Misogyny, general male cluelessness, and the women who put up with it in the workplace is the subject for Do You Feel Anger?, a new comedy that opened on Tuesday at the Vineyard Theatre.
Mara Nelson-Greenberg, the playwright, establishes a straightforward situation. Sofia (Tiffany Villarin), a sunny, rational woman in her late 20s, is a professional empathy coach. She has been hired by a debt collection agency to ameliorate dysfunction at a lawsuit-prone branch office. She aims to help its staff get in better touch with the feelings of the people they harass.
The menfolk are not receptive to Sofia’s efforts.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★ review here.]
“I don’t understand why someone else’s emotions should outweigh mine,” says Howie (Justin Long), a cheerful dude with major anger issues. Another bro, Jordan (Ugo Chukwu) is not as aggressive as the argyle patterns that his wardrobe features, but there’s an insidious edge to the bad French and poetical bits that he affects. Nor is Jon (Greg Keller), the branch manager, especially helpful, much as he declares, “I really want to pretend that I’m a good guy.”
Among the women, Eva (Megan Hill) is a beaming, chattering, terribly anxious soul who keeps getting mysteriously mugged in the kitchen and fakes having a boyfriend to ward off male co-worker aggression. Grasping for the right way to describe her inner being, Eva says, “I feel whatever the word would be for ‘nothing,’ if it existed.” Eva has long dreamed of being a mermaid so she can float free of her existence.
Sofia nurses her own troubles, having recently learned that her father secretly harbors a second family. For all of her empathetic expertise, Sofia is unable to discuss this betrayal with her sorrowful mother (Jeanne Sakata), whose phone messages she ignores.
As the 90-minute piece proceeds over five scenes set in a conference room, Sofia becomes frustrated in her efforts to wise up the workers even as she is observed to be adapting behavioral gambits to fend off unwelcome male attention. The men in the play are depicted not so much as predators as willfully un-woke jerks given to schoolboy attitudes.
While the playwright’s scenario suggests a sardonic variation on The Office, she composes its intermittently droll dialogue along mildly absurdist lines. Frequent non-sequiturs, cacology, and similar verbal blundering riddle the text to underscore the chronic miscommunication—intentional and otherwise—that divides the sexes.
Such screwy language, interspersed with casually impolite utterances (the phrase “blowjobs without reciprocation” is repeated more than a dozen times), recalls early works by Christopher Durang. The conclusion, set in the ladies bathroom, suggests the magic realism of Sarah Ruhl’s first plays. These writers are mentioned not to imply that Nelson-Greenberg is unoriginal but to provide a ready taste of what she serves up to the audience during Do You Feel Anger?
This meaningful, initially humorous play ultimately does not provide much emotional or even satirical resonance, although women are likely to appreciate its depiction of sexist attitudes and subtleties more than men. One wonders whether the introduction of additional contrasting characters might flesh out the theme to a greater illuminative degree. The final scene, different in expression than the rest of the play, is something of a puzzlement, although its point about Sofia’s lack of personal empathy is made all too obvious.
Margot Bordelon, the director, stages the action and actors to gradually create a sense of menace around the penultimate scenes as Sofia loses control of the situation. Good performances and effective design make the most of the play, which proves to be more thought provoking than actually satisfying.
