END-OF-WORLD TRAGICOMEDY
CRACKS, BLEEDS AND THRIVES
The end arrives not with a sob, but with a drag queen in a glittering black pantsuit, standing in a celestial spotlight, grinning like they’re about to host the universe’s weirdest game show. Keiko Green’s You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! doesn’t so much begin as launch, sending up a metaphysical flare before crash-landing in a sterile doctor’s office. This isn’t a slow descent into darkness—it’s a chaotic, shimmering freefall. The apocalypse is coming, and M, our sparkly emcee and emotional tether, is here to narrate, provoke, and make sure we don’t look away at South Coast Rep.
Sharon Omi (Golden Toad), Anna LaMadrid, Joel de la Fuente and Rafael Goldstein (Rat)
The plot—or more accurately, the controlled spiral—centers on M, played with wiry charm and volatile precision by River Gallo. M is many things: drag performer, reluctant oracle, emotional ballast for a family that begins the play already halfway to the void. Greg, the father (Joel de la Fuente, peeling back layers with stoic magnetism), has been handed a terminal diagnosis. Viv, the mother (Alysia Reiner, all brittle armor and exhausted affection), responds by constructing defenses out of wine and weary jokes. The family kitchen becomes a pressure cooker where grief, climate anxiety, and thwarted affection boil, bubble, and burn.
River Gallo
Joel de la Fuente and Alysia Reiner
But You Are Cordially Invited quickly transcends kitchen-sink drama as reality itself bends and blurs. Greg’s terminal diagnosis opens doors to spectral visitations from Greta Thunberg—played with puckish irony by Anna LaMadrid, who doubles as Viv’s combustible sister. These haunting intrusions transform environmental catastrophe into something between myth and warning, with Barbara Samuels’ lighting and Noel Nichols’ sound design eroding the boundaries between mundane and cosmic realms.
Alysia Reiner, River Gallo and Joel de la Fuente
Joel de la Fuente and Anna LaMadrid
What keeps it from collapsing under the weight of its themes is how flat-out funny it is. Not sitcom-funny—more like gallows humor, where the laughs come at full tilt and half a beat late: Greg gets scolded by a nature documentary narrator; Viv blurts out that her dying husband whispers Greta Thunberg’s name in his sleep; and the dinner table devolves into chaos when M’s boyfriend monologues about carbon emissions and Willful American Ignorance—and somehow it still lands. The absurdity isn’t decoration; it’s the coping mechanism. The joke is that there’s no joke, and that’s what makes it land.
Alysia Reiner, River Gallo and Joel de la Fuente
River Gallo, Alysia Reiner and Joel de la Fuente
Director Zi Alikhan doesn’t rush the chaos—he lets it breathe, then twist the knife, calibrating performances so that heartbreak spills into absurdity without losing its sting. A dinner scene midway through tightens the noose: M introduces their boyfriend, Will (Rafael Goldstein, an exposed nerve in human form), who launches into a caffeinated monologue about climate collapse and corporate rot. In another staging, it might have curdled into satire. Here, Goldstein’s sincerity scalds; the speech lands not as polemic, but as helpless incantation.
Rafael Goldstein and Joel de la Fuente
The production’s design elements—from Adam Rigg’s shapeshifting set to Nicholas Hussong’s striking projections to Lux Haac’s revealing drag costumes—echo the characters’ slow unspooling in every shift of light and fabric, all against a clubby, ambient soundscape that feels like memory disintegrating at the edges.
Anna LaMadrid and Joel de la Fuente
What emerges from this wreckage is not despair but something stranger, more defiant. Failure saturates the play, but hope still lingers—stubborn, irritating, impossible to kill. Green seems less interested in diagnosing civilization’s fatal symptoms than in tracing the way ordinary people fumble toward grace under terminal conditions. It’s not a lecture, not a sermon. Even Will’s rant, trembling at the edge of didacticism, pulls back just in time to leave space for human breath.
Joel de la Fuente and Rafael Goldstein
The play shares spiritual kinship with Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, another exploration of climate anxiety that finds stubborn flickers of humor amid gathering darkness. Where Arbery sketches apocalypse through bureaucratic absurdity, Green cracks it open at the dinner table, both playwrights letting panic stay strange, jagged, and unfixable.
Joel de la Fuente and Alysia Reiner
If You Are Cordially Invited loses its footing, it happens in the murky middle, where Greg’s ecological reveries start to blur into repetition. Still, the play resists neat resolutions and tidy conclusions, embracing a disorder that somehow feels honest enough to lean into. Beneath the noise and disintegration, it balances ruin and resilience with a kind of ragged determination, allowing humor and heartache to occupy the same room. The whole thing may be messy, but inside that mess, there is truth.
Joel de la Fuente and Rafael Goldstein
That this play blooms in the suburban sprawl of Orange County, a region more associated with safe conservatism than radical theater, feels quietly insurgent. A non-binary led, climate-anxious, drag-saturated meditation on the end of the world, staged amid the manicured lawns and conservative politics of the county, doesn’t yell, but it definitely doesn’t ask permission.
Sharon Omi, Alysia Reiner, Anna LaMadrid, Joel de la Fuente, River Gallo, Rafael Goldstein
Don’t worry, attendance isn’t mandatory if you get invited to the end of the world. But if the world really is ending, this might be the best last party you’ll ever crash.
River Gallo and Rafael Goldstein (background)
photos by Scott Smeltzer
You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!
South Coast Repertory’s Segerstrom Stage
part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival
100 minutes with no intermission
ends on May 3, 2025
for tickets ($35-$114), visit SCR
Alysia Reiner and Sharon Omi
