Saw the final performance of Bailey Williams and Sarah Blush’s un-Googleable dystopian open office horror comedy Events at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg tonight, and my one regret is not seeing it sooner. It is one of the most magnificent stage plays about contemporary white collar capitalism I have ever seen and it’s going to stick with me for a long time. Phenomenal script, acting, creepy cold office tube lighting, set design, practical effects, everything.
Early reviews and the blurb in the play's promotional materials were coy, and perhaps deliberately misleading, presumably for the sake of avoiding spoilers--it's not actually a Samuel Beckett-esque magical realism experimental comedy where people monologue existentially about whimsical situations involving working life under the pandemic. It's more accessible than that--and while it certainly is a pandemic-era play, with situations that feel familiar in the zeitgeist (like the characters making funny faces they know the person on the other side of an audio-only conference call can't see), it really has nothing to do with the pandemic at all.
(I'll try to be relatively judicious about spoilers, myself, but it's really impossible to talk about the most interesting parts of this play without spoiling anything. Besides, that was the last showing of a sold-out run, and barring a second run, any potential performance of this play that could be spoiled for you is unlikely to ever happen. So.)
Events is, in fact, true-to-genre psychological horror, in the vein of the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Solaris, and Get Out. Deftly, the monster is rarely mentioned or shown directly, even though its presence is keenly felt in every dialogue, every scene. The monster is capitalism.
And if you're rolling your eyes at that premise--very well-trod territory in experimental theater, I know--the thing that makes Events's capitalism-as-monster so inescapable and so terrifying is that it is never represented by a single person. There are times when it feels like the play is going in the direction of making one character represent Capitalism, against whom a worker gradually awakens to the need to struggle, communistly, but as in real life, things never turn out so simple. The monster is everyone.
All of the characters, plagued by and terrorized by this horrible beast, nonetheless embody it and perpetuate the suffering of themselves and the others for the sake of capitalism, in different ways and at different levels. To quote the nameless debt slave--masterfully played by Zuzanna Szadkowski, doing the most convincing portrayal of a perpetually exhausted middle aged Midwestern white woman bottom tier bureaucrat I have ever seen--who serves as the play's narrator and muse-invoker: "I have an itch I can't scratch, and I am the itch."
The plot of Events is simple: A New York event planning design firm, led by the messianic TED Talk-like design auteur Todd David (Brian Bock), has been contracted to plan a promotional party for a pharmaceutical company, and the theme is "egg". The team on this project, comprised of the slick and effervescently insincere project manager Christine (Claire Siebers), the hard-nosed and pragmatic logistics expert Monica (Dee Beasnael), the jaded and overcommitted creative lead Dario (Derek Smith), and the perpetually deer-in-headlights junior associate Brigid (Julia Greer), are joined by the uncannily adaptable and eerily wise new office manager Francine (Haley Wong) in figuring out what exactly the fuck Todd wants so they can get started.
Todd is not very forthcoming--as a pastiche of every coked-up revivalist superstar Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has ever graced a stage at TED, Todd is big on Values and Vision and Big Ideas that will Change the World, and not so big on, say, making concrete decisions or regularly showing up at the office. When he does give necessary input, it's dialed in to a conference call as he's walking along a beach in Miami, where he's picking up glass beads for "inspiration", and when he does make decisions, it's a direction change at the very last minute that requires everyone to throw out all their progress on the project, start over, and scramble to deliver in the time they have left. A bunch of very normal things ensue, familiar to anyone who has ever done this kind of thing in real life.
Oh, and their pharmaceutical client's product? It is simply referred to as "the pill", and it's a little bit of a spoiler to reveal that the thing the pill does is grant immortality. But that's not important, really (even though it totally is). Taking the pill is a personal decision. We don't talk about personal matters at work, no matter how much they affect, well, everything. It's very unprofessional to discuss the pill, even as a point of principle. The characters can't let personal matters distract them from the really important, world-changing conversations, like whether the tablecloths at this event will be one shade of purple or another. This is important work they're doing here. Didn't you hear Todd? The company has a Vision. The company has Values to uphold.
Events is also a true-to-genre horror story about a Lovecraftian cult. It's hard to tell it's about a cult, at first, because it's so recognizable from real life--the play exaggerates very little, and the moments of the reveal are indistinguishable from moments in corporate life at, say, Meta or Amazon or Google, or at any excessively well-funded Silicon Valley startup--but the play very convincingly makes the case that this style of work, with its grueling hours and its closed mandatory-fun team-building events and its indoctrinating vision documents and its loyalty tests about corporate values, not to mention the cult of personality around its leader, is absolutely a cult.
The most visible way Events gets this across--in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has worked a white collar job at a large company--is the cheerful, excessively casual contemporary corporate jargon ("no problem if not!") through which the cast communicates, clearly expressing discomfort stepping on eggshells trying not to violate company culture norms. It's amazing, for someone just barely old enough to remember when this culture emerged in Silicon Valley as a rebellion against the stodgy, corporate formalism of the previous tech giants, to see how perfectly the dialogue and acting express the intense, uncomfortable insincerity of having to pretend you are a cool bluntly honest friendly cheerful go-getter who loves all their coworkers and is so psyched to come into work all the time, exactly the way you'd act to impress a youngest-ever twentysomething startup CEO in San Francisco circa 2004. (Turns out that talented actors are phenomenal at expressing the absurdities of familiar, everyday performative behavior. It's almost like this is a play or something!)
