No Dogs in the Kitchen’s “Below the Belt,” with Garrett Wiegel and Jeremy Osinga/Photo: Sara Corker
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A dollop of Albee, a pinch of Pinter, a dash of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”—mix these ingredients together, add playwright Richard Dresser’s formidable inventiveness, comic flair and real-life corporate experience, and voila! We have “Below the Belt,” Dresser’s 1995 absurdist take on organizational existence, given a seriously funny performance by the spanking-new No Dogs in the Kitchen company under the skilled direction of Jared Goudsmit.
Actually, “absurdist” isn’t quite the right term for Dresser’s three-hander, which takes place in a remote, heavily guarded manufacturing compound located in an unnamed country. “Below the Belt” inhabits the fertile zone between Ionesco-style nonsensical absurdism and Swiftian social satire, its characters and situations driven by a strange but coherent logic that gets pushed here to a crackpot extremity. Simultaneously absorbing and disturbing, the play has us roaring with laughter while we contemplate the bureaucratic head games that keep these office workers in a state of gnawing insecurity and smoldering, inchoate rage.
The play’s triad consists of two “checkers”—i.e., quality control inspectors—the snarky and self-isolating veteran Hanrahan and the initially polite and easygoing Dobbitt, a new arrival assigned to share a cramped, uncomfortable room with Hanrahan, plus their supervisor, Merkin, a manipulative egotist who combines the worst features of the pointy-headed boss in “Dilbert” and the Marquis de Sade. The three nerdy company men scheme with and against each other, each trying desperately not to become the odd man out in this lonely, prison-like outpost of capitalism as they perform meaningless work on behalf of the ungrateful. At one point, naive newbie Dobbitt asks his colleagues about the “units” being checked—what are they, exactly? In response, Merkin and Hanrahan laugh uproariously. Units are just units, which exist to be checked by checkers. Only God and maybe the unseen Regional Director know or care what it’s all about.
No Dogs in the Kitchen’s “Below the Belt,” with Aidan Beasley, Garrett Wiegel and Jeremy Osinga/Photo: Sara Corker
There’s a plot of sorts, preposterous but sequential, involving verbal fencing between the thin-skinned Hanrahan and the over-apologetic Dobbitt; bullying and shifting favoritism by Merkin; the plant’s contaminated river catching fire; the climactic “Economic Recovery and Realignment Day Party,” to which the checkers, disliked by the more numerous workers, are invited only for forty-five minutes of dead time; and a tragicomic marital crisis. Oh, and did I mention the croaking, sharp-toothed, orange-eyed mutant creatures that are gradually burrowing their way under the barbed-wire fence into the compound? Spoiler alert: They mean no good.
These plot developments are really only excuses for playwright Dresser to unleash salvo after salvo of well-honed zingers and bon mots, as the characters struggle to secure the respect and affection of co-workers for whom they themselves feel only rivalry and disdain. All three youthful cast members—Jeremy Osinga as Hanrahan, Garrett Wiegel as Dobbitt and Aidan Beasley as Merkin—are a hoot, fully embracing the storyline’s pretzel-like twists and turns, without neglecting the incisive wit that graces Dresser’s polished, fluent script. Director Goudsmit keeps everything light and limber, yet firmly under control, imparting that deadpan daffiness that’s so essential to both absurdism and satire.
The show is great fun from beginning to end, but underneath the zaniness there are glimpses of some darker truths. With its trivial, overthought interactions among characters and perverse power dynamics, the play is a kind of corporate parable, showing that when life is reduced to routinized work, work becomes dramatized, and our human need for purpose, meaning and deep connection can assume some very weird forms. As we watch these exaggerated, eccentric but recognizable figures fight to retain their sanity and self-esteem in a milieu that seems masterfully engineered to strip them of both, we can’t help but wonder about the damage we have sustained and perhaps inflicted during our own time spent in the rat race.
Anyone who has ever inhabited a cubicle will relate to and enjoy this show, which announces the presence of a promising addition to our city’s crowded theater scene. If you can, see this play not once but twice, as the actors who play the superficially different but structurally similar characters of Hanrahan and Dobbitt will alternate parts during the run. The switcheroo brings home just how interchangeable these human resources really are.
“Below the Belt” runs through September 28 at City Lit Theater, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church. Tickets are $32.64 for adults, $16.88 for students, available at nodogsinthekitchen.org.
