Elizabeth A. Davis Photo by Grace Copeland

As the play opens, Gail (Elizabeth A. Davis) and her husband Ben (Dan Amboyer) are engaging in a bit of sexual role play in their rather palatial bathroom. Acting out a jail-cell fantasy, she is a prisoner and he is a prison guard. The power dynamics change as she wrests control of the officer's baton. As the scenario comes to an end, we discover that Gail is pregnant. As reality sets in, fun and games will have to be put on hold.

Reality, however, in Mondi's world is highly conjectural. When an audience member sneezes, for instance, Gail instinctively says, "Bless you," and then is taken aback by her response. The reaction doesn't fit with the conventions of the play. Or does it? The characters, we are told, live in a mobile home somewhere in Vermont, but their bathroom, where the entire play is set, is as luxurious and grand as one might find in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. (Josafath Reynoso's scenic design and Dawn Chiang's lighting beautifully capture the theatricalized funhouse effects.)

As Gail's pregnancy progresses (helpfully delineated by Siena Zoë Allen's costumes which show the various periods of gestation) and the baby arrives (effectively rendered through Evdoxia Ragkou's sound design, which produces unsettling off-stage irritable-baby cries), she spends more and more time in her pause room. When the couple moves their mobile home from Vermont to New Jersey, Gail has become a permanent bathroom fixture not unlike the room's toilet and tub. Having set up a lucrative business, she still will not leave the loo even as Ben tries to coax her to at least spend time with their growing son.

By this time, Gail has come to the realization that she is not alone in her bathroom; she is surrounded (quite literally) by an audience: us. She escapes through the confines of the fourth wall and confides in us directly. She is caught, it appears, in a play not of her choosing, and she doubts that there is even a real child. The infant must surely be merely the fabrication of the playwright. Ben, on the other hand, exists on a different plane and must carry the burden of raising the unseen child and providing emotional support for his spiraling-downward wife.

Davis and Amboyer do fine work together. As the suffering wife, Davis shifts capably from steely resolve to poignant fragility. As the long-suffering husband, Amboyer is suitably oafish, incredibly patient, and gradually vexed by his wife's behavior.

Mondi's playful overturning of theatrical conventions harkens back to absurdist playwrights such as Eugene Ionesco, Luigi Pirandello, and Edward Albee. (Thematically, the play also calls to mind Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper.") Director Chad Austin and the design team heighten these elements, and both dramatically and artistically create a sensation akin to entering a hall of mirrors. The back wall literalizes this notion, and the set, enclosed by metal shafts alternately resembles a porous glass box and a two-way prison cell.

As I was leaving the theater, I overheard an exasperated woman complain to her companion, "It didn't make sense!" That may be the point of the play, but for me, Maybe Tomorrow made too much sense. Unlike an Albee work, for instance, the feeling of indefinable and inarticulable existential dread did not seem overwhelming enough to cause the woman stay in one room for what apparently is years. There are references to postpartum depression and mental health issues, but unlike in an Ionesco play in which nearly everyone turns into a rhinoceros, Gail's issues appear to be diagnosable and perhaps treatable. In successful absurdist theatre, logic and reason have their own set of rules. We just don't always know what they are.