It’s a play about a reunion, but The Children is set against the backdrop of a nuclear catastrophe which opens a Pandora’s box of questions about what the older generation might owe to the younger generation.
Nancy Travis and Michael Butler star as a married couple being visited in their cottage in England by a long-lost friend, played by Linda Purl.
Butler admits the story is hard to describe.
"We found it sort of enticingly difficult....it's so well written, but complicated," said Butler.
All three of the characters had worked at a British nuclear power plant which was the scene of an eco-disaster.
The Children was described by the New York Times as an eco-thriller. Part of the inspiration for the play by Lucy Kirkwood was the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, when a tsunami damaged a nuclear power plant. The idea is to get the audience thinking about the impacts of our place in the world, and how it might affect those after us.
"The legacy we left our kids...what is our responsibility as people on this planet?" said Travis. "Is it more important to be around for your kids, or does it serve them better if you just kick off and go away?"
Travis says while The Children deals with some major moral issues, it does it with a sense of humor.
"It's not a documentary...there's a lot of humor," said Travis. "You see these three people interact in very comedic ways."
Jenny Sullivan is director of the Ensemble Theater Company production of the play, which has a Friday night preview and opens Saturday night.
"It deals with so many things, like the absurdity of how we were all living during the pandemic," said Sullivan. "These kinds of things come up in the is play...the isolation, we can't do this, or we can't do that."
The Children had hit runs in London, and on Broadway. It runs through April 23, at Ensemble Theater Company’s New Vic Theater.
