It was on the Orange Line into DC — a favorite of all suburbanites who allege DC residency — and already running late thanks to a stalled train at Ballston, that I cracked open a book to distract from my tardiness. My selection, a blind grab as I rushed out the door, was a volume of short stories by the master of horror H. P. Lovecraft. Between reading and checking the time, I further distracted myself by frenetically swiping for updates on Hurricane Milton. Despite arriving just in the nick of time, I couldn’t have better prepared myself for the evening’s events, for Rorschach Theatre’s production of Sleeping Giant contemplates anxieties equal in terror both real and imagined. Staged in the hollowed-out basement of a former clothing shop, a sense of the uncanny pervades the space. While Sarah Beth Hall’s homespun set endears, the eldritch landscape squirming just beyond, and designed via hypnotic projection by Kylos Brannon, betrays the horrors to come. Robert Bowen Smith and Erin Denman in ‘Sleeping Giant.’ Photo by DJ Corey Photography. As a veteran of the small screen supernatural — if hit shows on HBO and Netflix can still be considered small, that is — Emmy-nominated writer Steve Yockey’s newest play mines familiar themes to reach more urgent and profound ends. On a weekend away at his mother’s lake house, Ryan (Jacob Yeh) surprises his girlfriend Alex (Sydney Dionne) with a massive, firework-laden proposal, but when his display awakens something primeval and tentacled in the lake, they must contend with more than just Alex’s marital indecision. Told in a series of seven interrelated vignettes, Sleeping Giant details the many different human responses to the inexplicable. From buckling under trauma and hawking contaminated fish guts, to giving up on humanity and baking up a suicide cake, Yockey’s characters are as unmoored from reason as they are determined to contrive their own. Whether fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, Sleeping Giant, by turns riotously irreverent and frightfully earnest, lays bare how we contend with a world constantly and indelibly changing before our eyes. Rorschach Theatre seems the perfect home for a show as bizarre and grimly comic as this, especially as we face the challenge of coping with increasingly fraught times. Indeed, Rorschach director Jenny McConnell Frederick’s entire production is attuned to Yockey’s intricate and elusive tonality. The show traffics in the dualism between perplexing nuance and campy B-movie tropes. Draping the scenery in glistening moss and an ethereal luster, set designer Sarah Beth Hall and lighting designer Dean Leong texture it with the looming threat of the monster just beyond its walls. Sound designer Thom J. Woodward joins in this effort by capturing the foreboding din rolling in from the lake, only to replace it with the far more sinister sounds of celebration in the play’s final scenes. All this is complemented by Aoife Creighton’s detailed attention to the show’s prop design and Ashlynne Ludwig’s astute costume design, on which not an insignificant amount of Yockey’s vignettes depend. Generally, Frederick’s production conjures up a frightful dreamscape that paints its characters’ deteriorating minds in bold strokes and cements Sleeping Giant’s abstract musings in the tangible. Thus transported, the viewer can easily grasp Yockey’s more existential inquiries — though the play’s standout cast is to thank in equal part for this. Jacob Yeh, Robert Bowen Smith, and Sydney Dionne in ‘Sleeping Giant.’ Photo by DJ Corey Photography. Of the seven vignettes and many zany characters presented in Sleeping Giant, the show’s four-person cast has many opportunities to show their range and leaves no vein untapped. In the classic style of a double act, they each take turns being each other’s straight man, only to prove themselves a funny (or tragic) man at the end of the scene too. Robert Bowen Smith accommodates Rorschach’s take on the show’s skit structure with remarkable skill, taking his eccentric, often endearingly flamboyant characters to the furthest stretches of wit, while grounding them in the face of the anxious forces that surround them. Erin Denman and Sydney Dione likewise bring a palpable and empathetic realism to the show’s absurd circumstances, using the humor of their characters to reveal the deeper truths they aim to hide. Jacob Yeh rounds out Rorschach’s cast with the best of both worlds: delving deep into the affable Ryan who bookends the show and tuning into the emotional resonance of each character. Jacob Yeh and Sydney Dionne in ‘Sleeping Giant.’ Photo by DJ Corey Photography. Generally, Rorschach Theatre’s production of Steve Yockey’s Sleeping Giant reveals itself in layers. As its peculiarities bloom, so do its insights. As the monster rises from the deep, so do the monsters among us — and the lost, the forgotten, the lonely, the hopeless, and the hopeful. Running Time: One hour and 25 minutes, with no intermission. Sleeping Giant plays through November 3, 2024, presented by Rorschach Theatre performing aat 1020 Connecticut Avenue, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($20–$50) online. The playbill for Sleeping Giant is online here. SEE ALSO: ‘Dark comedy is pretty much what I do’: Playwright Steve Yockey on his embrace of Rorschach Theatre’s mission (interview by Jeffrey Walker, January 4, 2024) Recapping Rorschach Theatre’s fun and creative ‘Eldritch Investigations’ (review of the Psychogeographies Project by Kendall Mostafavi, September 30, 2024)