The still-dim auditorium filled in seconds. The stage is dressed like anyone’s living room with mismatched pillows, an off-centered coffee table, and a fish painting. Everything is sitting, waiting, uncanny in its ordinariness, as time unravels.
Time isn’t just a theme in There’s Nothing You Can Do—it’s a creeping antagonist, stalking every breath, beat, and breakdown on stage. Performed at the LSPU Hall from May 9 to May 11, Cole Hayley’s darkly surreal screenplay captures the slow horror of losing grip on time: the days that blur, the years that vanish, the milestones that never arrive.
The cast—Nora Barker, Mallory Clarke, Colin Furlong, Jeremy Nolan, Joel Stead, and Evan Walsh—hurl themselves into this spiral with raw physicality and unnerving conviction, embodying a kind of temporal vertigo where movement becomes meaningless and stillness is unbearable.
Under the moody lighting cast by Bob Stamp and within the lived-in, liminal set designed by Jawon Kang, the audience witnesses Chelsea Dab Hilke’s razor-sharp direction and Lynn Panting’s disquieting choreography. Elizabeth Perry’s understated costuming subtly reinforces the domestic unease, while the haunting sound design by Julian Smith, created with CUERPOS, pulses through the piece like a second, erratic heartbeat. Together with Robert Chafe’s dramaturgical insight, Ana Pitol’s seamless production management, and the support of Meghan Greeley as Artistic Animateur, this team doesn’t just blur the boundaries of time—they annihilate them.
Loosely orbiting a group of old friends edging into early adulthood, the play evokes a quarter-life crisis not through traditional dialogue, but through the disintegration of language, memory, and identity. Each performer shares their character with the entire space, letting emotions pour down like weather.
Characters dissolve as quickly as they are drawn; conversations fray into overlapping monologues; bodies jerk and twist as if compelled by something unseen. Laughter frequently veers into hysteria. Hayley’s script resists plot in the usual sense. Instead, it offers a portrait of psychic entropy: a collapse not caused by any single tragedy, but by time itself, looping, limping, and refusing to resolve.
This is where the metaphor of the 1518 dancing plague becomes more than clever—it becomes terrifying. Panting’s choreography forces characters to dance past meaning into madness. What begins as play devolves into something almost inhuman: a desperate churning of limbs, as if the body is trying to escape the clock. There are no cathartic breakthroughs here, no moments of clarity. Just motion. Just time. Just the unbearable awareness that things are getting worse, and nobody knows what to do about it, but everyone feels it.
The ensemble is unflinchingly committed, with ruptures of brilliance scattered across the stage. Some actors appear possessed; others visibly resist breaking down. The physicality is intense but never self-indulgent. It feels like watching people try—and—fail to hold themselves together in real time. This tension builds toward a final sequence that abandons realism altogether, surrendering instead to a fevered, physical crescendo. It doesn’t answer the questions it raises. It doesn’t need to. The point isn’t whether we can do anything. It’s what happens when we realize we can’t.
There’s Nothing You Can Do isn’t comforting. It’s not hopeful. But it is honest, brutally, beautifully honest. In an age of hustle, burnout, and collapsing futures, that honesty feels almost radical. Hayley’s play speaks to the underachievers, the drifters, the people time forgot or left behind. It whispers what we’re too afraid to admit out loud: that maybe time isn’t ours to master. And that may be the only thing worse than dancing forever is realizing we missed our chance to dance at all. So don’t waste your dancing years.
