Camp Freedom!

With Black Sheep’s third show, producer-director Vance Smith seems intent on cornering the lighter side of the end of the world. Following Spencer’s 2007 suburban-homogeneity satire Another Day in the Empire and Andy Gershenzon’s 2008 apocalypse comedy The End, Camp Freedom! imagines a near future in which late-paying credit-card holders and toxic-mortgage defaulters are relocated to a FEMA-DHS internment camp run by Commandant Ricky (Walsh), who’s not fooling anyone with his half-hearted insistence that he isn’t actually Dick Cheney.

Our protagonist, sad-sack Jack (Brad Smith), teams up with jaded divorcée Amelia (a winning Forster) to fight from within. As with Empire, Spencer offers up some compelling riffs on the sociopolitical mess we’re in. Ricky’s lament about the ecosystem’s refusal to hew to his vision—“the Gulf Stream refuses to cooperate”—is chillingly wry, while Brad Smith masterfully underplays Jack’s recounting of the world’s incremental erosion and its inverse relationship to his ability to care.

As a whole, though, Camp Freedom! doesn’t quite sustain itself. The comic timing, both in Spencer’s script and Smith’s direction, is just off enough that it begins to sound less like satire and more like a weaker sibling of 1984. A running gag about Nick at Nite as an instrument of torture is too heavily leaned upon, and Cheney himself proves too easy a scapegoat (despite Walsh’s game caricature). Spencer hits some targets—we’re struck by Amelia’s observation that “billions of years of evolution have led to Accounts Payable”—but the playwright’s pencil could, and we’re sure soon will, be sharper.

• More theater reviews
• More Theater articles