When the lights dimmed in Taylor Theatre, the 50 or so people sitting in rows of chairs lining the walls fell abruptly silent. There was no stage separating the performers from the audience — only black paint and well-placed lights to direct the audience’s attention to the drama unfolding only feet away.
“Come in, sit down. How are you?” said Jessie Berger ’21, playing the part of “the manager” in Mike Bartlett’s two-person play “Contractions.”
It’s a line repeated several times in an hour of increasingly tense encounters between “the manager” and “Emma,” played by Jolie Curran ‘22, a new employee at an unnamed corporation.
From the first scene, it’s clear something is off. The manager straightens her cuffs, polishes her glasses, and straightens the matching pen set on her desk; Emma walks in nervously and takes a seat on the yoga ball chair across from her.
Emma is a new employee, and her manager is just checking in on her — or so it seems. Questions on how Emma’s getting along with her coworkers quickly progress to the manager’s asking Emma to read pages of her contract aloud and warning her against having any romantic encounters in the workplace.
“You have your own definition?” Emma asks incredulously when the manager gets up to read aloud the company’s definition of the word “romantic.”
The play is certainly humorous in a painful sort of way, but that humor quickly becomes darker as the play progresses.
“What we witness here is a form of torture, for all its apparent civility,” wrote Paul Taylor of The Independent in a 2008 review of the play.
Emma is called in repeatedly to the manager’s office, and it’s eventually revealed that Emma has entered into a relationship with one of her coworkers, Darren. As the manager grills Emma about the details, it becomes painfully clear she has already talked with him. When Emma says she thinks the relationship will last a year, the manager responds, “He said a few weeks.”
Darren is sent away to prevent workplace favoritism, and Emma learns she is pregnant. The corporation wants Darren back, however, and coerces Emma into breaking up with him, threatening legal action if she doesn’t. Life continues to get worse for Emma, as she struggles to raise her child alone.
At one of the meetings, it becomes clear that the child has died. “Did you get the complimentary flowers?” the manager asks, to a full-audience wince.
In order to determine that the child is definitely dead, the manager requires Emma to bring in his body. The manager pokes through the box Emma brings with one of her color-coordinated pens, then vigorously rubs hand sanitizer onto everything as Emma leaves.
“Oh my god,” one member in the audience moaned. “What the f***, this is wild,” someone in the back row whispered.
But the last scene of the show is the most terrifying.
“Come in, sit down. How are you?” the manager asks one last time. Emma, who has recently been sent to the company’s psychiatrist due to her increasingly erratic behavior, is all smiles.
“Everything is fine,” Emma says, and it’s clear that she’s become just like the manager — calm, collected, and utterly inhuman.
The play lasted only an hour, but when the lights came on again and the audience applauded, it felt a bit like waking up from a nightmare of interminable length.
“[‘Contractions’] will chill to the marrow anyone who’s ever had to fill out a W-2,” The Washington Post said of the play in 2013. And the play is indeed a very effectual deterrent to wanting to work in any sort of office space. Ever.
“Though this play is certainly absurd, it is only occasionally unrealistic,” first-time director Emily Gardner ’19 wrote in the play’s pamphlet. “Contractions” is a dark satirization of corporate culture, employee power, privacy rights, contracts, and what having a “duty to care” really means. Under the immaculately manicured control of the manager, the plot is unpredictable, and even the most grotesque events seem plausible.
Produced by Theatre Workshop, the only student-run theatre group on campus, “Contractions” is utterly brilliant and absolutely terrifying.