Trish (Jenny Bacon, center) frets while Nathan (Marquis Rodriguez) and Liz (Danielle Ferland) eat pie in New Light Theater Project’s The Lights Are On.
In addition to crafting an engrossing thriller, Owen Panettieri shows a gift for prognostication with The Lights Are On. He wrote the play before the pandemic—it had been set for a fall opening in 2020 when COVID shut down all theater—yet it has a character who hoards toilet paper and face masks, wipes down the groceries and stays home all the time.
The pandemic is not the only zeitgeisty topic whose presence is felt in The Lights Are On. Panettieri appears to have taken the most pressing global problems, fears and conspiracies of our time and made them manifest in a drama that mixes the suspense of a horror story with a potent character study and sociopolitical commentary.
Nathan (Rodriguez) and his mother, Liz (Ferland), have faced some tough times since his father was killed seven years ago—one of the incidents shrouded in mystery in The Lights Are On.
According to the program, the play is set “a little further on from now” in a generic suburb. That’s where we find middle-aged Liz (Danielle Ferland) in her kitchen, humming away as she goes through a box of canned goods—checking their dates, removing some, returning some to the box. Then: a knock on the door. Liz doesn’t want to answer. She picks up a gun that’s just lying on a pile next to the kitchen table but settles on a butcher knife to hold as she approaches the door.
It’s her neighbor Trish (Jenny Bacon), who beseeches Liz to come outside and accompany her home. She’s afraid to go alone because when she drove up to her house, she thought she saw somebody lurking behind the curtain of her bedroom window—where the lights are on, though she never leaves them on.
Liz refuses to go—she’s barefoot and already in for the night—but she invites Trish in for a drink. “Iced tea,” she offers, then takes a wine bottle out of the fridge and pours some for Trish, who drinks it without pushback. Peculiar behavior like is one of the ways Panettieri unsettles the audience. Another example soon follows, after Liz’s twentysomething son, Nathan (Marquis Rodriguez), has arrived home from work: right in front of Trish, while they’re engaged in conversation, Nathan nonchalantly strips down to a jockstrap and changes into clean clothes from the laundry basket on the kitchen chair. Then he leaves his work clothes on the floor where he dropped them, and his mom doesn’t ask him to pick them up until later.
Bacon (left) and Ferland play neighbors who used to be close friends. Photographs by Hunter Canning
Panettieri builds intrigue with other bizarre bits, such as a cabinet door that opens on the opposite side from where the handle is; a crackling sound that seems to be coming from the walls; and Nathan reentering in different clothing every time he leaves the room. Plus, there’s a creeping sense of dread about the world beyond the characters’ homes—that they’re living in an authoritarian state (“No one gave you any trouble?” Liz asks Nathan about his trip home from work) or an inhospitable natural environment (“Fresh stuff would be better,” Nathan says about food, “but where you gonna get it?”).
These kinds of dystopian threats exist in real life, so the playwright may just be making a horror show out of contemporary society. He does, after all, have his characters dealing with some problems—income inequality, a disastrous hurricane, talk radio that spreads conspiracy theories—that we have already experienced.
Whether you see it as a riff on these existential issues, a satire of sorts on today’s polarized society or a modern ghost story—or just enjoy it for the spooks—The Lights Are On provides 95 minutes of provocative, amusing, disconcerting entertainment. It takes layered, original storytelling to continually rachet up the suspense as the play does.
Nathan (Rodriguez) was once the best friend of Trish’s (Bacon) son.
It’s effective, too, thanks to the creative team, from Sarah Norris’s well-paced direction to the crucial sound effects by Janet Bentley and Andy Evan Cohen to the surprises that await Trish when she finally dares to look outside Liz’s house. Brian Dudkiewicz’s prop-laden kitchen set has a lived-in look, and lighting designer Kelley Shih gets those lights flickering and throwing shadows.
The actors—newcomer Rodriguez and his very established costars, Ferland and Bacon—contribute tremendously by playing it straight, not campy or melodramatically, and imbuing their characters with real personalities.
So is Trish crazy, or are Liz and Nathan just making her think she is? Whose version of events is correct all those times when Trish’s recollection conflicts with theirs? Is one of the past incidents that Trish and Liz discuss what we’re actually witnessing now? The Lights Are On falls into a common trap for thrillers by establishing more mysteries than it resolves. On the other hand, you may like that it doesn’t answer every question—a thriller to the end.
The Lights Are On runs through Nov. 11 at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd St.). Performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday; newlighttheaterproject.com.
Playwright: Owen Panettieri
Director: Sarah Norris
Sets: Brian Dudkiewicz
Costumes: Kara Branch
Lighting: Kelley Shih
Sound: Janet Bentley and Andy Evan Cohen
