Five years after a tragic event, Jack Jordan is still reeling from its effect on him. Although it takes quite some time in Jeff Bower’s mordant drama, The Impossible Task of Today, to learn what has turned this formerly high-functioning school teacher agoraphobic and deeply depressed, the memory of it remains with him like a black-cowled specter of death.
Bower’s play, his first produced full-length script, was developed by Florida Atlantic University Theatre Lab, where it now has its world premiere after its initial audience encounter in the Boca Raton company’s 2022 New Play Festival. While the 95-minute work is not without some humor, Bower takes us down the rabbit hole of mental illness, gun violence, suicide and social media obsession.
Since he has not left his seventh-floor walk-up apartment for years, Jack Jordan (Iain Batchelor) now ekes out a living teaching English to Chinese students by Zoom. When not teaching, he can usually be found on his dilapidated couch playing outdated video games. And dreading the imminent anniversary of the night a crazed gunman shot and killed Jack’s wife Anna and others in a movie theater, as Jack escaped unharmed, peeing in the bathroom. With the burden of survivor guilt, Jack and a friend Lynne (Vaishnavi Sharma), who also attended the movie, have a painful ritual of reliving that fateful night each June 20, a date fast approaching.
Batchelor gives a towering performance, pulling the audience inside his fogged brain, displaying a range of emotions, edgy, belligerent and volatile, yet earning our empathy. Although he has pushed the world away, Jack keeps getting weekly grocery deliveries from an amiable soul named Frank (Anthony Blatter), who has a grief secret of his own, and occasional arrivals from the building manager, Val (Kaelyn A. Gonzalez), concerned but unable to help. And hovering silently over the action — but seen only by Jack — is that cowled figure known only as The Dark (Nicole Perry), an embodiment of his bleak mental state, moving about in a languorous dance of death.
Producing artistic director Matt Stabile stages the production with a sensitivity to the subject matter, avoiding its potential for mawkishness. He is aided by Michael McClain’s seedy scenic design and the otherworldly lighting by George Horrocks. Stabile and company do not shrink from the dark recesses of The Impossible Task of Today, while Bower eventually arrives at a much-needed glimmer of hope.
THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK OF TODAY, FAU Theatre Lab, Parliament Hall, 777 Glades Road, FAU Campus, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, April 20. $35- 45. 561-297-6124.