Working 2020
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
The Actors’ Gym
Extended through June 1
RECOMMENDED
There are a few things you need to know about Working 2020, the show currently playing on Friday evenings at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks. First, while the evening was “inspired by” Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking 1974 nonfiction book Working, the pieces themselves were written by members of director Bobby Moresco’s Actors’ Gym. Second, all eleven actors are excellent, and some are even better than that. Third, the eleven pieces that comprise this show are united by a powerful theme, one that this group does a fine job of exploring.
The evening begins with the Sisyphean image of an isolated man trying to push a large boulder up a mountain, as John Lennon’s “Working-Class Hero” plays over the speakers and the actors enter and sit on folding chairs at the rear of the stage. Then, an actress with a slight build and graying hair (Maureen Teefy) walks toward the audience and relates her struggles to make a living as a long-distance trucker. During her story, other performers (Joseph Lyle Taylor and Tonya Cornelisse) take on characters who play crucial roles in the outcome. (Other pieces also involve additional actors, an effective strategy in creating a sense of a company creation rather than an individuals’ showcase.)
The female trucker’s story is followed by that of The Orderly (Tom Bower), The Mother (Elizabeth Grullon), The Fireman (Michael Pare), The Marriage Counselor (Joe Pacheco), The Hairdresser (Anne DeSalvo), The Writer (Cornelisse), The Actor (Thomas Polanski), The Waitress (Pauline Schantzer), The Hustler (Goya Robles) and The Welder (Taylor). Five of the monologues are performed by the same person who wrote them (DeSalvo, Polanski, Schantzer, Robles and Taylor).
Each piece effectively portrays a working-class person coming up against the spiraling odds of financial success or of being recognized as an individual rather than a dispensable cog in the capitalist machine. In spirit, the material goes back to the Group Theatre of the 1930s — plays by Odets like Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy, in which the working-class hero gets screwed by the boss. The difference here is that in the computer age there is no longer much hope of making an honest living, much less of getting any justice if you’ve been cheated. The only two stories that have a happy ending of sorts are Pacheco’s marriage counselor and DeSalvo’s hairdresser. Of these two, only the hairdresser presents a contemporary model of upward mobility, and even she is aware that her success is the exception, not the rule.
My personal favorites are the final two pieces in the show: Robles’ hustler and Taylor’s welder. Robles, whom I have enjoyed in his drug dealer role on Get Shorty (on Epix), is even more effective in person. His tale of a proud son trying to help his struggling family captures in shorthand the dilemma of many minorities, who have few options for obtaining economic security.
But the show’s crowning achievement is Joseph Taylor’s monologue about the heartlessness of corporate overseers, which gives a good sense of what Clifford Odets might be writing about if he were at work today. Taylor’s words crackle with electricity and shoot bullets of outrage at the faceless entities who ruin the lives of multitudes of working-class men and women in their pursuit of a larger market share. This performer is a world-class talent who should be much better-known than he is; here he renders a highly theatrical segment that will take your breath away.
Nothing else in the evening reaches that level of excitement — but the bigger problem is the continual starting and stopping that having all these separate stories entails. This can get wearisome. Also, Moresco pairs up some of the narratives, such as when Tom Bower’s Orderly and Elizabeth Gullon’s Mother alternate their stories. Bower is a legendary actor, whose memorable performances go back to the dawn of television and to countless movies from the last 30 years (some may remember him as a local doctor on The Waltons, others as a narcotics cop from Hill Street Blues). I found it disrespectful and distracting to split the focus when Bower was performing. More to the point, I didn’t feel that the two monologues enriched or bolstered each other. It simply seemed like a way to cut down on the running time.
Right now the sum of the parts is unequal to the power of the individual presentations. The production seems to be in development, still searching for a form. In the meantime, I highly recommend it for its many great performances and for the beleaguered characters that have been created. They will linger in your mind long after the show has ended.
Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 6/1, 8 p.m.; extended through Jun. 1. (818) 687-8559 or whitefiretheatre.com. Running time: two hours with one intermission.
