Photo by Mitch Goldstrum

The Memorandum

Review by Paul Birchall

In the late Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel’s world of hapless drones and drudges, corporate overlords make absurd decrees that all must obey. (After defying Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, Havel was elected president of his newly liberated nation.) Obviously reflecting the bad old days when writers could only criticize the government obliquely, Havel’s underlings are dehumanized into thinking of nothing but their upcoming lunch break. It also sounds more than a bit like your day job, doesn’t it? 

Well, it appears that while the Soviet era is gone – unless Putin knits it back together — corporations now have power and influence over our lives in ways that make the sardonic excesses of Havel’s play almost seem prosaic and simplistic. In Jen Bloom’s quick paced staging, we can’t help but think that Havel’s satire was way ahead of its time – and, indeed, is only marred by not being full of enough scheming, spite, and backroom backstabbing.  We live today in a world where not only are corporations identified legally as “individuals with free speech,” but they’re also mini-governments of their own, controlling the activities of the so called “real” government.  Where totalitarian socialism has failed, people now line up to be ruled and controlled for a corner office and a paycheck, all of which renders the core of Havel’s comedy ironic and ferocious in an entirely new way.

Josef Gross (Bart Petty), the well-intentioned, but not particularly well informed managing director of a massive corporation (no one seems certain what the corporation actually does) receives a mysterious memo written in what appears to be gibberish – it’s the first salvo from his deputy director, Miss Ballas (Barbara Urich), who has decreed that all workers in the company must utilize a new language, called “Ptydepe”, for all office projects.  No one understands Ptydepe, which is entirely incoherent, but Miss Ballas believes that the sheer random gibberish of it will allow interactions to be more precise and free from linguistic ambiguity and distracting emotion.

Gross is appalled by the new language, but his attempts to put a stop to the lingua babbela force him into a battle with Miss Ballas – that he discovers to his horror he can’t win. The more he tries to apply reason to the hysteria that sweeps the company, the more rapidly his own authority slips through his fingers.

Bloom’s serviceably snarky production cuts smartly to the dopiness of drones, even as the clinical office setting is threaded with undercurrents of unease, and then  paranoia.  We’re always aware that the company’s insistence that its workers use a new language is very much a Big Brotherly attempt to control intellectual thought – as well as a means for the ambitious Miss Ballas to use as a weapon against anyone who opposes her. 

A child of the Absurdist school of drama that included playwrights Luigi Pirandello and Eugene Ionesco, The Memorandum is about human spinelessness and how diffident refusal to confront tyranny permits all kinds of wicked excesses to prosper.

Perhaps because of the production’s distinctively cerebral and, yes, arch tone, it fails to engage emotionally. Part of this problem comes from the text, as Havel is more concerned with crafting a metaphor than providing his characters with dimensions. Yet, it’s also a performance problem that the characters feel so like a collection of quirks. Perhaps the absence of personalities is part of the production’s point. Okay, point made.

Petty’s everyman-turn as the increasingly befuddled managing director is suitably confused and irritating – but his lack of ruthlessness in handling his underling’s rebellion isn’t really convincing.  It is here that the difference between 1968 and today’s corporate atmosphere comes into stark counterpoint:  Nowadays, any on-his-toes executive would be far more worldly and wily than is Petty’s Gross, and would just fire the subordinate and not shed a tear. 

Urich’s Miss Ballas is a revelation, however:  Cheerful and girlish, her perkiness belies an inward cruelty and thirst for power that is truly timeless.  The Production’s ultra-chic, modern atmosphere is enhanced by Sean T. Cawelti’s quirky production design, which includes a series of corporate-style slide images, complete with irritating hashtags calculated by Human Resources to boost morale in a dead end job. –Paul Birchall

Santa Monica Repertory Theatre at Miles Memorial Playhouse, 1130 Lincoln Blvd, Santa Monica; Fri.-Sun., 7:30 p.m.; through April 20. (213) 268-1454, www.santamonicarep.org.