Absurdism Meets Reality in ‘The Neighborhood of the Loners’

The air in Loyola’s new production of “The Neighborhood of the Loners” felt heavy — not with ghosts, but with the absence of humanity. The lights in the Newhart Family Theater shone on an empty stage where no one spoke and silence pressed against the cast like fog. Here, in this quarantined pocket of the Loners’ world, people have forgotten how to touch, how to walk and how to exist.

Until one of them dies. 

The death of their neighbor, Miss Pérez’s, cracked the stillness of the isolated Loners like glass. Suddenly, the Loners must gather to ask a question none of them want answered — what to do with her body? What follows isn’t a mystery so much as an exorcism of fear, absurdity and the terrible comedy of being human. 

Written by Uruguayan playwright Jimena Márquez and translated by director Kelly Howe, “The Neighborhood of the Loners,” which ran Oct. 23 to Nov. 2, speaks to the struggle of living in an individualistic society. Set in one of the Loners’ houses, the production plunges into a town hall meeting between the Loners to figure out what to do with Miss Pérez’s belongings. 

The show’s ensemble of 16 actors stayed on stage through nearly the entire performance, each embodying a character whose fear isolates them further from others. The worries held by the Loners were the reasons they fled the real world. The Loners’ world is in the midst of the forest, the houses are segregated to purposefully avoid each other.  

Third-year political science and theater major Lisette Gowland, who plays Gutierrez, said her character’s anxiety feels almost childish, but in a world like this one, even small fears turn monstrous. Gowland said Gutierrez was the last character to speak up and for her, this amplifies the character of Gutierrez and her development in the play.

“Even though the fear is something so simple, it is something that I feel a lot of people can relate to,” Gowland said. “It’s definitely something when I was stepping into the character, no matter how small it may seem, it is extremely frightening.”

Director Howe’s team challenged the cast to perform isolation not with stillness, but with tension in the way their body moves, according to Gowland.

Gowland said because the Loners haven’t seen or talked to anyone in a while, the hardest part to convey was the deprivation of touch.

“We haven’t been around people, but we’re all suddenly stuck in a room together,” Gowland said. “You’re constantly surveilling who’s around you. You don’t know what somebody’s going to do next. You don’t want to be touched. If someone scoots too close to you, do you scoot your chair away? How are you responding to the sounds you’re hearing?”

With the focus on bodily language, Gowland said the cast also paid close attention to balancing between realism and exaggeration. Gowland said Howe and her assistant directors emphasized absurdism doesn’t mean detachment — the characters still feel human, even when their actions border on ridiculous.

In this absurdist tragedy, movement becomes a survival instinct. Assistant Director Cecilia Skemp, a fourth-year theater major, said this is Loyola’s first time producing a play that’s both realistic and absurd.

“They are very different genres inherently,” Skemp said. “The characters are real people who have real sufferings and experiences, but also absurdism. They’re being ridiculous. They’re killing each other over very minor things, and they want nothing more than to be alone.”

With this being Loyola’s expansion into a new theatrical genre, Skemp said the actors experienced a learning curve to fully embody the characters. She said it took them a while to get a hang of the plot and properly articulate the language of the characters they play. 

Skemp said the directing team guided the actors toward melodramatic choices — an intentional exaggeration meant to heighten the tension between humor and horror. The actors had to switch between sardonic and serious tones and insert comedic lines in humorless situations.

Assistant Director and fourth-year theater major Laura Cortés said the play’s exaggerated performance is inherent in helping the audience comprehend its scope. 

“From the beginning, it’s like, ‘Who am I? Who is my enemy? Who will I not like?’ Cortés said.

Each rehearsal, the cast navigated scenes that swung between ludicrous humor and social dread, according to Cortés. She said she read the script in its original Uruguayan format and saw how Howe’s translation preserved Márquez’s satirical edge. 

As rehearsals unfolded, Gowland said the cast found themselves haunted by the play’s echoes of real life. The COVID-19 pandemic became a natural point of reflection and a shared language for the isolation the Loners embody. Gowland said the cast’s experience with bouncing back after COVID propelled the production forward. 

