AFTER THE BLAST is set in the wake of total environmental disaster, when the human population has retreated underground. Experience is simulated. Fertility is regulated. And Anna and Oliver have one last chance to have a baby.

In this time of anxiety regarding the present and uneasiness about the future, it might feel as if the arts are, at best, escapist fodder and, at worst, self-indulgent vanities. Certainly, Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression on Saturday Night Live, though impeccable, offers a meager consolation in the reality of its inspiration: a man who seems capable of starting a war with the same ease he has when publishing streams of trigger happy tweets.  To be sure, it is difficult to laugh at a joke when the world feels beyond humor, beyond the former limits of absurdity. It might feel crass and cowardly to escape this new reality, if only for the duration of a joke, a book, or a play, instead of dealing with it head on, in truth and sober honesty.  Now running at the Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater, After the Blast, directed by Lila Neugebauer, deals with this tension between reality and chosen illusions in its own provoking way, with equitable humor, empathy, and pathos. Zoe Kazan, perhaps most widely known for starring with Kumail Nanjiani in the hit film, The Big Sick, wrote After the Blast, and exhibits a formidable talent for writing as deftly as she performs on stage and screen. The …Read more