The speechwriters for the recent election got it wrong. The people of whom we should beware are not those with nothing to lose, but those with just a little to lose—and that little is all they have. The employees of the high-end Manhattan hotel of The Fundamentals are hardly destitute. They draw steady, if minimal, wages, for fixed hours in a location near their homes—Abe for 30 years, Millie for nine. The forced affability associated with service jobs inevitably grows stressful, however, leading the afflicted to engage in petty rebellions—falsifying time-sheets, scavenging bulk supplies, sometimes outright thievery. This misbehavior is usually tolerated by management until such time as reductions in staff personnel precipitate a crisis where survival often requires sacrificing your comrades. This dynamic is not restricted to the hospitality industry, of course. Swap Millie and her co-workers' polyester uniforms for aprons and you have My Mañana Comes (produced last year by Teatro Vista). Dress them in suits and you have The Belmont Avenue Social Club or virtually any play by David Mamet. Place crowns on their heads, and you have Shakespeare's tragedies. Erika Sheffer's universe is that of grit-scraping livelihoods engendered by the widely disparate distribution of wealth in this or any country, where the prospect of pushing others out of the lifeboat in order to avoid perishingm yourself, becomes increasingly acceptable. You may deplore the actions of the woman forced to abandon her education for the responsibilities of motherhood—contraception being nonexistent in North American drama, even in 2016—but what would you do, in her place? Do you know? Have you ever thought about it? Yasen Peyankov, no stranger to the politics of immigrant communities, directs a cast wholly committed to the dignity of their personae, never for an instant engaging in gratuitous drollery at the expense of characters walking an economic tightrope with no safety net for themselves or their dependent kin. (An exception is Stellan, whose Nordic complexion and lucrative family connections enable her to wriggle out of tight spots.) Navigating this inhumane labyrinth is Alana Arenas, who ensures our awareness of every small step in Millie's capitulation to a system rooted in exploitative expedience. Theater audiences accustomed to deriving their entertainment through fantasies of the rich and powerful may find themselves confronted in the future by an expanding number of plays ennobling the humble laborers too long shunned by a society boasting of its egalitarian principles. Even if you don't subscribe to the WPA-mural view of our nation's populace, you ignore them at your own peril.
