*This Purview contains spoilers.
My bank account is saying that within the past three months I’ve been to a coffee shop a minimum of 18 times. Or rather, because I’ve gone with friends who have paid for the both of us and vice versa, let’s bring the minimum up to 25 times, shall we?
That’s three months and 25 times minimum that I’ve found myself in this very specific type of third space, attempting to romanticize my life; see, I’ve made it a goal of mine to try to be “more present,” as cliche as that may sound. Contrary to the standard definition (which asks one to view life with rose-tinted glasses and gross positivity), through my task to romanticize—to take things a millisecond slower—I find that I’m forced to take sharper notice of my senses, the people around me, my sporadic thoughts, and how my overpriced caramel latte is a nice treat.
In “coffee shop romanticization,” I people watch, which often includes watching the barista[s]: What’s that yummy-looking drink they're making? Are they in a state of flow? Are those tears hiding behind their smile? Is that customer pissing them off? Are they gonna change the music to their playlist? Did we just make eye contact? Are they mad that I’ve stayed here to write, but finished my drink 2 hours ago?
Perhaps it’s this personal training—my quest to “romanticize” my life as a Black woman in the middle of the chaos that we are all currently living in—that made me lean into the moments of minutia through Patty—the most mundane character in Milo Cramer’s new play, Business Ideas, directed by Laura Dupper as part of Clubbed Thumb’s 2025 Summerworks. And—to clarify—I don’t use “mundane” with a negative connotation, either.
Patty (Brittany Bradford) is an overworked and underpaid (an all-American classic) barista in a coffee shop whose clientele [in this production’s casting] is all-white. She serves a slew of wacky customers (from a surgeon and youth pastor, to an eighth grader and homeless person, for example), all played with delicious nuance by the hilarious Mary Wiseman. And on the other side of the coffee shop is mother-daughter duo Lisa and Georgina (Laura Scott Cary and Annie McNamara, respectively), who try to scheme up business ideas to ensure Lisa has funds for college after Georgina recently got fired after asking for a raise.
Cramer’s play certainly speaks to the ridiculousness of trying to work one’s way through (and suddenly up) in capitalism, with Lisa and Georgina dreaming up potentially profitable business ideas such as DMV photo retakes, sexualizing the food market for men, an all-ages bar, addictive medicine that only works a little bit, and so on and so forth. They turn the coffee shop into their boardroom with ideas scattered on colorful Post-Its that scenic designer Emmie Finckel’s chic and minimalist set collects. Their back and forth suddenly becomes the score to what captivates my attention the most—Patty’s thoroughly memorized choreography of labor: taking out heavy trash, filling up a jar of cucumber slices and water, taking tea bags out of their wrappers.
These little actions of mundanity for Patty that are skillfully overshadowed (literally and figuratively) by Lisa and Georgina’s largeness in their ideas, language, and delivery paired with Emily Clarkson’s lighting design feel like Patty’s respite. The mundanity, the boringness of the action, as respite from fitting into a persona that is likable for each individual random customer on any one random day. And when you add being a Black woman to that, bypassing the stereotype of being unlikeable, not smiling enough, being angry, and all the other qualifiers you and I know all too well, then yes, delicately removing tea bags in silence is a way—dare I say a perfect way—to circumvent exhaustion in all of its manifestations.
While Cramer did not specifically write Patty to be Black or a femme person of color (and states and acknowledges in their script that there are multiple routes to racial breakdowns, each with their own unique connotations), Patty’s inherent exhaustion in this production was innately more complexly layered with racialized and gendered history [in the workplace]; however, in operating in a white space where other characters are allowed to both think, say, and be outlandish, Patty sometimes falls short of having a personality.
You can argue that that is the inevitable truth of working in the service industry specifically, where your personality is malleable, or even crafted on the fly. But, I craved more from Patty. And I was hoping to hear her potential solution for a business idea, instead of relying on Lisa and Georgina for the [false] promise of a job in their “newly-found business.”
Patty shouts at one point that she “... WAS JUST TRYING TO BRAINSTORM ACTIONABLE STEPS I COULD TAKE TOWARDS CHANGING MY LIFE FOR THE BETTER AND LINKEDIN WAS ONE OF MY ONLY ACTIONABLE STEPS I COULD BRAINSTORM AND NOW YOU’RE TAKING MY ONE GOOD STEP AWAY.” And, perhaps, if our mother-daughter duo had romanticized a little, and taken note of what was right in front of them for the past 5 minutes (a literal 65-minutes to us as audience but figurative to Patty) and collaborated with Patty, they might’ve dreamed up some solutions to our modern-day barista’s conundrum[s].
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Business Ideas runs through May 27, 2025 at the wild project as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Series.
