By Beth Accomando

January 27, 2026

My introduction to New Village Arts’ The Apiary was last August when I received an email with the subject line: Strange Request.

“So this play requires some very special props,” Kristianne Kruner explained. “One of those being a cadaver — both a human and a pig. And I thought, who do I know in San Diego who might know about this? So I thought of you, Beth.”

So as a home haunter, I did hook them up with a prop cadaver but…

“We started with the cadaver itself,” Kruner added. “But we found that when we actually had a real human on stage, it was even more impactful.”

And the job of playing that body landed with Nio Russell.

“It is difficult because in a TV show, you can have different cutaways from the actor, and so you can maneuver around the fact that they are still alive and still breathing,” Russell said. “When you’re on stage, you have to just sit there and do your best to control your breathing and try not to look alive. So it’s easy if I zone out a little bit during the scene so I can really focus on being really calm and my breathing being really calm.” 

I should probably provide some context for why a dead body is so central to The Apiary and it revolves around bees.

“The Apiary is an incredible new play that follows a group of female scientists who are trying to save the last of the honey bees,” Kruner said. “ So it takes place 22 years in the future in an underfunded lab that is trying to do everything that they can to maintain the life of these bees. And it’s not going so well until a wonderful accident happens. And so then the play really delves into the ethics of scientific discovery. How far do you go to save a species? And what does it mean to take extraordinary steps to protect our beautiful little honeybees.” 

The play employs projection to depict the bees and make them characters in the play.

“One of the things I loved about working on the show is I’ve gotten to learn so much more about the honey bees,” Kruner said. “Our civilization is really so based off of these little tiny creatures, from the foods that we eat and the way that we live. And they are threatened right now. So they are this little tiny creatures with this huge impact in our society that are in a moment of danger. And so I think that by studying the bees, by really looking at the bees, we’re getting to look at the bigger picture of what’s happening in our world right now, but through these little tiny, tiny creatures.”

Check out The Apiary, which runs through February 22 at New Village Arts in Carlsbad.