The Dinosaurs

April Mathis, Kathleen Chalfant, and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes

The Dinosaurs 

By Jacob Perkins 

Directed by Les Waters 

Playwrights Horizons 

New York, NY 

February 19, 2025 

Reviewed by Dominic Finocchiaro 

If the ever-present countdown clock in Oedipus was the defining image on Broadway this past season, a much more inefficacious timekeeper demanded attention Off-Broadway: the cheap, broken wall-clock that hung on the wall in Les Waters’s premiere production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons. The piece of scenery, easy to disregard in its anonymity, managed, in its inutility, to hold within itself the very dramaturgical structure undergirding the production. The world presented to audiences on the Judith O. Rubin Theater stage was one in which time was not linear but broken open and palimpsestic, containing both past and future in the eternal here and now that is the life of the addict in recovery. 

Perkins’s play is an addiction recovery play, a genre highly present onstage recently in the form of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir, Joe White’s Blackout Songs, and Sean Daniels’s The White Chip, among others. However, it is perhaps more useful to place Perkins’s play in conversation with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life and its abiding interest in formally exploring the liminal spaces of recovery (from illness in Baker’s play) and the ways that such spaces fracture and distort one’s experience of time. The Dinosaurs follows the Saturday Survivors, a weekly AA support group for women, as they prepare for and undertake one of their meetings. The women (portrayed by Kathleen Chalfant, Elizabeth Marvel, April Mathis, Mallory Portnoy, and Maria Elena Ramirez) are of various ages and ethnicities, similar only in their addiction. A newcomer to the meeting, Reyna, or Buddy (Keilly McQuail), arrives briefly at the top of the play before quickly skittering off (although she will reappear later). Everything is set-up for a hyper-naturalist, minimalist, real-time drama to unfold. dots’s design further established this expectation in the audience: their set was perfectly banal, painstaking in its recreation of the anonymous, threadbare, and utilitarian nature of the rooms in which AA meetings are often held. The folding chairs were mismatched, and stray items were neatly lined up against the back wall—a period painting (whose subject cheekily evokes The Dinosaurs’s origin as a Clubbed Thumb prompt about The Decameron), exercise mats, cardboard boxes—as if to showcase the various and random usages that the room was in service to. And let’s not forget that broken clock.  

Perkins’s characterizations, like the set, are relatively sparse on the page, underscoring the importance of anonymity to the addict in recovery; although every addict’s story is different in its details, at their core they are all the same, and to engage meaningfully in the work of recovery is to throw off the uniqueness of the individual self and accept being one of many. The women all have names that start with the letter J, further signaling this lack of individuality. Waters and the ensemble offset this sense of anonymity somewhat through the specificity of their work, but the sparseness of Perkins’s text resists too much actorly embellishment. Indeed, the performances that seemed to push hardest against this simplicity of characterization are the ones that risked dissonance vis-a-vis the larger vision of the production. Perhaps the most unadorned—and strongest—performance was Mathis’s as the gentle, conciliatory Jane; in giving over to the text completely, Mathis exuded a quiet but resounding presence that reverberated in its utter simplicity and helped ground the production.  

The Dinosaurs was the first production in Playwrights Horizons’s new Unplugged program, which aims to promote new plays in simple realizations with low-production values, focusing on the creativity of the work itself rather than the spectacle afforded by large design budgets. A one-location play set at an AA meeting is a smart choice for such a program, but the fact that Waters was directing gave audiences a hint that the realm of pure naturalism was not this play’s likely home. Waters’s oeuvre is perhaps most striking in his productions’ ability to manifest psychogeography, to create haunted, liminal atmospheres so rich in emotion and memory that they become another character in themselves—his recent, deeply moving (and deeply underappreciated) staging of Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp at the Atlantic was a prime example of these tendencies. For Waters, a room is never just a room—certainly not a room with as much embedded memory as one that has housed a support group for over fifty years.  

What audiences came to realize, little by little, in Waters’s production was that what they were witnessing was not a single meeting, but in fact fragments of many meetings over many years. The first significant evidence of this (besides the broken clock) was the reappearance of Reyna during the group’s three-minute silent meditation and the asynchronous conversation she had with Jane that went unacknowledged by the other women. Another example was Joan’s (Marvel) days of sobriety ricocheting from forty-five days to twenty-seven to ten to five to one to thirteen years, all in the span of a single minute. Later, Jolly (Chalfant) vanished from the stage without fuss and was spoken of in fond remembrances by Joan, mourning her passing. This was a world in which time is a tenuous, fragile thing that is as uncertain as each character’s hard-fought sobriety. 

Time in this room, then, was a purgatorial time that flattened. If, as Thornton Wilder writes in his essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” theatrical time is always now, then so is it the case in recovery, with its emphasis on living in the moment and on being in “the present tense,” as Perkins’s characters often reiterate. Recovery is anti-teleological, the inherently cyclical time of eternal return—every day is a new day, but every day is also the same struggle, and the women in the play must, as they cheerily invoke, “keep on coming back” to this same room. What Perkins and Waters attempted to do, therefore, was to give to such an experience a theatrical form attuned to its psychological truth; while a more linear structure that moved towards a climactic resolution would be false for the addict in recovery, the production’s dreamlike distortions of time recreated the addict in recovery’s ongoing relationship with their own addictions. It is a relationship whose routines are so repetitive that they blur together into an endlessly occurring, singular present.  

Although the play refuses dramatic resolution, Perkins does offer audiences something to grasp onto at work’s end. Reyna returns after having been integrated into the group. Chalfant then arrives back on stage, only this time, she is a new character. The eldest member of the group now embodies the newbie, and Reyna has moved from newbie to welcoming veteran. The names and roles have changed, but the cycle continues in the empty room. The two women then left to meet the others at a nearby diner, and the audience was left with the room itself, in a silence that screamed. The room will be there after these specific women have gone, and it will continue to hold their love, their care and generosity for each other. Waters succeeded at creating another of his haunted spaces, the ghosts that inhabited it not fearsome but friendly, guides rather than demons.