End Days occurs in the trough between the shockwaves of 9/11 and America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. The characters are adrift and unmoored to the lives they once led, having quickly grabbed on to seemingly firmer anchors in this chaotic time. However, throughout the play they learn their newfound selves are even less concrete than the ones they have abandoned.

Deborah Zoe Laufer‘s play centers around Rachel Stein (Molly Ephraim), a sixteen-year-old whose father (Peter Friedman) worked in the Twin Towers, and has since developed PTSD and no longer participates in the lives around him. Her mother (Deidre O’Connell), once a disciple of Proust and Camus, has taken up the Good Book as her new moral code, and is driving the rest of the family nuts with her constant pleas to repent and be saved. Rachel sticks to her atheistic upbringing and dons goth makeup and clothes as her own way of telling the world to count her out. The family seems on the brink of collapse when Nelson Steinberg (Dane DeHaan), an Elvis-impersonating high school student, enters their lives.

Nelson is the catalyst that brings the Steins back to each other and to the real world, after having lived so long each in their own sealed off personas: Rachel, an angsty teenager full of rage; her mother Sylvia believing that the end is near and desperate to gain the love of Jesus for herself and her family; and Arthur, the father, so lost in his own suffering he hasn’t truly interacted in over a year. Nelson too has experienced great loss, but he is the antithesis of the beleaguered family. He is so innately full of joy at the world that his giddy wonder cannot help but spill over into others’ cups, turning them from half-empty to nearly full. He views Stephen Hawking (Paco Tolson, who also takes on the role of Jesus) as a near mythic creature, able to unravel the mysteries of the universe and explain them to the common man — a prophet for the computer age. Rachel quickly takes this notion up as well, having at last found a belief set with mathematical proof included.

The second act of End Days takes place during an “apocalypse party.” Sylvia is sure Jesus has revealed to her the day of his return (this Wednesday), and has prodded all the other characters to join her in their last hours on Earth. Only Nelson (of course) is enthusiastic about Sylvia’s plans. He finds spirituality, both through the Evangelical service he attends with Sylvia and his Hebrew school classes, to be equally believable to Hawking’s theories, something neither Rachel nor her mother can grasp, though Nelson himself seems fine with the contradiction.

The second act is also the first time we see any sort of set change, and this is only minimal. A couch and TV are added to the single room in which the action takes place, bare but for a card table, two chairs and hundreds of unpacked moving boxes, stacked like the decaying remains of the Steins’ lives before they moved away from the city in the aftermath of the attack. Beige industrial carpeting lines the floor. Though the script follows Rachel through school, Sylvia to church and a protest, and Nelson and Arthur to a supermarket, the set pieces remain the same, with only changes in lighting or a single added prop to show the difference. The fact that their unpacked boxes and bare refrigerator follow them around signifies how the characters are all tethered to one another, and to their past experiences. They can’t run away from depression or confusion any more than they can tear down the walls of their living room. It is only through the efforts of an angel clad in the white bedazzled suit of the King that this family can finally begin to heal.