In just five years and eight shows, the scrappy company The Amoralists has generated a deafening buzz in the New York theater world, and now they’ve harnessed that momentum to move from Downtown to just-Off-Broadway. The group of unpaid actors and off-stage friends has brought its trademark intensity and manic energy to the new setting, while broadening the world of the play — previous shows were all set within one home or hotel room — to comment on everything from gentrification and environmentalism to the Occupy movement, terrorism, and police brutality, the lot wound tightly into a riveting detective story.
Company co-founder Derek Ahonen makes knowing nods to classic film noir throughout “The Bad and the Better” (at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater through July 21), juxtaposing the small-town boredom of hero cop Detective Lang (William Apps) with his brother Venus’s (David Nash) high-stakes undercover operation. The former investigates a real estate developer’s violent takeover of a Long Island refuge and the latter infiltrates a potentially terrorism-prone Occupy cell. As connections between their respective cases emerge, each cop turns out to be not so heroic.
For all its zeitgeisty topicality, though, “The Bad and the Better” remains hilarious from start to near-finish, poking fun at the state of contemporary theater — Venus poses as a wannabe anarchist playwright who hopes joining the protesters will lend his upcoming sequel authenticity — and deploying filthy police banter. “When was the last time you smelled a dead body?” a younger detective (Ugo Chukwu) asks Lang. “The last time my face was between your wife’s thighs.” The often-crude laughs are matched by the brutality of the play’s dramatic scenes, particularly as secret motives are revealed and the body count reaches “Departed”-caliber levels. Seemingly every character inhabited by the cast of 26 — an unheard-of figure in the perpetually belt-tightening world of non-profit theater — is riddled with conflicting allegiances, dark secrets, and regrets.
Ahonen and director Daniel Aukin keep all these strands moving in an exquisite bit of stage choreography, with different stories and subplots unfolding in overlapping scenes on Alfred Schatz’s elaborately cluttered set. The resulting arc invokes a kind of nostalgia for the less muddled morality of a romanticized past — signified in the familiar character types of countless cop dramas — before systematically complicating and darkening every motive. In a world gone so bad, Ahonen implies, one can only aspire to be better, and the Amoralists’ latest show is certainly their most better to date.
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