Inside Box of Moonlight, I hear a saxophone playing with no mind to time. I can’t tell if it’s live or recorded. It drifts in and out with the sparkle of wind chimes. How does a wind chime chime inside?

I learned about Stairwell Theater’s revival of Caryl Chuchill’s Far Away from a sticker on a utility pole near my apartment. A man who turns out to be the play’s director (Sam Gibbs) is thrilled when I prove traditional marketing still works. His production is both in and of our present world.

It begins with Adult Joan (Stairwell’s co-artistic director Rebecca Tyree Gibbs) shadowplaying over a classroom projector lighting the stage’s red curtain. She depicts a house beneath clouds, moon, and winking star. A flock of birds and shooting star on little sticks bring the sky to life. This was all supposed to be so innocent.

Then, a child, Young Joan (Avalina Ortiz), tells her aunt Harper (Maude Mitchell, celebrated for her late 2000s performance in Ibsen’s Doll House) that she witnessed her uncle dealing in children. He’s either trafficking them, or saving them. It’s unclear, but unsurprising either way. The logistics of pedophilia are table stakes in today’s conversations. I see Young Joan’s foot covered in dried blood and I think it’s normal. The air in the room tastes the same despite the smoke machine.

At first, the world depicted seems to be on the edge of darkness. Young Joan glimpses the obscene, in the way of early episodes of True Detective’s first season, or part 3 of Bolaño’s 2666. We live in a horror movie, and it’s all the worse that we can’t see what’s happening, that we’re stuck dumb and gullible in our urbane lives where we expect terror to take us, though it never does. Would you rather be stabbed once, or fear the possibility your entire life?

Scenes occur on multiple stages to make active witnesses of the audience. We choose to move our stools to watch. Some take the changes as opportunities to get better seats. But you can only be so involved when all you do is watch? “Who’s going to mobili[z]e darkness and silence?” Adult Joan says in her ending monologue.

It becomes apparent that our characters don’t live near darkness, but in it, much like in Cuarón’s Children of Men. It’s frustrating, but normal. Corrupt government contracts, the daily work of costuming prisoners, propaganda non-events: we’re witnesses and vendors to it all.

The play’s climax is a parade led by a drummer, Kelsey Elizabeth Holley, and accented by that Ayler-esque saxophonist, who turned out to be real and named Anthony Leung. Behind them, prisoners—shackled, numbered, and masked to look like owls, plague doctors, capped dunces—march through the crowd. Todd (Joel Watson) and Joan sit on stools among the audience. The prisoners eventually exit, back to jail or to a firing squad line. We can’t help them.

Earlier in the evening, I stood in front of a wall of human spines. I was at Jon Pichaya Ferry’s Bone Museum, inside Mckibben Lofts (255 McKibbin). Ferry’s collection includes bones that were once fraternal hazing props; labels like, “Skulls with Unknown Traumas;” and wormian bones highlighted with ink. You can charge $20 for entry into the human body. It’s allegedly ethical to photograph skeletons of twisted, dead infants. It’s even more ethical to own them.

In the final scene of Chuchill’s play, Todd and Harper conflate animals and enemy nations. They speak of cities (Dar es Salaam) and countries (Bolivia) to demonstrate that they know of these places, that they are often afraid of them, that they hate them. Todd speaks frankly about having engaged in war crimes. Joan returns and admits to having killed cats and a young child.

That is our milieu: a world that’s more easily mediated through another’s words. That way, you can call bullshit and move on.

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After the play, I go outside, cross Broadway. There are ICE raids down this road from Halsey to Flushing, between and beyond. But there’re so many Dunkin’ franchises to stuff us with some comfort. Take the L and have your partner photograph you in front of bones. Raise your chin to display neck tattoos accented so well by your green highlights.

Far Away ends in a world of constant war, where atrocities happen at such velocity that it’s unclear if they’re done or still coming undone. I remember that, in the dark interims between scenes, I was afraid of not knowing where to look next. That I’d appear to others as a rube.

I must be an informed witness, like the bloodless #NoKings centrists who take to Bluesky to claim daily they’ve been right all along, that the fears they described are now daytime nightmares.

Their most felt tragedy was Colbert’s cancellation. The change outside isn’t a becoming of something different, but a reifying of what’s always been. The mask is off, or the mask is on and it better accents our nation’s nature. Though refreshingly direct, candor doesn’t ease us any better, or more carefully, into each day ahead. Near the end of Far Away, Mitchell’s Harper wonders out loud about her home: “Is this a place of safety?” Is this place—its blackbag abductions, compartmentalized genocides, stabbing paranoia—a place of safety? No need to ask when SNL’s returned to soothe us.

See Stairwell Theater’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away until November 23rd at Box of Moonlight (“pay-what-you-can, suggested donation: $45,”at 17 Saratoga Ave, in what Stairwell markets as Bushwick, though the theater is south of Broadway and east of Gates, making it Ocean Hill, which turned out to be a half-century old name and not some DUMBO-esque rebrand erasure, or whatever the fuck a BoCaCa is).

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Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have previously appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. He can also be found on Twitter: @ecstatic_donut.

Photos taken by Ellie Gravitte, courtesy of Stairwell Theater.