It Works

IT'S INCREDIBLE how many things could have gone wrong with Working and didn't. Incredible that two and a half hours of taken-front-life monologues about the laborer's lot wouldn't drag, that Harvard students could stand up in front of their friends and roommates and deliver lines like "Sure I'd like to do something other than work in a factory. But if that's all you know how to do, that's what you do" and "Jobs are not big enough for people" without sounding like Soc Stud burnouts. Or, for that matter, that the full-stage production numbers wouldn't stretch out thin, would stay in step and in tune. A play with the same book bombed on Broadway and it's not difficult to see how a light coating of razzle-dazzle, a touch of crowd-pleasing superficiality, could pervert Working and obscure its message. But that's not what's happening at the Loeb.

Instead, this exploration of the ambitions and frustrations of 26 working men and women--adapted from the 1978 Studs Terkel book, which was based in turn on copious interviews--moves ahead with unerring confidence. Director Jonathan Magaril focuses on simplicity, on mining all the emotion possible out of the script's surprisingly rich words. Though the play breaks some traditional rules of structure--building tension and plot through a series of tangentially linked cameos--and thus requires some unconventional tricks of production, Magaril cannot strictly be said to be experimenting. He knows exactly what he is about.

In scene building he goes consistently for the concrete and vivid; when characters speak from within the set a maze of scaffolding covering the back wall, skillful lighting and mime make their spaces substantive rather than symbolic. Rather than trying to fill the vast mainstage with gimmickry--as direction after director has done--Magaril and choreographer Sabrina Peck simply fill it. Good blocking spreads actors to keep the open spaces under control. The full-company numbers sparkles with movement, much of it painstakingly researched to mirror actual on-the-job motions, an astonishing proportion of it in synch. And in Magaril's boldest visual effect, four-foot-square letters spell out WORKING in crimson light, transforming Jonathan Lemkin's harmonious set into a glorious spectacle.

SUCH MOMENTS of grandeur furnish the perfect balance for the rest of Working which is sober and reflective. Briefly alone under the light, each secretary and steelworker and schoolteacher talks about life and the job, awkwardly philosophizes, and turns back to obscurity. Some evoke the original interview clearly, while others flower into song and acute, desperate commentary on their lives. Terkel evidently found articulate and thoughtful subjects for his research; instead of rambling "life's rough" sagas, he has documented startling flashes of insight.

The result successfully steers clear of a cliche ridden things-are-bad philosophy. Avoiding the didacticism of hammering home a single point--the misery of the downtrodden--Terkel instead has culled enough of a range of happiness and unhappiness from his interviewees to stir the emotions without demanding any clear reaction. For every openly frustrated speech--like the steelworker (Michael Rapposelli) who wants desperately to get out of work and "go tell some guy fuck you," because he can't tell his boss--there is a dreamer like Anthony Calnek's stonemason, who notices the crooked bricks in every house he has ever built, and glories in the nobility of the work.

At times, the play between happiness and unhappiness becomes exquisitely subtle. As the steelworker leaves the stage, lights pick up two corporate executives loudly casting aspersions on their parking attendant (Ronald Brown); they throw a dime tip, expecting him to scrabble. But instead Brown swings into an ebullient softshoe number, boasting of his car-parking skills; the mood lifts and lifts, and suddenly a clump of leotarded dancers inches and rolls onstage to join him, representing--incredibly--a car, white tires and all. Brown later plays a gas-meter reader whose pastime is to scare sunbathing housewives so that their bathing suit tops fall off; the conspiratorial grin with which he exits obviates any simpleminded sympathy.

THERE ARE NO weak segments in Working, though the transitions between them sometimes seem arbitrary and strained. We move from Calnek's insterstate trucker to Anne Hailey's telephone operator, predictably enough, via the former's casual phone call; the plaintive 30-years' teacher unable to cope with modernity (Jeannie Affelder) announces a supermarket checkers' number by nostalgically recalling a favorite student ("She works down at the Star Market now.") Then again, a few juxtapositions make a viewer catch his breath. After Nina Bernstein's lonesome ballad "Just a Housewife," the sarcastic opening line of the prostitute (Martha Hackett)--"Well, I didn't want to be just a housewife--comes like a slap in the face. Each speech and song brings a new twist--a corporate executive is numbered among the hunted unhappy, a cocktail waitress keeps herself euphoric through a curiously empty pride in the job.

The individual voices deal the strongest emotional punch--particularly Bernstein, who varies her tone and character effortlessly from scrappy, Horatio-Alger-like preteen newsboy to gentle, pained, unfulfilled wife and mother, and Barry Mann, who as a migrant worker urging a grapes boycott evokes a universe of hardship and anger in Spanish melody.

Singling out segments, though, becomes counterproductive in view of Magaril's strategy and art. Using his actors, his musicians, his softened spotlights as mortar and stone, he builds and builds until the overpowering structure needs no outright message to spell out its devastating vision and power. This reviewer, at least, has never before caught herself sobbing at a Harvard play.