Now it’s empathy that’s the thing with feathers. Or that’s the perception of the impenetrably thick-skulled men who rule the workplace in Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s “Do You Feel Anger?,” a fitful comedy with an ingenious premise, which opened on Sunday night at the Vineyard Theater under the direction of Margot Bordelon.
“Empathy? Isn’t that a type of bird?,” asks Jon (Greg Keller), a boss at a debt collection agency, with what appears to be genuine cluelessness. Jon is speaking to the newly arrived Sofia (Tiffany Villarin), a counselor who has been brought in to teach his team the value of compassion.
Just before posing that question, Jon had been extolling his company’s new maternity leave policy: “We let women leave when they’re giving birth.” And no, that’s not a joke either. What Jon and his male co-workers — the short-tempered Howie (Justin Long) and the self-described poet Jordan (Ugo Chukwu) — find genuinely funny turns out to be a lot more inane, and a lot scarier.
Ms. Nelson-Greenberg has had the inspired notion of translating everyday sexism into the ostensibly nonsensical language of absurdism, as it was practiced by the likes of Eugene Ionesco, the young Edward Albee and, more recently, Christopher Durang. In the testosterone-saturated world of “Do You Feel Anger?,” words have been uprooted and mangled to the point that they now convey only the most atavistic impulses.
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Asked by Sofia to list the feelings that they might expect others to experience during stress-inducing phone calls to people who owe money, her male pupils come up with answers like “horn” (short for horniness) and “hunger.” The one woman among these employees, Eva (a wonderful Megan Hill), provides more expected responses such as “scared” and “ashamed.”
Eva does get confused about what other words mean. Murder, for instance. “What’s it called when you stab someone to death?” she asks, in reference to a serial killer she used to date. Spend enough time in the company of men, it seems, and a gal’s language skills are guaranteed to short circuit. Sofia had better beware.
The spasmodic art of conversation that’s practiced by the overgrown boys of “Anger” is sometimes flat-out hilarious. And you may find yourself startled into laughter as involuntary as a belch.
The male actors here — who also include Tom Aulino as a mysterious 130-year old man whose own anger has not been withered by age — offer an entertaining gallery of satiric portraits. But the variations on their characters’ willful stupidity (Jon thinks a tampon is an emotion) are stretched awfully thin, as if a “Saturday Night Live” sketch were being played on a loop.
The script features plenty of portents about decidedly unfunny goings-on at the firm. There are, for instance, that lonely cardigan and abandoned coffee cup at the conference table, the only evidence of the existence of Janie, an employee who went to the ladies’ room and never came back.
But Ms. Bordelon’s staging lacks the sustained thrum of anxiety required to justify the play’s climactic eruption into violence. It is followed by a doozy of a final scene, in which Laura Jellinek’s standard-issue office set morphs into a dazzlingly eerie limbo land.
For “Anger,” which was seen at the Humana Festival in Louisville last year, aspires to more than caricatures of dangerously devolved masculinity. Ms. Nelson-Greenberg is also considering the ways in which women unthinkingly absorb a poisoned social system for which patriarchy seems far too dignified a word.
That’s the corrupting process that’s traced in Sofia’s attempts to ingratiate herself with the guys. In the early scenes, Ms. Villarin registers as little more than a straight woman to the madness around her. She’s the eternal good girl, determined to succeed at her appointed task.
But there comes a turning point when Sofia makes the decision — and it is a decision — to laugh at what sounds like a seriously disgusting cartoon that Howie and Jordan have drawn of her and Eva. “Is that my appendix?” she asks, appalled. Her face contorts painfully into a smile, followed by a hollow, choked guffaw that would deceive no one — well, except a man.
Is Sofia, too, empathy-challenged? After all, she has consistently refused to answer the phone calls of her mother (Jeanne Sakata).
Mom has been leaving long messages about her nasty breakup with Sofia’s father, who has turned out to have a second family and was always insisting on nonreciprocal oral sex. (This particular form of erotic inequality is a running motif in “Anger.”) Yet Sofia has continued to be in touch with her father, despite that seriously inappropriate email he sent her.
Ms. Sakata is so touchingly, desperately beseeching that you may feel the need to call your own mother as soon as the curtain falls. And Ms. Hill’s Eva is an even more poignant, guilt-inspiring presence.
This eagerly affable woman seems to crawl through life in a defensive slump, glancing anxiously over her shoulder. That’s what happens when you are regularly mugged from behind in the coffee room, presumably by a co-worker.
Ms. Hill — who recently appeared as the turbo-charged rocker David Lee Roth in Amy Staats’s “Eddie and Dave” (directed by Ms. Bordelon) — here delivers a very different comic portrait. Always trembling with an air of apology and confusing the names of the men in her life, from her father to that serial killer, Eva at first seems like the funniest character in this erratic show. She turns out to be the saddest as well, which in the warped world of “Anger” is as it should be.
