THE END OF THE WORLD
COMES WITH A COFFEEE BREAK
There’s something eerily familiar about the way Michael Redfield and Hugo Armstrong zip and unzip their parkas in Will Arbery’s haunting new play Evanston Salt Costs Climbing by Rogue Machine Theatre. Like characters in a Samuel Beckett fever dream reimagined for our climate-addled era, these salt truck drivers perform their thermal choreography with the precision of veteran vaudevillians—too hot, too cold, never quite right. Welcome to winter in Illinois, where the apocalypse arrives not with a bang but with rising maintenance costs and inexplicable temperature swings.
Hugo Armstrong, Michael Redfield
Mr. Arbery, whose scorching Heroes of the Fourth Turning is like Chekhov’s Moscow transplanted to a Catholic conservative gathering in Wyoming, has become our poet laureate of American unease. Here, he turns his penetrating gaze to the mundane apocalypse of climate change, though you won’t find that particular phrase anywhere in his script. Instead, you’ll find exactly 62 utterances of a certain four-letter word, each one landing like a grain of salt on increasingly unstable ground.
The plot, such as it is, unfolds over three winters that feel more like dress rehearsals for the end times. Mr. Armstrong’s Basil, sporting a biblical beard that would make Methuselah envious, and Mr. Redfield’s Peter navigate their municipal duties with the existential weight of Beckett’s tramps—that is, if Vladimir and Estragon had access to heavy machinery. Their workplace banter, peppered with profanity and nervous laughter, serves as a kind of contemporary Greek chorus, marking moments where language fails in the face of overwhelming reality.
Hugo Armstrong, Michael Redfield, Lesley Fera, Kaia Gerber
In the role of Maiworm, the assistant director of public works, Lesley Fera performs the kind of high-wire act that makes you hold your breath without knowing why. Her forced cheerfulness, maintained even as she carries the secret knowledge of her department’s impending obsolescence, becomes almost unbearable to watch. Ms. Fera makes you feel the cosmic weight of every budget meeting and policy memo.
But it’s Kaia Gerber—yes, that tabloid fixture Kaia Gerber, shedding her nepo baby chrysalis like last season’s couture—who delivers the production’s most startling revelation. As Jane Jr., Maiworm’s daughter, she transforms what could have been a one-note role (hysteria as climate anxiety) into something far more unsettling. Her uncontrollable laughter feels less like mental illness and more like prophecy, as if she’s receiving transmissions from a future we’re all trying desperately to ignore.
Kaia Gerber, Hugo Armstrong
Under Guillermo Cienfuegos‘ precise direction, these four lost souls perform an intricate dance of denial and revelation on Mark Mendelson‘s deceptively naturalistic set. The wide Matrix Theatre stage becomes a purgatorial landscape where the mundane (a break room, a bedroom, a salt truck) collides with the cosmic, aided by Dan Weingarten‘s lighting that somehow makes you feel both freezing and feverish, often within the same scene.
Michelle Hanzelova-Bierbauer‘s projections of falling snow and Chris Moscatiello‘s sound design of rumbling trucks create an atmosphere where the ordinary and the ominous become indistinguishable. In this production, even the weather feels like a character, albeit one having an increasingly public nervous breakdown.
Lesley Fera, Hugo Armstrong
What makes Evanston Salt Costs Climbing so devastating is its refusal to announce itself as what it is: a play about the end of the world as we know it, told through the story of people who can’t afford to acknowledge that fact. When Maiworm’s copy of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities ends up buried in the snow, it’s both a perfect metaphor and a practical reality—theory versus lived experience in an age of melting certainties.
What’s particularly fascinating about this Los Angeles production, arriving after its New York premiere, is how the play’s Midwestern anxieties translate to a city where winter exists mainly as an abstract concept. The existential dread of changing seasons becomes somehow more pointed here, where audiences understand climate crisis not through snow but through horrendous fires. Mr. Cienfuegos has wisely leaned into this disconnect, allowing the play’s heartland specificity to create an almost exotic landscape for West Coast viewers.
Lesley Fera, Kaia Gerber
There’s a particular moment, about halfway through the evening, when Peter begins reciting one of his “salt fictions”—whimsical stories he writes about their daily work. In any other context, this might register as mere character quirk. But Mr. Redfield, borrowing perhaps from the grand tradition of Eugene O’Neill’s pipe dreams and Arthur Miller’s salesman’s illusions, transforms these tales into something approaching secular prayer. His delivery, balanced between self-consciousness and desperate belief, captures the essence of how humans create narrative in the face of chaos.
The production also benefits enormously from its intimate staging at the Matrix. Unlike the New York production’s more metaphorical approach, this version plants us firmly in the gritty reality of municipal work life. Mr. Mendelson’s set, with its fluorescent-lit break room and truck cab, reminds us that the apocalypse, when it comes, will still require paperwork and time cards. This attention to naturalistic detail makes the play’s surreal elements—those sudden temperature swings, that mysterious woman on the route—land with even greater force.
Michael Redfield, Hugo Armstrong
When considered alongside other recent climate-themed works (think Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children or Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs), Arbery’s achievement becomes even more remarkable. While those plays tackle environmental anxiety head-on, Evanston Salt approaches it obliquely, finding its truth in the spaces between words, in the nervous laughter that punctuates every scene like static on a failing radio signal.
Don’t call it climate change theater—that would be like calling Death of a Salesman a play about the traveling sales industry; instead, let’s call it what it is: A darkly comic masterpiece about what it means to keep showing up for work when the world itself seems to be calling in sick. In an era where the weather has become as unreliable as memory, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing might just be the forecast we need.
Michael Redfield, Kaia Gerber
photos by Jeff Lorch
Evanston Salt Costs Climbing
Rogue Machine Theatre
Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue
Fri, Sat, and Mon at 8 (dark Feb. 10); Sun at 3
1 hour 35 minutes, no intermission
ends on March 9, 2025
for tickets ($20-$60), call 855.585.5185 visit Rogue Machine
