REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Steve Yockey writes plays the way some directors make movies: he likes to set up a world that’s already tilting, then see how long you’ll stay on your feet.
REYKJAVIK presented by Stray Cat Theatre and now playing at Tempe Center for the Arts until December 20, is Yockey’s snow globe of supernatural unease, shaken until the glitter feels dangerous. He brings out tricks of haunted hotels, shapeshifters, spectral relatives, sudden blood, a raven that becomes a man, then invites you to enjoy the twists and turns even when you’re not quite sure which direction it’s going.
The opening is a knockout.
As things continue, the narrative skips like a scratched record. A moment of intimacy mutates into menace, a casual drink spirals into blood, a spectral visitation dissolves into black comedy. What binds these fragments together isn’t logic but mood: the uncanny sense that beneath the Northern Lights, everything ordinary is trembling with supernatural possibility.
Stray Cat’s production team of Dori Brown’s scenic design, Joanna Emmott’s lights, Stacey Walston’s technical direction, and Pete Biss’s sound together give the play a charge that makes you want to sit forward in your seat. As directed by Ron May, it’s theater as amusement park ride: part scary, part funny, part “what the hell is going on here?”
There’s also a strong sexual current running through the piece; part danger, part romance, all of it startlingly believable because of the naturally delivered performances and, more importantly, essential to the play’s internal logic. The actors navigate this charged terrain with a kind of effortless precision, approaching each encounter with both care and a searing openness. It’s as if the strangeness has its own voltage. It’s the sort of theatrical world that can feel by turns exhilarating and exasperating: you keep wondering whether these figures are meant to snap together in some grand design as it occasionally suggests, or whether we’re simply meant to surrender to the fragments of a cracked kaleidoscope, something that’s glittering, absurd, yet oddly compelling.
And just when the strangeness threatens to topple into parody, there comes a moment of piercing sadness, often revolving around loss and reunion. The supernatural here is not decoration but a way of heightening the rawness of human experience...
But that’s the real trick of REYKJAVIK. Like the Northern Lights themselves, the play veers between obscurity and wonder. Clouds drift in, colors dissolve, and just when you’re ready to give up, the sky clears and you’re staring at something weird and wonderful, even uncanny. And that’s precisely Yockey’s game: he wants you to wrestle with it, to get lost, to lean into the fog. Sometimes the fog is frustrating, but then it clears, and you’re hit with a moment of theatrical clarity so sharp it takes your breath away.
This Stray Cat Theatre production helmed by May is like chasing the Northern Lights: half the time you’re staring at clouds, wondering why you bothered, and then, there it is; something shimmering, weird, and wonderful, and you’re suddenly glad you came.