“When I was going back to school after being online, I just didn’t know what to expect from people,” Gowland said. “Everyone had been behind their screen for so long, and I definitely felt that sense where I needed a sense of community after that because I hadn’t been around one for so long, which definitely helps push the message of the show. Everything that goes wrong in the show goes wrong because they don’t have that sense of community.”

Cortés said post-pandemic, society was fraying at its edges since people were unable to connect together.

“This play is about people learning how to be together again,” Cortés said. “When people can’t quarantine with anyone, it changes a person for better or for worse.”

Skemp said the shared loss of community through the COVID-19 Pandemic helped ground the production not in one space but in a shared experience. The production’s surreal world isn’t tied to a specific place, even though the playwright’s Uruguayan roots shape its texture, according to Cortés. For her, the production’s architecture, clothing and mood gesture toward Uruguay but remain universally familiar. 

“This could have happened anywhere at any time,” Cortés said. “In regards to the names, we wanted to stick to the names in the script. We didn’t want to change them. With the casting, we didn’t really have specific races and specific people in mind. We really wanted a mix of Loyola students who aren’t even theater majors.” 

Behind the dark humor and eerie stillness, “The Neighborhood of the Loners” became a mirror for the team, according to Skemp. Its haunting isn’t supernatural — it’s social. Skemp said during rehearsals, the team often reflected on how themes of isolation and distrust felt uncomfortably close to the current political moment.

“We were handling these huge topics about individualism and the dangers of isolationists,” Skemp said. “The characters probably think they’re in a utopia, at least at the beginning. But we know from previous written books, it’s projected to be a utopia, where everything is brilliant, society has been solved, there’s no issues in the world. But as you go on, you realize everything’s falling apart at the seams, and in itself is a dystopia. It’s a classic kind of dystopian world.”

Following this natural progression, the play’s absurd tones eventually shifted to tragedy. Cortés said by Act III, the play’s humor collapses into violence, and that’s where the sharp turn happens. The characters turn against one another, their fears finally consuming them and inspiring their revenge on innocent individuals. 

Cortés said the chaos of the final act highlights how fragile society becomes when fear overrides empathy, referencing one moment where a character says, “I have the sense that those who defend nothing live longer.”

 “That line hit me the hardest because in our current political state, at least in our generation, there are people who stand for something, and there are others who, unfortunately, don’t, because they don’t know how or don’t want to,” Cortés said.

Beneath the chaos, the production lingers on the importance of memory — what it means to remember and to long for connection after it’s gone. 

Skemp said nostalgia runs through every character’s fear, turning empty spaces into reminders of what was once alive.

“A lot of these characters ended up isolating themselves because of people in their lives,” Skemp said.“Fernandez is afraid of seeing his dead family in mildew stains. Ortiz is afraid of abandoned houses because humans can’t stand the idea of something being empty and alone. It has to be filled, and it has to have life in it.”

For Cortés, the nostalgia of the production related personally. Visiting her grandfather’s house after he died before her fourth year of college started, she said she felt the emptiness of the house not as a sign of sadness, but as a sign of remembering. 

Cortés said the Loners’ refusal to remember and their insistence on keeping Pérez’s house occupied reflects a kind of weakness.

“An abandoned house can be a little bit haunting because the people that are there aren’t there anymore,” Cortés said. 

By the time the final lights flare, Skemp said the audience has laughed, winced and recognized themselves somewhere in the chaos — not as ghosts, but people who have forgotten how to live together.

For Cortés, the audience could relate to the play one way or another — either by means of nostalgia or recognition that survival depends on community. Skemp said “The Neighborhood of the Loners” is never truly alone, the humor threaded throughout binding the show and its message together. 

“For some people, comedy can definitely go in a way in which they laugh, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous, this would never happen,’” Skemp said. “But laughter is used as a tool to get people to open up. It’s to understand that there’s comedy and tragedy in life, and oftentimes, they come together. Comedy opens the door — then you have to start to think about it, because you heard it. You didn’t just shut it down.”