A group of women in recovery meets weekly in the same place over several decades to share their stories as the world around them continuously shifts and evolves.

Fluorescents up. We’re in the basement of a church in Anytown, USA, in one of those quintessential nondescript white rooms with the metal folding chairs. This is where the women meet for 12-step, same time every week, like clockwork. It’s a ritual. It’s one day at a time. It’s—humorously formal? I had made a note of “artifice”; it feels for a good long while like a play that doesn’t know where or what it wants to be.

The Dinosaurs is written with an ambling naturalism that feels at odds with the way the characters speak. They finish each other’s sentences in an almost mechanical way, sometimes with a witty Sherman-Palladino-esque patter and sometimes like novice actors tripping on an em-dash. The characters are initially not that distinguishable from one another, named similarly and sometimes even speaking in unison. What this is meant to convey—and does, but not in an accessible way—is the essential experience of being new to one of these groups. The outsider, still counting in days, not sure if you belong here. You don’t want to be one of them—the nameless, faceless, interchangeable “bits of scenery” whom you imagine Have A Problem.

This is stapled to a second major structural conceit which only starts to reveal itself about midway through the play. A stopped clock telegraphs the temporal novelty early, but it becomes more apparent in a moment of group crosstalk. There are two meetings happening at the same time. And then more. One character speaks and it seems that time is flowing backwards to when she first joined the group. Another character abruptly disappears and they speak about her in past tense. The meeting is the constant, but the group composition changes over time: newbies becoming leaders running the meeting. It’s evocative of the transitive quality of support systems. Near the end of the play, we get this memorable, poignant moment between two characters who don’t know each other, haven’t interacted, but have touched each other’s lives through the group fabric.

The riposte hits: the characters each deliver these monologues in the second half that show that they really do have these disparate backstories, but have chosen to gather to work through a shared challenge. Thinking of them as interchangeable substance abusers is the outsider’s category error. The foundation of meaningful connection is deliberately seeking the commonality, big and small—spilling the donut filling, the necessary tedium of group business, setting up and closing down the meeting. The reassuring irritation of “Thanks, Sarah.”