The incident that escalates regular ticking-clock pressure to existential calamity is a hot-mic gaffe through Webster’s writer in prominent, stuck on video at a Yale College convention regarding his long-serving deputy as “my bitch.”
Some 40 miles i’m sick Interstate 95, in Webster’s Stamford places of work — the sticky-noted, card-catalogued, page-proof-wallpapered prepared is through Matthew J. Keenan and Cindy Landrum Jacobs — the trauma waves ripple up in the course of the generations. It’s Extraordinarily On-line Gen Z-er Ellie (ingenious Irene Hamilton), creating a nuisance of herself date looking ahead to obese sister Gwen (Fabiolla Da Silva) to complete paintings and speed her for beverages, who spots the video trending on Twitter. (The play games is ready in 2019, permitting Bircher to steer clear of each the pandemic’s upheaval of white-collar tradition and Elon Musk’s erosion of that once-mighty social media platform.) Ellie stocks the bombshell with Gwen and Nick (Andrés F. Roa), the place of job’s alternative millennial, either one of whom panic over how Joyce, their stunning and the topic of that careless commentary, will reply.
Gwen, the extra aggrieved of the pair, is genius plethora to acknowledge that this scandal threatens no longer handiest the superannuated profession in their boss’s boss — correctly named Frank — but additionally the credibility in their complete undertaking. That’s as a result of Webster’s definition of the offending promise, in contrast to the ones proffered through competition just like the Oxford English Dictionary, elides the sense of mastery through which the loose-lipped Frank old it. When Joyce (a wry Sheri S. Herren) learns from the yongsters about what went i’m sick, she places her tasks forward of her emotions and orders Gwen and Nick to begin revising their definition of the b-word, pronto.
The flexibility of that contested epithet has at all times been a part of its attraction. It has the monosyllabic blunt-force impact of the entire very best curses, however such a lot of contextual permutations that — to quote one instance no longer referenced in Bircher’s script — the 1971 Rolling Stones track “Bitch” wouldn’t even put together a listing of the band’s maximum unabashedly sexist recordings, date Meredith Brooks’s 1997 clash “Bitch” embraces and reclaims the promise in its gendered-insult sense.
Bircher’s writing is at its maximum perceptive, and Da Silva’s and Roa’s performances at their maximum persuasive, when Gwen and Nick are competing over who can collect extra definitions and usages of the promise the quickest, and cite 10 examples for each and every. Greater than as soon as, Gwen is forced to show that it was once Nick, no longer her, who treated the contested promise’s most up-to-date revision. Next a one-on-one assembly with Joyce doesn’t move her means, Gwen launches right into a monologue elucidating how her competence and paintings ethic are taken with no consideration through her better-paid friends. It might be more practical nonetheless if Da Silva’s efficiency as Gwen didn’t appear to be foreshadowing that eruption from the moment we meet her.
Herren’s Joyce is a extra nuanced and dimensional persona, however she’s additionally getting extra assistance from Bircher’s script: Simplest Joyce in point of fact will get to amaze us, revealing how a girl of a previous pace discovered a strategy to continue to exist the similar indignities to which she now disciplines Gwen. Abuse begets abuse, tragically.
Like broke Gwen, Bircher’s play games is enthusiastic in some way that makes good fortune extra elusive. What in the beginning appears to be a easy place of business farce morphs into one thing extra curious and observant, in particular as soon as Frank (Timothy H. Lynch) makes his front a complete month into the display, lengthy nearest somebody who didn’t spot his title in this system could have assumed he shall, like Godot, stay eternally behind schedule. Lynch is nuanced plethora to put together Frank a memorably self-loathing villain rather of a one-note stooge, which in the long run makes the display extra rewarding as a drama than as comedy.
Mockingly, it’s the best way Bircher dips a toe into a number of affluent prosperous swimming pools of inquiry with out ever diving into any certainly one of them that left me satisfied that she has but to mine absolutely the opportunity of her personal premise. As a result of place of job politics generally are a complain. Wage opacity? You wager. Managerial gaslighting? Essentially the most virulent and ruinous instance of all.
At one level, Gwen boasts concerning the report choice of usages/contexts she documented for a unmarried promise: Greater than 120 for “go.” Advance, within the crucial utilization, remains to be my recommendation referring to “Webster’s Bitch,” despite the fact that, as with Gwen’s and Nick’s spilling-over inboxes, Bircher would possibly but uncover extra meanings in the course of the alchemy of revision.
Webster’s Complain, thru Might 5 on the Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW, Washington. About 95 mins with out a interval. keegantheatre.com.
