What do you do? For leisure. For work. What do you do when everyone else seems to be doing work and life better than you? What do you do when you’ve been fired after finally asking for a raise but need to care for yourself and your teenage daughter after a lifetime of middle-class aspiration? “What do you do?”
In Milo Cramer’s Business Ideas, which opens this year’s Clubbed Thumb Summerworks Festival, this question of vocation and action in the face of adversity repeats until it becomes an existential echo that haunts Patty, the beleaguered barista who has come to the limit of her understanding of life and labor.
THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION
Patty (Brittany Bradford) finds herself compelled to inquire, “What do you do?” to dozens of customers—each distinctively cringey and played with aplomb by Mary Wiseman, economically and elegantly articulated by Avery Reed’s costume design—who mostly fail to order (or ask politely for) coffee but always succeed in interrupting her. The customers’ answers, often the button of their interactions with Patty, elicit our laughter but drive Patty further into despair: “I just feel very deeply that something is in some deep way… wrong. With everything./ and some people know the secret and I somehow have not been told the secret… that everyone else has been told.”
As Patty suffers through another hour, day, or week at work behind the counter, recently fired Georgina (Annie McNamara) has dragged her teenage daughter Lisa (Laura Scott Cary) to occupy the tables at the coffee shop and brainstorm entrepreneurial “business ideas” to underwrite their present and secure their future. Though Georgina initially obscures the stakes of their devising from her daughter, it is soon clear that Georgina’s former job was a thin veil over financial precarity such that Lisa is only now realizing that her future attending college may have already dissipated.
Patty and the mother-daughter team find themselves stuck in the coffee shop. When I sat down with the play’s director Laura Dupper, she noted that stuckness reflected her and Cramer’s experiences in the service industry that forced them to ponder questions like, “How do we define ourselves by our work? How do we carve identities based on what we do or what we don't do?”
Dupper connected that stuckness to another sensation, being “on the precipice of something” that might unlock if one could just answer those questions about identity and work. For Dupper, “this [is] in the form of the play and the way that it functions as sketches initially, until the membrane of the cafe is broken, and we're all together in this space asking the bigger questions.”
And what a space to be stuck in. Eerily familiar and uncomfortably ubiquitous, scenic designer Emmie Finckel’s minimalist set in creams, shades of pistachio, mint, and seafoam, and maple wood, is lit with Berlantian cruel optimism by Emily Clarkson. A perversion of the “third place,” this coffee shop is where flourishing and withering converge, as Georgina confesses, “but the thought that we “could” “get rich” “at any moment”…tortures me.” San serif slogans (“stressed, blessed, and coffee obsessed”) declare the space as a coffee shop, though neither coffee nor the apparatuses necessary to make coffee are ever visible.
LABOR POWER
The question of when labor is visible or not is appealing to pose in the theatre with its suspension of disbelief and realism’s collective erasure of the work that goes into rehearsal in favor of events unfolding on stage as if for the first time. The pleasure of this production is in its acknowledgement of that labor, whether Wiseman’s arch mutability or McNamara’s sincerely moving pitches for terrible business ideas.
Like a math problem, the play shows its work. What is happening onstage is not for the first time but rather, especially for Patty, the nth time. Yet even as the café’s “membrane” is broken when Patty and the mother-daughter team collide, each tries to, according to Dupper, “crack the code” of fulfillment or material security as the means to fulfillment. All will be dissatisfied. As Dupper observes, the play “doesn't ever say the word capitalism but it asks us to examine what kind of society do we live in and propagate,” and perhaps this is because capitalism is so visibly on the nose and insidiously invisible.
In Capital, Marx tells the origin story of capitalism in theatrical terms, a change in “the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.” Marx elaborates when he writes that the capitalist “smirks self-importantly and is intent on business” whereas the worker “is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but–a tanning.” It is not just the worker’s labor-power (her capacity to work) that is up for sale but her “own hide” with no expectations beyond torture. In a little over an hour, Business Ideas explores how much further the worker has fallen behind the smirking capitalist as they have become the precariat (precarious + proletariat) in this late(r) stage of capitalism.
Lisa’s recognition of herself as not just a queer teen who needs to keep up with the Joneses in her school’s social justice club with a new cell phone but as a precariat follows her shift from reluctant accomplice to fellow entrepreneur when she begins imagining a life without a college degree. This breach signals Cramer’s investigation of life, labor, and meaning, which twists and writhes beneath the comedy. As Dupper notes of Cramer’s plays, “[they] sneak up on you because it is so funny and wound so tightly in the beautiful rhythm of comedy that you don't realize that there's a lot pulsating underneath the whole time.”
What pulses beneath is the tension between the visible and invisible as well as what changes and stays the same. Cramer’s note on casting states that “there are multiple ways the casting of these four roles can break down racially, each with different connotations.” What is marked and unmarked in this production is Patty’s presence as a Black woman is compelled by occupation to serve Wiseman’s panoply of white customers and white girlboss. Patty chafes: “your words control my body. /when you order,/ my body has to move.” This business is business as usual; capitalism is racial capitalism. So change resides elsewhere. Lisa’s personal conversion is set within the play’s larger transformation signaled by Wiseman’s final turn as Ruth, Patty’s compassionate coworker. Wiseman, who has always entered and exited the stage space, this time, remains. Her continued presence punctures the limits of the coffee shop.
In the tradition of Clubbed Thumb, Cramer’s play ends on a final twist, where Wiseman becomes a less science-fictional version of Mickey 17, the disposable worker, as quotidian as the shop vac that she rolls in. In her final monologue, Wiseman as Ruth sheds the customers she has portrayed in all their idiosyncratic glory to become all workers across the centuries who have been sacrificed to the switchbacks of capitalism.
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Business Ideas runs through May 27, 2025 at the wild project as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Series.
