Windowmen
A play by Steven Barkhimer
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
Cast: Daniel Berger-Jones (Lester), Nael Nacer (Rocco), Alex Pollock (Kenny), Brandon Whitehead (Vic), and Will Lyman (Al)
Director: Brett Marks
Set, Anthony R. Phelps; Costumes, Rachel Padula Shufelt; Lights and sound, David Wilson.
Running time: two hours ten minutes with one ten minute intermission
November 24, 2013
This play is as much fun and layered complexity as you're going to get in a two-hour theater production. It has everything going for it. The right cast, the right theater, the right set.
A recent college graduate, Kenny (Alex Pollock), is hired as an office assistant at Turner Point Fish in the Fulton Fish Market in roustabout lower Manhattan in the early 1980s, long before it becomes gentrified. With a major in philosophy and a minor in math, he seems to be a weird fit. Vic (Brandon Whitehead), blue-collar and proud of it, is the “Windowman,” who runs the small office. Vic vows to take it easy on him on his first morning of work a little before 4 AM. The previous assistant lasted exactly one day.
Playwright Steven Barkhimer drops two plot bombs in the first minutes of the play. “We were $400 short yesterday. It’s not the first time,” business owner Al tells Vic, who dismisses it as a mistake that will be corrected. A minute later, Al follows with, “I’m getting a computer, that should solve the problem.” It’s hard to get a read on Vic – is he relieved or worried?
After the play’s first frenetic minutes, you sense something is awry. Orders are barked in from a PA system from the warehouse floor. They’re paid for through the noisy sliding metal window, which seems to be a sixth character by the play’s ending. The phone often rings with mysterious gravel-voiced Sal who wants to talk with Al, owner of the business. Kenny screws up some of what Vic calls “the codes”.
The furious pace of ordering, calculating, writing receipts, is tense. Exactly how tempting is the cash coming through that window?
Kenny (Alex Pollock) and Vic (Brandon Whitehead)
“I’ve never seen so much money in my life,” Kenny says surveying the mountain of greenbacks he tallies at the end of his first day. Cash indeed. We begin to wonder about the codes Vic tells Kenny to write on the invoices.
We have ideas how the computer might change business as usual. But what the hell is going on with the money? And why do some of the orders barked from the floor end with “Going south”? Why is Vic so picky about how he wants Kenny to write up the invoices? Rarely does a play establish its footing so quickly and firmly.
The genius of the play is how these questions are answered. Using back-stories and revealing dialogue, Barkhimer paints a picture of Kenny, Vic, and Al undergoing transformations on a scale fitting the problems by which they are bound together. By the end of the play, you really care about what becomes of the three main characters.
Playwright Steven Barkhimer’s ear for the play’s dialogue was honed at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked after graduating from college in the 1980s. For the next three years, Barkhimer got a degree in the college of hard knocks. If you’re fussy about vulgar language, take a pass on this play.
The set is simple and brilliantly conceived. The messy, cramped office space set in the shoebox-sized Boston Playwright’s Theater with seating at the front of the stage magnifies the immediacy of the intense action going on in the office, the only place we see the action unfolding. The rest is brought to life as characters in the office allude to the action where the fish are sorted and sold on the warehouse floor.
Al comes into the office periodically to check on Kenny. Al inherited the family business. Erudite, inquisitive, and hard driving, if he weren’t running Turner Point Fish, he’d probably be a principal in his own law firm. He’s a hard-ass boss intrigued by this college kid with a knack for numbers, Socrates dialectics and no idea where he wants his life to go. He quickly sizes Kenny up. “The longer you don’t know what you want, the longer you do what someone else wants,” he tells the wishy-washy kid in a paternal but firm way.
None of this would amount to small change if we didn’t get invested in these three guys. First of all, they look and talk so damn right for their parts and have mannerisms to match them. Vic’s beer gut, disheveled appearance, flannel shirt hanging out, is the voice of the working man (“I was born in Brooklyn, live in Brooklyn, and will die in Brooklyn.”). He takes a liking to Kenny, asks him about his love life (“Are you sending it in every night?” he asks, making a crude gesture) and makes us laugh with his witty, vulgar ripostes to customers at his “window.” Vic confides to Kenny that he has family troubles. His plan to manage them is the fulcrum on which the play turns.
With his diffident way of answering questions, lack of direction, it’s clear that Kenny is drifting. He has a grasp of business efficiencies and the ability to work under pressure cooker days beginning at 4 AM. Kenny can keep track of Vic’s orders coming and going through the sliding metal window box that Vic uses to rake in cash from customers and send receipts to customers at a frenetic pace. There are orders from the warehouse floor, from the phone, from the window. The crackle of business is intense, with the immediacy of a 911 call we can feel all the way to the back of the small theater.
Will Lyman’s Al is the play’s center of gravity. He commands respect or fear. He can quote Socrates, spot fault lines in the cash business, drives his employees hard when he works with them on the warehouse floor. He can read a man’s character as easily as he can gaff fish with the hook hanging over his shoulder. He’s developed his own moral code, a code that is brilliantly on display in “Windowmen”s final scene.
The play is rounded out with Rocco (Nael Naser), a shady small businessman who connives to get better prices and pay late. The other minor character, in cahoots with Vic, is Lester (Daniel Berger-Jones) who works on the warehouse floor with Al and the rest of the crew.
As the second act gets underway, I realize I’m watching a morality play in which men try to do the right thing, each by their own lights. Honesty becomes a relative commodity, a wandering North Star to Al, Vic and Kenny. They’re good men, decent men, doing the best they can.
Al’s plan to resolve business and personal matters is satisfying and laced with wisdom and unexpected humanity. As the lights dim to dark onstage, we see how their fates have changed for the better. And we cheer.
Photo courtesy Boston Playwrights' Theatre
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