Klein and DeAngelis.
“Hell is other people.” That famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit might be altered, for Jacqueline Bircher’s play Webster’s Bitch, to “hell is the other people you have to work with.”
The workplace comedy — running at the New Haven Theater Company at EBM Vintage on Chapel Street May 16, 17, 18 — is set in the near present, in the imaginary editorial offices of Webster’s Dictionary in Stamford, and has to do with the online tempest in a teapot stirred up when boss Frank (Ralph Buonocore), at a linguistic conference at Yale, aims the titular b‑word at his second-in-command, Joyce (Lillian Garcia).
The play, which premiered at West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park in 2023, is canny about how social media can add an immediate, far-flung context to any gaffe, creating a cloud of response — attack, derision, applause — that hovers over a person or business in digital perpetuity.
The folks on the ground trying to deal with the situation are two lexicographers, Nick (Gavin Whelan), slightly senior of the two, and Gwen (Abby Klein), who is in charge of monitoring online traffic, including the weekly definition updates for the online version of Webster’s. Gwen’s younger sister Ellie (Lisa DeAngelis) has arrived over an hour early for a date with Gwen to drink margaritas before Ellie goes off to raise feminine consciousnesses in Nepal. While Gwen and Nick struggle to meet their deadlines, Ellie sits in the office fidgeting like a bored eight-year-old (Nick at one point asks her if she needs a coloring book), until she discovers the viral content about Frank’s slur against Joyce.
Buonocore and Garcia.
The play is mainly about the struggles among Joyce, Gwen, and Nick — Frank, driving from New Haven to Stamford, is incommunicado and doesn’t arrive until late in the play — over a few different matters: the favoritism toward Nick, who had taken a course Joyce taught; the demand for more pay by Gwen, who has taken on most of the duties of a lexicographer who left and has not yet been replaced; and the fraught question of whose definition of the word bitch is the one they published.
The question of how a word should be defined, and how many usages are enough to establish a new shade of meaning, gets worked over in a lively and interesting fashion, particularly when the team learns that Frank didn’t simply say that Joyce is “a bitch”; he said “she’s my bitch.” The possessive adds a whole other dimension. We could say the play considers the ways individual users of English can make the language their bitch.
The workplace context is even more tellingly rendered than the swirling digital surround, and that’s largely because the five actors give us a vivid sense of what it would be like to deal with each of these persons on a regular basis. This is the first play produced by the New Haven Theater Company in which the members of the cast are mostly not members of the company. The play is very well cast, with each actor fully rendering their respective character.
As Gwen, in many ways the key character, Abby Klein maintains a coolness that lets us know she isn’t particularly comfortable dealing with people. She likes words, and loves the linguistic rigor of her job. And yet: she does have to work within this particular context of personalities. Gavin Whelan’s Nick has a fussy, harried air, even when trying to be more friendly. His efforts to get and divulge personal facts seem like items on a to-do list. Lillian Garcia’s Joyce has a steady, no-nonsense demeanor. When she begins to thaw, she’s apt to rhapsodize about breaking into the old boys’ network she found when she arrived. She seems to treat Gwen as lesser simply because she’s not male. So, because she can. That’s something Ellie picks up on right away, even as her own people skills — somewhat resented by her older sister — get her into the good with everyone.
Whelan.
As played with bubbly aplomb by Lisa DeAngelis, Ellie is the kind of bright young worker who knows she can be obnoxious and delights in that fact. As the outsider to the work ethic of the others, she not only likes to ride her elders for being elders, but is skeptical about the importance of the tasks they devote their working lives to. For her, it’s all pretty much a sideshow. And Ralph Buonocore’s Frank hits all the right notes of cheery bossiness and gladhanding — and, when the chips are down, the use of sentimentality and male desperation to try to sway feminine sensibilities.
Ably co-directed by veteran NHTC members Margaret Mann and John Watson, Webster’s Bitch lets us walk a bit in each character’s shoes, but doesn’t presume to say who we might side with most or like best or least. We get to look on as a job crisis moves amid the employees, hearing all that’s said (as no character does). Bircher’s script leaves us to make up our own minds about what we’ve seen and heard. In other words, no easy answers. Ain’t that a bitch?
Webster’s Bitch runs at New Haven Theatre Company, 839 Chapel St., May 16 – 18. Visit the company’s website for tickets and more information.