The other night I found myself streaming old episodes of Project Runway for comfort. It had been years since I’d watched and it struck me just how obvious the product placement spots seemed, with scripted plugs of the Macy’s accessory wall, L’Oréal makeup room, or Tresemme hair studio, depending on that season’s sponsors. Then there’s the repeated cringe moment when the “produced by Harvey Weinstein” credit shows up during the title sequence.
Those blatant advertising spots and household names seemed downright quaint compared to the insidious barrage of marketing that has crept into every aspect of our late-stage-capitalism lives, as evidenced by Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s absurdist world of incessant commodification where no space, idea, or human interaction is marked safe from being up for sale.
The play revolves around a simple grant proposal from someone in a painfully familiar circumstance. Jane, of the titularly questionable possession, has submitted an application to Matt’s Fund for an initiative called Communal Chairs. She is back home living with her mother Cheryl and unseen troubled brother Brian. Having recently lost her job, she is motivated by the accompanying stipend, but seems genuinely interested in establishing a community space with chairs. As anyone who has visited the Moynihan Train Hall knows, there really isn’t enough public seating by design. Theresa, the harried employee of this mysterious rich benefactor Matt, interviews Jane for the award. The only catch is that she does so at a desk a few feet away from Jane’s bed. There is an additional oddity: the imagined co-op must be a profitable business housed in this very same bedroom.
As Jane and Theresa, Susannah Perkins and Sue Jean Kim nicely balance the comically heightened circumstances by performing measured earnestness and ambitious anxiousness well off each other. They are both clearly at the mercy of the wealthy Matt’s whims and problematic history of bad behavior. Mission drift occurs even as the two women begin attempting to establish a mission for this enterprise, trickling down from the fickle and self-serving top. An anticipated need for damage control seeps into brainstorming sessions as they try to maintain the plausible deniability of a double negative. Accountability is avoided by skirting the issue of ever identifying too closely or directly with any concept so as to squirm away from vulnerable areas of attack.
There are also far too many cooks crowding the increasingly all-purpose room. A series of escalating interruptions from mom Cheryl, Jane’s convenient date turned roommate Malcolm (an effectively deadpan Jordan Bellow) and jack-of-all-trades George (played with hilarious haplessness by Yonatan Gebeyehu) exacerbate the suffocating claustrophobia of lack of privacy or clear boundaries in an only slightly exaggerated world of modern multitasking. The frantic pace of entrances and exits is like a funhouse mirror of a slamming door farce where there is only one door for the majority of the play.
As all of the chaotic comings and goings reach a fever pitch, Jane looks around and realizes just how soulless and far off the mark the whole operation has become. There are display shelves in this makeshift marketplace filled with QR code signs to scan, a Nike knock-off logo and not a chair in sight. She begins to tear everything apart in a move that feels like the equivalent of closing all of the open tabs on your computer. The trappings have proven to be a dead end trap and must be transcended. My heart leapt as a new portal opened up to a far more straightforward and meaningful alternate universe, which applies the salve to the wound that Jane had been so haphazardly guided to go about healing. What she had really wanted this whole time was to finally give her brother a load off and be able to talk to her mom honestly again. What a satisfyingly quiet but resounding victory to witness Jane’s return to a less complicated and more connected time for the three of them, when nothing in the room mattered except the only other person occupying that lone spotlit chair.
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Not Not Jane's ran through June 13, 2025 at the wild project as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Series.
