Work Is Work: The Receptionist and The Fever

It doesn’t take long to figure out that there’s something not right in The Receptionist. At the start of Adam Bock’s 2007 play — now in a revival at Second Stage directed by the fluent-in-menace Sarah Benson — a soft-spoken man chats with us about fly-fishing. He’s got an amicable, uncool-dad energy: bad tie, mustache and rimless glasses, white tennis shoes with his pleated work slacks. But why can’t he finish certain sentences? And why is so much of his ambling conversation about blood and death? “It seems a bit gruesome,” he tells us, explaining what he does with a catch, “but I cut the gills and I hold it in the water of the stream and bleed it out. It’s the humane way to kill a fish … And then I eat it. And that’s okay. Because everything out there is eating something.”

So, what’s eating us? The answer’s right there, and the game of The Receptionist is to dress it up in business casual and smother it in puce carpeting and bad wallpaper. On an office set by the ever-busy dots collective with a color scheme set to maximum soul-drain, we meet the chipper Beverly Wilkins (Katie Finneran), the titular admin, gossiping away on the telephone while deftly routing her absent boss’s calls to his voicemail. She gives her interlocutor motherly romantic advice (no more married men!), she orders a birthday cake, she cleans the coffee station, does some shredding, and bustles productively as her co-worker Lorraine (Mallori Johnson) arrives, also in need of romantic advice (no more narcissists!). The tone is aggressively beige — except that Beverly casually lets slip that “something went wrong yesterday. With a client. Mr. Raymond came back to the office very upset.” Perhaps that explains the eventual arrival of Martin Dart (Will Pullen) from “the central office.”

I won’t give away the play’s twist, because it has only one, which it deploys fairly early and then simply ratchets up for the rest of its 80 minutes. Suffice it to say, we don’t know what Lorraine and Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer, who doesn’t get enough stage time) do at this outpost of corporate blandness … until we do. Once we know, things can only go from bad to worse. Though the rising friction between the banal and the appalling makes room for some solid creepy-comic performances — Finneran and Johnson are particularly nimble together, poking at the weirdness and desperation beneath their Ann Taylor Factory Store attire — Bock hasn’t written a particularly meaty play. In a moment that hadn’t yet given us Severance or Black Mirror, or even Office Space, The Receptionist’s little envelope full of anthrax might have felt more surprising if not necessarily more substantial. As it is, the show goes down a bit like a competent pilot episode without the ensuing excitement of a first season. It could aim higher — and cut so much deeper — but it satisfies itself with a contained dystopia, a tidy package for the horrors we already know.

For an altogether more eviscerating immersion in those horrors — that is, if your conscience and your stomach can both take it — try the Greenwich House Theater, where you have four more chances to see Wallace Shawn perform his 1990 monologue The Fever. That Shawn, at 82, isn’t just content to let his brilliantly disturbing new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, collect laurels till the end of May but instead has decided to take the stage himself on Sundays and Mondays, with hot tea, tiny microphone, and back-up script in hand (“If I have to use it, I know you’ll be generous,” he quipped when I was there), really puts the lock on his national-treasure status.

Still, it can be dizzying to remember that Shawn isn’t just Vizzini or Mr. Hall or Rex the dinosaur or Dr. Sturgis but a writer and performer of truly devastating commentary on the American psyche. The Fever, perhaps more terribly potent with each passing day, is a two-hour spiral into the thrashing, slowly awakening soul of a Good Middle-Class Liberal. To watch it seated in an audience of (mostly, presumably) the same — to admit to oneself that yes, that is me, too — is something like witnessing a human dissection in one of the old Victorian medical theaters. Except that it’s your body on the slab. My body. And God, how full of cancer it is.

Sickness is both the metaphor and the reality of The Fever, which takes shape around the idea that, at some point, the cognitive dissonance of the allegedly decent person will become so acute that it will corrupt the body, too. “I’m traveling,” begins Shawn’s nameless narrator, and one night he wakes up shaking and sweating. Almost everything he has to say will unfold as he slumps on the tile floor of a hotel bathroom “in a poor country where my language isn’t spoken.” His mind slides or tumbles away to a memory, a sensation, a birthday party in a fancy restaurant, or a contemplation of Karl Marx — vertiginous thoughts that spin out and out and then return to the present, always brought back by the suffering body, by the bugs on the walls and the vomit that keeps coming up.

With that unmistakable voice and a mildness of presence that lets him slip the blade in and keep twisting, Shawn is a master of defamiliarization. He builds up vast, eccentric mountains of words around mundanities until suddenly they become strange — a series of photographs that you’ve walked past every day where all at once, for the first time, you can see that the people in them aren’t smiling but grimacing in revulsion or pain. “What radicalized you?” the kids’ TikToks ask. Well, if nothing’s gotten to you yet, maybe The Fever will finally break your brain. As he plummets through bouts of hellish nausea, Shawn’s narrator provides a layman’s breakdown of contemporary capitalism that spares no one, least of all himself. “You’re simply a relentless, unbearable fanatic,” he says, speaking to every person with an Amazon Prime account, everyone who donates reasonably to charity, everyone who gives the beggar on the corner or the subway a little something, of course, but not too much. “Yes, the commando who crawls all night through the mud is much less of a fanatic than you … No thought may enter your mind if it conflicts with the assumption that you — yes, you — are a decent person.”

What makes The Fever so audacious, so brutal, is in part its unbearable lightness of timbre. There’s no finger-wagging, no righteous accusation or earnest cri de coeur. Shawn renders the spiritual rot of the comfortable and complicit with Beckett and Sartre perched on his shoulders — as the driest, darkest of comedies, a No Exit for the free market. It’s a psychological hammer to the kneecaps, and if its blows feel extra trenchant right now, it may be because we’ve become quite fond of blaming up and calling it a day: Eat the rich! Ban the billionaires! Boycott the Met Gala!

Those are some big, nasty tumors, and wouldn’t it be great to cut them out? But it’s easy to wish for the fall of the empire and harder to acknowledge every way in which we are its foot soldiers. “Answer the question, idiot,” says the avatar Shawn has created for us. “Don’t just stand there. I can’t give the beggar all that I have, because I — because I — be —” And language withers, thought breaks down, and all that’s left is a terribly familiar body on the bathroom floor, sick to its stomach, sick in its soul. 

The Receptionist is a Second Stage production at the Irene Diamond Stage at Signature Center through May 24.
The Fever is at the Greenwich House Theater through May 24.