Wasteland

Dresser's Below the Belt is a light attack on corporate life

by Steve Vineberg

BELOW THE BELT. By Richard Dresser. Directed by Dan Welch. Set designed by George Marcincavage. Lighting by Richard Van Voris. Costumes by Katherine Lopez. With Joseph Hindy, Eric Evenson, and Gustave Johnson. At Worcester Forum Theatre, through April 27.

The satirical comedy Below the Belt has been performed in Louisville and New York, but since its author, Richard Dresser, is a native of Holden, mounting the New England premiere at Worcester Forum (where it's the season opener) seems only appropriate. Below the Belt takes place in an industrial compound somewhere off-country, i.e., outside the borders of the US. It's not clear what exactly gets manufactured here, only that the environment is creepily -- and humorously -- unwelcoming: the river gleams with waste and occasionally catches fire, unidentified animals roam the grounds inside the barbed wire, the living quarters are somehow both too cold and too hot, and time spent here feels like an eternity away from loved ones.

The play has only three characters, who represent the checking department of this company. (We never learn, of course, precisely what it is they check -- only that they're isolated from the rest of the workers. They're invited to company parties, but only for abbreviated periods; they're asked to leave before the buffet is served.) Hanrahan (Joseph Hindy), who's been here roughly forever, is acerbic, anti-social, even paranoid. Dobbitt (Eric Evenson) is a young man, deeply committed to the company, pathologically eager to please. Merkin (Gustave Johnson), their supervisor, is so worried about what they think of him and how his higher-ups might perceive him that he keeps trying to turn Dobbitt and Hanrahan -- who become unlikely friends -- against each other.

Dresser writes some good jokes, and Dan Welch's trim and efficient production provides a lively context for them. Welch has staged the play well, on an ingenious set by George Marcincavage (beautifully lit by Richard Van Voris) that fragments the always amenable Forum space into an office, a cramped double room and a bridge while giving a sense of the overall look and feel of the compound. And the play is quite well performed, especially by Joseph Hindy and Eric Evenson. Gustave Johnson is less resourceful; he has both an elegant and a forceful presence but also a tendency to mug and to listen to his own voice.

The problem with Below the Belt is that Dresser has maybe enough ideas for a half-hour sketch, and the play runs for two hours. You get his points almost immediately: the company life is monotonous and mired in a bottomless bureaucracy, you can't trust anyone, the company owns your soul, existence on the compound suggests some Kafkaesque hell. (Dobbitt even suggests to Hanrahan that they're being punished for something; they don't know what it is, but they must be guilty.) The play feels awfully retro -- the absurdists did all this stuff back in the '50s, and except for placing it in a distinctly American idiom, Dresser hasn't tried much to alter their ideas. His main skill is with language, but by the second act you're so used to the rhythms of his dialogue that you can predict where most of the exchanges are going. The actors get caught on a conveyor belt, repeating all the same shtick you saw from them in act one.

Hindy's the most resourceful actor of the three, yet it's his performance that shows the most wear in the second act, for reasons that are beyond his control. What makes Hanrahan the funniest and initially the most playable of the three characters is his stinging, take-no-prisoners wit. But Dresser also wants us to see him as childishly territorial, and after a while the character begins to seem schizoid -- two ideas the playwright couldn't meld together into one man. The audience at Below the Belt when I saw it had a good time and laughed a lot, and it's easy to see the show's merits: Welch and his collaborators have worked hard to give it style and polish. But I think Dresser's absurdist approach and his cleverness at crafting circular dialogue are covering the thinness of his material.