Who is the phoenix when she is in the womb There’s a corniness in moments like this, and in moments when the play reënacts traumas that are too familiar and too close to us in time to take symbolic flight: a comic dance involving grocery sanitization and uncertainty about mask hygiene left me cringing, but not necessarily clearer about the inner lives of Angel and Bae. The real intrigue of “Zoetrope” lies in the specifics of its production. Angel and Bae’s apartment—one room acting as their whole dysfunctional diorama of a home—sits in a small trailer, in an empty lot near Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn. A handful of audience members take their seats at windows around the trailer, throw a dark curtain over their heads, and look in. The set design self-consciously echoes the effect of a natural-history museum; we watch our two heroes through glass, overhearing them—through a pair of flimsy headphones—in a way that feels almost accidental. The items in their apartment are labelled in big, cartoonish letters. The setup produces a neat metaphor for the problems of private life in tumultuous times—sometimes it’s hard to hear the dialogue over the honking mess behind you, in the street.