This is the funniest, and saddest, part of Events--and also the truest--the exhaustion of having to act motivated constantly, and prove yourself motivated. Especially in loyalty tests where a character makes another character contradict themselves trying to impress them, and then calls them out for not being earnest, or being shy, or being vague, don't worry, we're all friends here, you're my number one idea guy, you're my brilliant genius, come on, show me your next world-changing idea! Show me what you got! Yes! I love it!
This is visually exemplified in the form of that hideous chair prop, pictured above. Diagetically, this chair was designed by the design firm's genius founder, it is Art, and sitting on it is absolutely forbidden. It just looms there, ominously, across the stage from the open office conference table and actual chairs where the characters work. It is an intensely unsettling dig at the incestuous relationship between highbrow art and corporate design--a testament to the constant psychological dissonance of the insincerity of creative work for corporations, far alienated from any genuine human experience from which it could have been conceived. Form without function, purely as an exercise of creative authority. Brilliant! I knew I could count on you, you rockstar! This is why we hired you! Perfect! No notes!
A recurring theme is the intense disconnect between the motivations of the design firm's leaders and its workers--his reputation and immense wealth have effectively made Todd a capricious deity figure, throwing himself 100% into his company's mission (but far removed from any of its actual work) just to give him a sense of purpose in a life wanting for nothing, whereas the people working for him are clinging on for dear life, bound by the gravitas of the capitalist contract that ties their lives, their livelihoods, their health, their social worth, their future aspirations, and even their identity and their sense of purpose to performing some mundane role in society.
What's chilling is that all the workers at the design firm are, at first, jaded and clearly paying lip service to Todd's Big Ideas--but absent a life outside of work, and dependent on the company for their survival, they commit more and more of themselves to the company, stifling dissent among one another, until they are fully indoctrinated. Until there's nothing left of them but the company line, and the mad, inconsistent dreams of their founder. The culture of ominous, constant insincerity, of creative brainstorms between ostensible creative equals that degenerate into brown-nosing sessions, of endless validation and forced oversharing for "team building" and of having to justify their personal goals and motivations in terms of the goals of the company, becomes completely sincere. The contemporary corporate jargon, of circling back and finding alignment, of hopping in and out of calls, of effusive and excessive praise, you got this you rockstar, becomes tied to each character's own existential anxieties to the point where they lose the inability to communicate in any other way.
The characters all resist, tragically, in different ways, to no avail. Turns out that only people in leadership can afford to separate work and personal life, if everyone else is always at work--and the people who leave their humanity at home have none to spare at the office.
It's interesting to note how much the anti-corporate message of Events diverges from well-known dystopian critiques of white collar work in the same genre from previous eras of "late" capitalism. The infamous cubicle farm of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, most famously depicted in the film Office Space, heavily emphasized the eternal, unchanging banality of the office--financial security and the fruits of the American Dream at the price of having every day be the same for the rest of your life. A generation before that, Alduous Huxley's Brave New World took the mindless, meaningless drudgery of industrial era bureaucracy to its logical conclusion, a not-too-far step from reality in which eugenics and the alienation of work from its purpose led to a society that manufactured nothing but empty pleasures, essentially just human hamsters in cages, happy to be contained with their hamster wheels and their feeding tubes and their instant pleasure buttons.
Events, like these previous dystopan critiques of capitalism, expounds on how the precarity of the capitalist contract--security and stability in exchange for labor--is dependent on fear of human mortality. Its cast, as designers--our present era's professional experts in signs and symbols--are hyper-literate about the connection between the egg theme for the party and the social implications of the immortality the pill offers, even though they aren't allowed to talk about it directly. Rebirth. Perfection. Completeness. Easter. Breaking the cycle of life and death.
But unlike those prior works--and the entire utopian movement that led to our current era, with its dream that a society without mortal scarcity would render the daily humiliations of labor irrelevant--Events soundly rejects the idea that removing mortality from the capitalist contract robs capitalism of its power. If anything, it makes capitalism even scarier. It couches this in an observation of the present, where the wealth imbalance is so severe that American billionaires are all but untouchable, and never have to work, technically--and yet they throw themselves into the culture and values of work, anyway, precisely because they are effectively invulnerable. Because someone who does not fear death, having nothing to lose, is going to put everyone who relies on them at risk for the sake of giving themselves some semblance of purpose. Because we already live in a world where a bunch of spoiled rich people who act like they are going to live forever govern over the other 90% of the population who are terrified they are going to die tomorrow, and the fear isn't eternal drudgery but constant change. To quote Francine: "Grief is looking back with regret, and wondering if you could have done something different, and pretending you regret nothing. Grief is doing something different. Grief is doing something different every single day, over and over, forever."
Hell in the nineties was reliving the same day 40 hours a week in your cubicle again and again for the rest of your life. Hell in 2022 is spending 80 hours a week in a big open office with no concept of privacy, coming up with an action plan to pivot into exciting new challenges, making some necessary adjustments going forward to increase alignment with our values according to our vision document. (Which, for those of you who don't work in an office, translates to "we're fucked and heads are going to roll, do something about it, there will be loyalty tests.")
You think fighting for your life over whether a corporate party is enjoyable or not is absurd, wait until you see the other half of that equation--people who come to the office and sit and work, absent of any external motivation or purpose, because they've convinced themselves that there's nothing else they'd rather do.
Events noticed. A landmark in our cultural understanding of what the hell is going on, lately, in what we have let work mean to us.
