A news banner crawls across the bottom of the television screen reading, “Police seize 1,000 fake life jackets in Turkey.” Another news brief shows a clip of a boat, filled beyond capacity, capsizing in the Mediterranean. The familiar din of the 24-hour newsfeed is soon replaced by something more symbolic: Footage of ants, magnified by thousands of times and processed through a negative filter, is projected upon every surface, and soon replaced by the the show’s cast dressed as migrants crawling across the deck of a ship, as seen through the same video filter.

The news footage reveals just a small part of the catastrophe that includes the millions fleeing (or who have already fled) civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, as well as the ISIS caliphate, and other forms of social unrest or environmental disaster in their homelands. These are the real-life humanitarian catastrophes that inspire Matei Visniec’s darkly satirical Migraaaaants, or There’s Too Many of Us on This Damn Boat! 

Visniec is the first playwright whom ExPats Theater has presented a second time (last year Karin Rosnizeck directed his The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield). Visniec was born in Romania but during the Cold War he fled to France, where he received political asylum, eventually becoming a citizen. While he spares no one from his satire, every scene is infused with sympathies for those who had no choice but flee their native lands with the hope of starting a new life.

Migraaaaants! is performed in the format of a sketch-comedy show with thematically related stories, ranging from recurring gags to serialized storytelling, with the occasional tragedy along the way. The main plot is set on the “damn boat” of the title, sailing from Libya, which experienced its second civil war in a decade from 2014 to 2020. The boat’s captain, a smuggler (Eli El), addresses the audience, instructing them on the use of the contents of the sealed plastic bags found on their seats. Inside is a vomit bag, as well as a bag intended to keep one’s cellphone dry, and a document outlining the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. El is flanked by two henchmen (Brock Brown and George Kassouf) who hold machetes and signs instructing the audience when to respond with “Yes, Boss.” The damn boat’s captain plans to ferry his passengers 2 kilometers off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa and toss them overboard with life jackets and their airtight plastic bags. He gives them advice on how to stay out of trouble in Europe, but he’s not above tossing overboard stowaways—or others—as required.

A recurring skit is set at the “Cutting Edge Anti-Immigration Technology Show.” A trio of presenters (Vivian Allvin, Irina Koval, and Ege Yalcinbas) in tight black dresses dance to a disco beat, cooing seductively about the latest products border control agencies and individuals can use to repel migrants. These products, which range from heartbeat detectors to more aesthetically pleasing camouflaged barbed wire (both real products), are not just cutting-edge, but if we believe the presenters, they are fun to use! Another story is told in a series of vignettes about a couple in an unnamed Balkan country as they observe refugees passing through their community—most coming from Turkey (which currently hosts roughly 3.6 million refugees from the Syrian Civil War).  The woman (Allvin) is alarmed and suspicious, the man (Kassouf) is curious, even philosophical, as he slurps his soup. The pair return as the denizens of the “The High Office of the Prime President,” in which Kassouf, sporting a wig of disheveled blond hair a la Boris Johnson, plays a beleaguered head of government, and Allvin plays Georgina, his “political correctness coach.” The two game out how different policies (the more ineffective the better), and rhetorical stances will affect the prime president’s reelection chances. 

A darker satire of unregulated capitalism involves Elihu (Brown), an Eritrean migrant in Europe, as he is continually visited by another affably evil smuggler (El again), who carries a small briefcase filled with Coca-Cola. Coke may add life, as the jingle once told us, but the time it takes to drink it gives the smuggler time to propose another business venture. There’s no such thing as free cola, and the man making the offer is not just a smuggler of people; but a smuggler of parts. Does Elihu really need both kidneys?

Brown and El return, in another skit, as a pair of child traffickers giving a family-friendly presentation about how they are a much better option than threats like Boko Haram (a Jihadist militia based in Nigeria and neighboring countries, known for abducting girls as war brides and boys as child soldiers), promising a better future in accordance to the European Union’s human rights laws, along with the veiled threat that, if the traffickers are not paid in full, sweatshops and sex work are available ways to repay the debt. When they lead the audience in a chorus of the Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie-penned 1985 charity song “We Are the World,” the nonsensicality of the lyrics becomes more apparent.

ExPats Theatre’s aesthetic has always included video projections on a sparse stage, and Jonathan Dahm Robertson is up for the challenge of ever-changing graphic styles, ranging from documentary footage and surreal images to the bright colors of commerce. Costume designer Alisa Mandel is busy with six actors each playing several characters, but she gets a chance to be truly outrageous when outfitting the sex workers in one skit.

Visniec, though a postmodernist who gives no easy answers, and revels in the absurd chaos of the scenarios he portrays on stage, nonetheless pauses from the satire to acknowledge the dead bodies that wash up on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos. And yet the playwright’s humanism is always apparent as he mocks the xenophobic fantasies some demagogues promote as they present the future as a choice between a fortress Europe where borders and national identities are firmly guarded, or a nightmare of a fallen Europe, overridden by foreign hordes. Instead the French Romanian dramatist imagines a hybridized future Europe that includes “French Sri Lankans, German Afghans, Swedish Pakistanis, […and] Algerian Romanians.” 

ExPats Theatre presents Migraaaaants, or There’s Too Many of Us on This Damn Boat!, written by Matei Visniec, translated by Nick Awde, and directed by Karin Rosnizeck, runs through April 7 at Atlas Performing Arts Center. expatstheatre.com. $20–$45.