I saw The Morbs this Monday. The synopsis of the play goes as such:

“When their sorority reunion is interrupted by an outbreak of a terrifying illness known as The Morbs, Tatum, Trish, and Wendy take shelter in a cabin deep in the snowy woods of New Hampshire.
“Forced into close quarters after five years apart, the three former best friends rekindle old connections and conflicts as they discover the new people they’ve each evolved into. But the snow is falling fast and The Morbs is lurking just outside the cabin’s door. When it comes knocking, will the friendship that once held them together be enough to get them through the night?
“The Morbs is a comedy-thriller about friendship, cold soup, and the people we become.”

The play was set in a cabin-like wood house, unlike any other you’d see in NH, and, NH being my second adolescence home, I felt very nostalgic (a word that is always too overused and heavy for me but true in this sense) looking at all the set design in the last row of the small theatre. (Slight spoiler alert to follow) One item was a coat hanger that hung several winter jackets, the thick ones that you’d swing over you while popping out on a -20 degrees night, bouncing on your toes with your feet halfway into your Bean boots, because it’s so damn cold outside. I almost felt a cold breeze every time the door was opened.

I’d like to tackle at the first and seemingly most obvious aspect of the play: the Morbs. According to the synopsis, it’s supposedly a deadly and contagious disease. Sounds familiar? While I spent most of my time in a city during the Covid time, I’m sure many spent their time in a more rural place such as in a wood house. I can’t possibly know how that felt like or compare the two; everyone has their own Covid story. Nonetheless, three sorority girls suck in a wood cabin on a deadly cold night… this also sounds like the premise of a horror movie.

So, do they end up killing each other?

We can all imagine that women kill in a different way. Different than men, than some of the traditional murderers. I won’t give away any more details, but if you simply imagine another fact that, with the deadly cold winter night out in a cabin, the phone signals are probably cut off. Therefore, we have three sorority sisters stuck in the middle of nowhere without cell service. Some truths are bound to be spilt.

While the Morbs has a very distinctive trait/effect, it is introduced in a very subtle yet established way. This is something that theatre does better than writing. (Spoiler alert) We were slowly revealed what the Morbs would do to people, and we see how they fear it.

While the premise of the play sounds like it would guarantee some bonding or secret revealing, crying, memory digging, or even fighting, it is not so tied to the generic sense of all those things. Although we have three white girls (we can see from the cast and the posters) who might resemble any pretty girl from your high school (I certainly had some faces in mind when watching the play and I was absolutely intimidated at certain points) (Maybe the casting succeeded.), their secrets are very much worthwhile. Because, you can hate a cabin in the wild as much as you’d like to, some shit does go down there and only there.

I thought for a bit after the play. The actors were brilliant, and the set design absolutely so. However, I kept wondering what was missing, or if it was missing anything at all. As an Asian person, I don’t need the New Hampshire woods to explain anything else to me but freedom, so it’s not in a political sense; the play is definitely complex. Perhaps I wanted to see more about the relationship between them: between as in two and two and two, the three sorority girls. Although their relationship with one another was explored very clearly, I thought there were more. Maybe it’s only me.

This play, as the synopsis suggests, definitely prompts the audience to examine their own interpersonal relationship with those around them, should they be trapped in a wood cabin.

At last, maybe try to answer this: Who would you rather be trapped in a wood cabin with, an unidentifiable animal of the wild or a creature of your own mind?