“What do you do for work?” That seemingly innocuous small talk query can hold much deeper meaning: the person might be trying to gauge your socio-economic status, your professional network, your skillset—or, like Patty (Brittany Bradford), a barista and central figure in Milo Cramer’s Business Ideas, they might be desperately seeking “other employment” and surveying for jobs. While Patty suffers through an endless stream of customers (all played by Mary Wiseman), a mother-daughter duo (Annie McNamara and Laura Scott Cary) loiter at a table and brainstorm “business ideas,” a get rich quick scheme that will pay for college.
Cramer’s play structures the server-customer and parent-child plots in alternating scenes which director Laura Dupper stages side by side, giving the entire production a sense of duality, which is carried through tonally. Our wannabe entrepreneurs, Georgina and Lisa, rattle through a litany of terrible ideas, including a crepe cart, little books by cash registers, American Girl Dolls filled with drugs, and male salads. McNamara and Scott Cary, both excellent, are a convincing pair and lean into intergenerational comedy. Meanwhile, Wiseman goes over the top, making each customer into a mini caricature, tilting towards cringe. Dupper leans a bit too heavily into comedy, when it is the quiet tragedy of the piece that lands much harder, particularly in Business Ideas’ latter half.
At the core of the play is a deep exploration of what it means to work. Georgina and Lisa are scrambling for tuition money because Georgina has been fired from her corporate position at Starbucks after asking for a raise. Her bosses determined that she wasn’t “adding value.” When her daughter asks: “were you?” Georgina responds: “is anyone?” However, it becomes clear what kind of work Georgina thinks is valuable; she tells Lisa to let the image of Patty scrubbing coffee stains a few feet away serve as motivation, since she shouldn’t want to end up like that.
Patty knows she shouldn’t be ashamed to be a barista, but she is. Bradford beautifully captures the exhaustion, despair, and determination of Patty, who bemoans her low pay, her repetitive, draining job, and the terrifying power of Yelp reviews. She hates how customers literally order her around and in response she is “required to thank them.” As she concludes: “all day long I thank people for laboring on their behalf.”
Lisa, a member of the Social Justice Club and a softcore Marxist, tells her mom she doesn’t want to be an entrepreneur, but a worker. Lisa glamorizes labor, but we see the grueling reality of it with Patty, who desperately wants to do anything but be a service worker. Cramer does not offer us an easy solution, instead highlighting the various banal horrors of capitalism, or, as Patty’s coworker says, the miseries of having a life “disappointing in a way so mild, it’s hard to even complain about.” Though a refrain of the play is “if you’re thinking about life as a competition, you’ve already lost,” the irony is clear, since we all are trapped in a capitalist Hunger Games. Perhaps the basic lesson we can take away is to not define ourselves or others by what we “do” for a job, since we are more than our labors. But then again, someone still has to make your latte, right?
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Business Ideas runs through May 27, 2025 at the wild project as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Series.
