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An office running on ambition and fun

'It's 11 o'clock." "At night?? Did we have dinner?" Energy drinks and whiskey, plus the occasional $17-a-pack cigarette, are what these people live on. No sleep, no kindness, no food, nothing but blind ambition. Which is, as Marc Antony told us, a grievous fault, and, dude, these people pay grievously.

The Wilma Theater is proud to present the Off-Broadway hit comedy Assistance, the second offering in playwright Leslye Headland’s “Seven Deadly Sins” series, directed by returning Wilma director David Kennedy.
The Wilma Theater is proud to present the Off-Broadway hit comedy Assistance, the second offering in playwright Leslye Headland’s “Seven Deadly Sins” series, directed by returning Wilma director David Kennedy.Read more
    by ToZinman, For The Inquirer | Columnist
    Published 

'It's 11 o'clock."

"At night?? Did we have dinner?"

Energy drinks and whiskey, plus the occasional $17-a-pack cigarette, are what these people live on. No sleep, no kindness, no food, nothing but blind ambition. Which is, as Marc Antony told us, a grievous fault, and, dude, these people pay grievously.

Actually, the above-quoted conversation is one of the few person-to-person exchanges in the short moralistic comedy Assistance by Leslye Headland (Bachelorette), the Wilma Theater's latest, under David Kennedy's snappy direction.

Most of the dialogue is one-sided phone conversations, and most of them are desperate, groveling, frantic. And there's hardly a specific noun or antecedent in any of it: Who's "he"? What's "it"? Where's "there"?

This is a grungy office where assistants toil at the mercy of their tyrannical boss, the unseen Daniel, one of the richest, most powerful men in the world. Think the Donald. Think Vogue editor Anna Wintour (they don't call her Nuclear Wintour for nothing). With the promise of promotion, these assistants sabotage the others or themselves or both.

Nick and Nora (now where have we heard those names before?) are the major characters, and Kate Czajkowski and Kevin Meehan are terrific as twenty-somethings whose crassness and cruelty and jokiness are expressed more in body language than spoken language.

Jake Blouch, Kahyun Kim, Emily Althaus, and Michael Doherty turn in nail-on-the-head performances. They are obviously having big fun being these people.

Assistance is one of a series of plays by Headland called "Seven Deadly Sins" and this one (labeled "greed" - not for money but for fame, power, glittering success) - already has been optioned by NBC for development as a comedy series.

And that's what it feels like: a TV sitcom where the moral of the story is obvious and nothing really changes, but the interchangeable "sits" create a very contemporary, very shallow "com."

Assistance

Through Feb. 3 at the Wilma Theater, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets $39-$66. Information: 215-546-7824 or wilmatheater.orgEndText