"A Parallelogram" is a thought experiment. Bee is (maybe) visited by a version of her future self who poses an impossible question: If there was going to be a global catastrophe and there was nothing you could do about it, even if you could go back in time, would you still want to know?
That may sound dour, but Bruce Norris's play, which premiered in 2010 at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, reminds me of two taut plays from the (more-or-less) same decade, "Proof" and "Doubt." These are intellectual dramas with sparkling dialogue and barely-likable characters, centered around a central human mystery: how do we know what's true? And what should we do with what we know?
Bee (Celia Keenan-Bolger) is in a relationship with Jay (Stephen Kunken), a mansplainer who is sure she is secretly smoking, even though she says she is not. She has something important to tell him. Her future self (Anita Gillette) has been visiting her, puffing on cigarettes and playing solitaire in a chair in the bedroom. The whole world is going to be affected by a deadly virus and Jay is not going to survive it.
Jay will not listen. But J.J. (Juan Castano), the guy who mows their lawn, will. And so she starts to talk to him instead.
Bee wants to change things — is desperate to change things — but her future self tells her it's futile, bolstering her argument by pressing a button on a device that looks like a TV remote and skips back or forward five minutes or many hours, as if Bee's life were something watchable on Netflix. Director Michael Greif, who exhibited his virtuosity with making technology accessible in "Dear Evan Hansen," keeps this conceit from ever feeling corny by milking its humor.
Norris wrote "Clybourne Park," which also debuted in 2010 and won the Pulitzer Prize. That satire dug deep into race race relations and social class. There's a touch of that here: J.J. is working-class Latino, Bee and Jay are middle-class white. But this is a more playful work, with many plot holes. He's less concerned with his characters actual lives than with exploring a philosophical idea about what moral actions people should take when faced with the inevitability of death. It's more a parable than a social study.
Yet Norris has a point to make, and he does it by answering his own question. None of us can change the fact that everyone on the planet will at some point face the catastrophe of dying. We can only control how we treat other people.
By Bruce Norris, directed by Michael Greif.
At Second Stage Theater's Tony Kiser Theater, through Aug. 20.