Bailey Williams’s comedy is a sharp-toothed, sometimes bewildering satire of all-consuming workplace culture.
“No one is being murdered before the gala.”
It’s the kind of directive that wouldn’t be necessary at most companies — even, perhaps, most high-strung, high-design event-planning firms, even at the height of gala season. But nerves have been extra frayed lately at Todd David Design. People’s imaginations might be running away with them.
Or maybe, when Todd — the company’s pseudo-visionary leader — was patched in on speakerphone from a beach in Miami, his team back in New York really did hear him start to get murdered. Hard to say. In any case, his second in command, the imperious Christine, is not having it. So: “No one is being murdered before the gala,” she tells them all. They have a deadline to meet. Back to the task, everyone.
All-consuming workplace culture is the satirical target of “Events,” Bailey Williams’s sharp-fanged new comedy at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Directed by Sarah Blush, this co-production with the Hearth is off the rails — and that’s both a compliment and a critique.
The show is as vibrantly nuts as Todd’s own pretentious ridiculousness (“I am thinking already of florals,” he says airily, musing on the gala) but also tangled, occasionally bewildering and larded with too much corporate-speak. A little of that goes a long way; even when it’s being skewered, simply hearing it can have a deadening effect.
On a set by the design collective dots that includes an absurd foam-encased chair with a tiny tag on one leg, ordering people not to sit in it because it is art, “Events” takes place in two divergent realities. There is the brightly lit, well populated world of the office, and then there is the skulking realm of a woman called Itchy, dimly lit with just a single hanging lamp. (Lighting design is by Masha Tsimring.)
Itchy is part of Todd David Design, too, or at least she used to be. Played with soft, confiding intensity by Zuzanna Szadkowski, she speaks her series of monologues directly to the audience, and is a riveting storyteller. Itchy, we learn, has not been doing so well at the company. She is convinced that someone there has been poisoning her, which is what’s causing her terrible itch. And that’s why she’s gone to the empty office on a Friday night, dressed in a dollar-store version of hazmat gear — plastic rain poncho, goggles, multiple shower caps — to decontaminate the place.
Itchy is disaffected and quite possibly delusional. She may also be dangerous. But in her raw and wounded certainty, she is human and entirely fascinating.
The others — Todd (Brian Bock), Christine (Claire Siebers) and their beleaguered team (Dee Beasnael, Julia Greer, Derek Smith and Haley Wong) — have signed on to the office’s culture of surface-shininess, reflexive obeisance and total commitment, even when their guru-boss is objectively detached from reason. But what if, in their devotion to creating events for their clients, they’re missing the main event — their own finite lives? And what if they’re losing themselves in the process?
“Girl,” one colleague says to another, cutting through the nonsense at last. “You shouldn’t have brought your soul here. That’s your well-being. That’s your meaning-making.”
Events
Through Dec. 18 at the Brick, Brooklyn; bricktheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
