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L. A. Weekly Pick of the Week!
Part of the interest of Top Dogs is seeing how the transformation of the Amercian corporate world that occurred in the 70s and 80s -- a time when the old coprorate model was mergered, downsized, and outsourced right out of existence -- is now sweeping the globe. European corporations, once as paternal as the old GM, have adopted the American ideal of ruthlessness. Just a little gift from American coporate culture to the rest of the world.
Though the international work force may be struggling with the first phase of something we have long since absorbed, the emotional turmoil of the characters in Top Dogs is in many ways no different than what we still, as a society, are struggling with every day. Despite a time of unparalleled prosperity (a fact of which we are ceaselessly reminded), we are also in a time of unparalleled workplace instability, a time when workers are quickly used up and discarded, where organized labor, increasingly co-opted into shareholder status, has no voice, where institutional memory is lost to ceaseless employee turnover, where an older worker has no place and is steadily forced out or forced down to more and more menial jobs, where our identities are still primarily defined by our career, and when that career comes to an end, almost always without warning, the result can be as devastating as it is to the characters we observe in Top Dogs. We watch them tell their stories, watch them increasingly dehumanized, turned into electronic images, tribalized, regressing into ritual; we see, in miniature, our community reduced to a collective scream of helplessness. Why? If anything, Widmer seems to be appealing to us to look farther than a career as a means of defining a human life, and though we may pay lip service to this idea, here in Los Angeles of all places we must stop and question to what extent we really do.
The Swiss writer Urs Widmer was born on May 21, 1938. He studied Romance Languages and Literature, German Language and Literature and History and became one of the cofounders of the Verlag der Autoren (Author's Publishing House.) In addition to his often scurrilous but always imaginative shorter and longer stories, he has also translated works by several authors, including Eugne Labiche and Raymond Chandler. Urs Widmer now lives and works in Zurich.
by Urs Widmer
translated by Patricia Benecke
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design and Dramaturgy by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Cast: Tatiana Alvarez, Joel Drazner, Richard Grove, Dyan Kane, Dennis Ottobre, Mark Rebernik, Bo Roberts, Gene Williams
Swiss playwright Urs Widmer's brutally funny look at life after downsizing may be billed as surreal, but to anyone familiar with the corporate milieu, it can only seem painfully real. It opens with an endless series of huge, projected mouths announcing name, impressive corporate title and obscene salary. When next we find ourselves in a roomful of these same "top dogs," now jobless clients of the New Challenge Corporation employment agency, our pity can't help but be tinged with smug satisfaction. That duality of response continues as we empathize with this "white-collar trash" newly shorn of identity (literally clinging to their wingtips and pumps) and simultaneously scorn them for weaknesses we also identify with. Director Frederique Michel brilliantly balances the explosively comic and movingly melancholic in a precise, stylish staging that segues from drill-team choreography, to dead-on spotlit monologues (one man fantasizes becoming a zookeeper while a woman imagines impressing her hard-nosed mother with a top-floor office), to re-enactments of the characters firings. The ensemble is impressive: Tatiana Alvarez, Joel Drazner, Richard Grove, Dyan Kane, Dennis Ottobre, Mark Rebernik, Bo Roberts and Gene Williams. Charles Duncombe Jr. created the set, lighting, sound and video (along with Cristian YoungMiller and Arosh Ayrom).
-- Constance Monaghan, L. A. Weekly