyawp.com.