Assistance files into over-caricatured
Pinch ‘N’ Ouch opened their newest comedy/drama Assistance this past weekend. Written by Leslye Headland and met with not so favorable reviews from its opening in New York, Assistance consists of the cookie cut-out characters that audiences have seen over and over in regards to workplace humor and very little to really leave you saying more than, that was alright. Unfortunately, even George Contini, director, couldn’t take this skimpy script and make it less been there, done that. But fortunately for you I have more to say about “rolling calls”, shallow characters and predictability.
The entire show centers around one office, a few employees each at a different level of success, and a never present boss. They all simultaneously hate their jobs and yet want to stay and climb the invisible ladder. They take calls, transfer calls, hold calls, make calls, and in between gripe about what they do or make weird faces and voices. Hence the shallowness. The play opens with Vince (Grant McGowen) and Nick (Joe Sykes) doing what consists of the majority of the play. Vince is about to move up to a new position and Nick will be taking over his job of first assistant (so prestigious!). In between calls, the over-acting and caricatured actions are distracting and immediately set a tone for the night that is unpleasant. Vince’s character could have been wiped from the play and no one would have noticed. His goal is to just fill a numbered seat that Headland created for stock characters. He is the depthless of them all and his story line makes no consequence to any part of the action on stage.
Luckily, after Vince leaves the office, Nick’s Jim Carrey-esque antics calm down a bit. And then we are introduced to Nora (Morgan Pellegrino), who, not so spoiler alert, will be Nick’s office love interest and who’s cubicle love will be the only source of what is seemingly a plot line. But on the upside, Morgan Pellegrino made this show more palatable than it should have been. She was the only actor who on her own was believable and true. Those bantering with her were made better by her presence and I was thankful that Joe Sykes had someone to play off of who brought out actual emotions and character traits that resembled real life humans. There back and forth phone scenarios and growth of relationship take up most of the stage time. Until we meet a few other players who do much of the same thing.
We first meet Heather (Liz Schad) who is wearing scrunchies. Which I think is enough said. But I will go on. She is very much the over zealous yet under qualified intern who wishes she could be cooperate just for her parents but in reality would be much happier doing something less demanding like, I don’t know, making scrunchies. For a girl who has no idea about outward business appearances, she is incredibly emotionally shallow and blames the loss of her job on her mother’s dead brother and even screams so much into the phone to her mother. Maybe this would have been believable if she actually wanted to go on the business trip and didn’t go to great lengths, that she knew would piss off her boss, to get out of going on and eventually get fired because of it. Then we meet Justin (Barrett Doyle) who is the everyone’s whipping boy. He gets treated like shit from his boss, the other employees, and even his therapist. And of course he is a weakened angry man. That is all. And lastly we see Jenny (Mandi Lee) who is the British import taking control of all the chaos in the office with a cool and professional manner. But when out of sight of her fellow employees lets loose and freaks the fuck out because, duh!, she too hates her job.
I was left wishing Daniel, the unseen boss, actually took the stage. That there would have been more, definitely not more of what was already there, but more of what I had not seen. Maybe, and most likely, the introduction of the boss would have been just another Devil Wears Prada or Swimming with Sharks. But maybe it could have added a character, or even a reaction or action from the already on-stage characters that wasn’t so predictable. Seeing Assistance will only make you wonder how NBC is going to adapt this play into a television show. 90-minutes of rolling calls was enough for me, I can’t imagine an entire season.
Assistance is playing at Pinch ‘N’ Ouch till May 4. For more information, visit pnotheatre.org.
