Photo by John Lamb
Summer is a time for escape, a time for big budget entertainment and splashy spectacles. Unfortunately, escape is difficult when the price of fuel nearly doubles. A smarter choice is to find some adventure and excitement in your own city. You could opt for a fun, splashy musical comedy at The Muny, an evening in Shakespeare Glen, or a lovely little operetta. Or… you could have a dose of dread and tension shot through with sharp commentary on misogyny and classism. There’s nothing quite as bracing as a little antithesis. If your mind, heart, and stomach are strong enough, then The Wasp, as performed by Albion Theatre Company, might be just the play for you.
Written in 2015 by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, a playwright whose diverse oeuvre includes stage adaptations of Dracula and The Turn of the Screw, this modern psychological thriller is an urgent piece of summer entertainment that nearly sold out its opening weekend. It runs from now until June 28 at the Kranzberg Black Box Theatre (501 N. Grand Blvd.), an intimate venue that quickly becomes tense and claustrophobic.
The narrative kicks off in a café where two estranged primary school classmates reunite after years of silence. Heather (Ricki Franklin) has reached out to Carla (Micia Norman) over Facebook. On the surface, Heather is the picture of healthy, middle-class stability, while Carla is a rough-around-the-edges, working-class woman currently pregnant with her fifth child. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that their high school falling out involved severe, abnormal bullying. Carla, who survived a profoundly abusive father and witnessed unspeakable cruelty as a child, spent her youth projecting her rage outward through acts of violence against animals and, eventually, her peers.
Heather’s life seems more stable and comfortable by comparison, but she lacks the one thing Carla has in abundance: children. When Heather opens up about her struggles with infertility, Carla jokingly offers to sell her unborn baby. Heather declines, revealing her real reason for this awkward reunion. She wants to hire Carla to murder her husband, Simon. Simon is having an emotional affair with another woman, and Heather has the receipts to prove it. That’s because Heather is the other woman—she’s been catfishing her own husband for years. It is a massive red flag that signals the deep, terrifying psychological fractures beneath Heather’s polished exterior.
The play operates as a masterful, slow-burn trap. As the narrative shifts into a beautifully designed, retro living room adorned with framed insect collections, the play’s title comes into sharp focus. The central metaphor is the tarantula hawk wasp. (As an amateur entomologist, this reviewer has no less than three arthropod tattoos—a mantis, a stag beetle, and a centipede—but has not yet thought of adding the dreaded tarantula hawk to the collection.) The female tarantula hawk is a parasitoid; she stings a live tarantula, paralyzes it, and lays her eggs inside. The larvae then eat the spider from the inside out, carefully avoiding its vital organs to keep it alive for as long as possible before finally emerging and killing the host.
Malcolm uses this brutal lifecycle as a metaphor for the cycle of abuse. For both women, cruelty and violence were planted inside them when they were young, eating away at their psyches ever since, leaving them desperate for any kind of release—even if it destroys them. As Heather correctly observes, the sting of the tarantula hawk is one of the most painful in all of nature—three minutes of all-consuming agony that leaves the victim unable to do anything but scream. Then, somehow, it ends. The pain doesn’t go away, but it becomes… familiar.
While it operates like a classic Hitchcock thriller updated for the 2010s, The Wasp is slightly more morbid and emotionally taxing. Viewers should be advised that the play contains heavy swearing and graphic descriptions of violence, though the physical brutality is (mostly) kept off the stage.
The play runs for roughly 90 minutes without an intermission, and there is scarcely a wasted moment. It shares the same cinematic, claustrophobic tension that made Albion’s 2025 production of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane so memorable. Much of this immersion is owed to the company’s outstanding dialect work. The accents are so authentic, you feel as if you’ve wandered into a small theatre just off the West End.
Audiences may recognize Ms. Franklin from her stellar work in the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s 2024 production of As You Like It, where she played philosophical jester Touchstone. Her performance as Heather is a brilliant, chilling about-face. You may find yourself looking over the actors’ heads because direct eye contact is too uncomfortable in those final scenes. You may feel like a passive witness to kidnapping and torture.
Norman is equally memorable as Carla. Refusing to allow herself to be vulnerable, she masks her despair with pitch-black humor, delivering some of the play’s funniest lines as she weighs the pros and cons of homicide. That all changes when the once-dominant Carla, now heavily pregnant, finds herself in the role of victim for the first time in years.
The Wasp tells the story of two women—once the best of friends, now bonded together by a shared destiny and deeply dysfunctional relationships with men. Had they been able to approach one another with genuine empathy instead of weaponized trauma, their lives could have been entirely different. Instead, their tragic lives become cautionary tales. When evil things are done to us… when old injuries never heal… an even greater evil can grow within us and consume all that we are. | Rob Von Nordheim
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit albiontheatrestl.com.
