Assistance at Playwrights Horizons

Assistance is the first play I have ever seen at Playwrights Horizon and I guarantee you it won't be my last.  I love the space and intimacy of this theater.  I am also a huge fan of Judy Rubin who is the board chair of Playwrights.  We were introduced by her son and she reached out to me about getting involved with Playwrights.  I wish I was more passionate about theater because getting involved with her would be fantastic but alas that is not an area where my passions lie and there are only so many hours in the day. I can at least support by becoming a patron and seeing the plays that they put on. 

Assistance is one of the seven plays being written by Lesley Headland that represent one of the deadly sins.  Assistance is about greed.  The play centers around young assistants working for a hard driving CEO who  traumatizes everyone in his office at any hour of the day.  Why do they stay? The desire to start off somewhere in their career that they believe will take them someplace.  Greed.

We never see the boss and we never really know exactly what type of company he runs.  He is just someone who the audience forms an opnion about while never seeing him.   An amazing cast of young actors who show their emotional chops with this play.  The insanity of working in that office is under constant stress.

For me, it reminded me of my early days at Macys where I worked right after graduating college.  There were some really crazy terrible screaming lunatics that worked there and you really had to put on an armor of steel to survive.  There was one guy who made the people who work for him cry.  Not pretty.  Not sure why some people feel that it is necessary to create that kind of working environment but honestly life is just too short.