Like the dog snorting in the background, the robot vacuum definitely steals the scene. The second half of the new play “Work hard, have fun and make historyIn , undeniably charming actor Susannah Perkins is on the same stage, busily scurrying over industrial carpet, a black disc that hits walls but doesn’t tip over the edge, at least the night I saw the show. did not fall.
Perkins plays a phone service representative named Annie who calls a frantic customer threatened by iWhip 2.0, a new Android assistant.
“What’s the command to turn it off?” the caller begs.
“‘Put down your blade, Iwhip,'” Annie instructed.
Perkins gives the line a perfectly comic twist, but our focus is on Annie’s own numbness. Unleashing a robot can wreak havoc. Isn’t that interesting?
The title, “Work hard, have fun and make history,” reflects Amazon’s motto, never siding with machines, but in an increasingly fragmented and disembodied culture. The prevalence of machines in Written by Ruth Tang (lowercase names) and directed by Kaitlyn Sullivan, the film is the 2023 year of Clubbed Sam, an annual showcase of unconventional experimentation at Wild Projects in the East Village. It will be the first work of the Summerworks Festival.
Unfortunately, the tumult of sparsely related ideas and swarms of scattered characters have contributed to this suggestion, above all, of human estrangement: estrangement from the body, from physical existence, and from man. There’s a nagging feeling that you’ve overwhelmed comedy without a rich plot. Other people.
It’s a story about both the labor that brings home a paycheck and the labor that brings babies into the world, and uncontrollable greed disguised as genius. Thus, we have a couple of funny, dim-witted tech buddy characters called Jeff (Sagan Chen) and Elon (a.k.a. b). It’s about gender identity, sex, marital relationships, and the pain of parental rejection. It’s about climate change and artificial intelligence getting smarter and smarter while remaining very stupid in its essence. It’s about containers (heavy shipping boxes) and spills of containers that can’t contain them.
That’s a lot to fit into a 75 minute show. On a utilitarian set by design collective Dot and under warehouse-like lighting by Isabella Bird, ‘Work Hard’ is told in a series of fragmented, not necessarily tense scenes. For example, Elon and Jeff rambling.
With a massive doubling of the three-person cast and narrated dialogue (sound design by Lee Kinney), the show is as cumulative as the grumpy funny baby we meet for the first time in the womb (Chen). And life chases. But this keenly observant, sometimes heartbreaking, gruesome comedic drama is too sporadic to gather strength as it unfolds.
Work hard, have fun and make history
Until May 30th at the Wild Project in Manhattan. clubbedsam.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
