Hibiscus Hotel employees Kaleo (Kelvin Moon Loh, left in front) and Leilani (Cáitlín Burke, right) entertain guests in York Theatre’s This Is Not a Drill.
This Is Not a Drill is York Theatre’s second production in a year built on a people-stuck-in-a-hotel template. Last December’s Welcome to the Big Dipper involved a blizzard; in Drill, guests of Honolulu’s Hibiscus Resort have their trips disrupted by an emergency alert about an inbound missile.
Hawaii’s residents and visitors really did receive a mistakenly issued emergency alert, in January 2018—right around the time Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were publicly taunting each other about their nuclear buttons. Holly Doubet, who cowrote the book (with Joseph McDonough) and score (with Kathy Babylon and John Vester) for This Is Not a Drill, happened to be in Hawaii that day. “The minutes I spent pondering my death forever altered my life,” Doubet writes in a script preface.
A missile false alarm rejuvenates the marriage of Derek (Gary Edwards) and Sophie (Aurelia Williams). Photos by Carol Rosegg.
That experience is depicted in the play, but the emotions behind it are conveyed in a superficial manner. The fictional characters’ post-alert changes of heart, just like their development and conduct before the bomb threat, range from simplistic to hackneyed to implausible.
This Is Not a Drill opens with a short flash-forward where the cast sings a few lines about “Will we be spared? One terrible flash and we’re gone.” Then the emergency alert is not part of the plot for a half-hour, so the play isn’t about what it’s about until nearly halfway through. In the meantime, scene after scene—and song after song—set up the various plotlines. Gay couple Tony (Matthew Curiano) and Chris (Chris Doubet) were recently denied the opportunity to adopt a child they’d been fostering; Sophie (Aurelia Williams) and Derek (Gary Edwards) are middle-aged New Jerseyans taking a second honeymoon while he’s being treated for a heart condition; and Jessica (Felicia Finley), a mom of two, is traveling solo on what was planned as a romantic getaway with her cheating husband.
Tony (Matthew Curiano, left) tries to get his boyfriend, Chris (Chris Doubet), in a tropical vacation mood.
Representing the local folk are Kaleo (Kelvin Moon Loh) and Leilani (Cáitlín Burke), a husband and wife who work at the hotel, along with their son Ikaika (Sam Poon), under the supervision of the inexplicably Southern-accented Madeline (Marianne Tatum), whose reference point for authentic Hawaiian culture is Beach Blanket Bingo and Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii.
These scenarios are full of incongruous behavior and overblown melodramatics. Derek wears a heart monitor and has trouble breathing and walking, yet his devoted wife thought it was a good idea to travel 5,000 miles from home. Jessica clings to her marriage as if she’s living in an age when women had no options, and she unloads all the details of her husband’s infidelity to a waiter offering her a welcome drink. Leilani and Kaleo force their 17-year-old son to work at the resort and defend Madeline’s efforts to create a “tourist-ish” (i.e., white) experience for guests.
Throughout This Is Not a Drill, characters react and interact in ways that bear little resemblance to reality and instead just serve to get a laugh, further an argument, or delay decision-making. Ikaika’s disagreement with his parents, for example, hardly warrants this harsh exchange:
Kaleo: If you don’t like it here, find somewhere else to live.
Ikaika: Fine. I hate you both!
“The trade winds blow the clouds away, leavin’ rainbows in the sun,” sings Jessica (Felicia Finley) upon arrival in Hawaii, and it turns out to be a metaphor for her trip.
There is one character in This Is Not a Drill outside the resort: Anonymous Button Guy (Lukas Poost), the state emergency-management worker who sends out the alert. He’s portrayed as an obnoxious buffoon—which, according to reports, the real guy may have been, though the false alarm originated with a different employee. The play doesn’t seem too concerned with the cause of the snafu, as it’s only briefly referenced in one of the two cacophonous songs that occupy most of Button Guy’s stage time.
With the same rectangular blocks moved around, it’s not always clear where scenes at the resort are taking place, since none of the configurations look like hotel-room furniture or the beach. Another flaw in the design is that the projections—of the alert, Trump’s tweets, and images of Hawaii—are not legible on a billowy curtain (they need a flat surface).
The production does have its assets in a game cast. Finley and Williams are given ample opportunity to use their belts, and Curiano is fun in his stereotypical role. However, except for Tony and Chris’s frolicsome duo “Cincinnati Boys,” most songs are indistinguishable power ballads expressing disappointment and regret (pre-alert) or determination and optimism (post-alert).
With songs titled both “This You Should Know” and “How Could I Have Known,” the score typifies the script’s lack of sophistication. And its level of insight is encapsulated by Tony’s treacly comment, “I wonder if it’s possible to live each moment as if it were a jewel?”
This Is Not a Drill runs through Oct. 11 at the Theater at St. Jean (150 E 76th St. at Lexington Ave.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit yorktheatre.org.
Music & Lyrics: Holly Doubet, Kathy Babylon, and John Vester
Book: Holly Doubet and Joseph McDonough
Director and Choreographer: Gabriel Barre
Sets: Edward Pierce
Costumes: Johanna Pan
Lighting: Alan C. Edwards
Sound: Shannon Slaton
Projections: Brad Peterson and Peter Brucker
