Three words jump out at you when looking at Aux Dog’s newest production, “Offices.”
Those three words: “By Ethan Coen.”
Yeah, that Coen. Like the “kinda funny lookin’” Dapper Dan Man, “The dude abides” kind of Coen.
The three short, one-act plays run in secession without intermission and resemble a Coen brothers’ movie if you squint. There are similar themes and gags, and some of their style is there.
You’ve got your droll, bland lives of normals doused with sex or violence, black humor and heaping profanity.
It’s only half of the writing/directing of Hollywood’s underdog brothers who crept onto the A-list over their film careers.
The Coen brothers are an inseparable unit when making films, so it’s bizarre to see Ethan’s name sitting alone on the writing credit.
But is the triple one-act lineup at Aux Dog comparable to the brothers’ clever, dark-film movie work?
Well, not really, no.
It is funny. But not that funny.
The pieces function more like movie scripts than plays, with slow lighting moving the characters from one dialogue and separated office to the next.
It acted like a movie, mimicking the hard cuts that the medium can use for its own comic timing with uncomfortable character interactions and awkward dialogue drop-offs.
But as a play, this technique killed the pace in too many places.
The set design for each play is more or less the same: nameless cubicle office boxes for the shirt-and-tie corporate worker bees.
The production’s central lighting and placement of the office’s bubbling water cooler is the visual tour de force.
The first piece, “Peer Review,” centers around a wannabe social dissident preaching to employees who are too busy or stupid to care.
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There’s no gag like a running one, and “Peer Review” runs as far as it can with its in-office copulation. It seems to imply that if office members would include the loud and lonely protagonist in their community sexathon, he might be less upset.
Unfortunately, the joke’s value dies, and it becomes easy to anticipate the incoming sight gag, despite the cleverness of the set design.
The tone is appropriately black, even poking fun at the protagonist’s inability to compare his corporate environment to the writings of Kafka.
The ending is uninspired, however.
As the Coen brothers’ work often does, this play offers little resolution, but the bright and confusing final scene contrasts the rest of the piece and the endings of the following two.
Matthew Van Wettering is a standard at Aux Dog, and audiences are all the happier for it. Wettering is always funny, but he doesn’t get a lot to do. Somehow he makes every second count.
Many of the strongest actors in “Offices” have small roles.
Brennan Foster, in the role of the patient, powerful boss, is gone all-too soon.
The structure of the one-acts is similar: We almost exclusively follow our main character passing from one truncated movie scene to the next as he interacts with the Coen-kooky ensemble.
This is not a terrible system, albeit not the most conducive for stage.
It requires a strong protagonist, and here it’s simply not the reality. The best performances are hidden in the ensemble and receive the biggest laughs.
Joel Miller leads in the middle one-act, “Homeland Security.” It captures the best satirical atmosphere, scripting and ending. It’s bleak and cute, twisty but familiar, and it certainly drops you on your ass.
The last piece, “Struggle Session,” is a bawdy, muddled morality tale about the squalid corporate landscape.
It features a fired-boss-turned hippie (Guy Darland), the moral man trying to stay that way (Micah Linford) and a loud, profanely derisive Hobo-Sage (Aaron DeYoung).
There isn’t much content or comic value.
The character arc of the boss describes the positive aspect of change, while the moral man who gets his job worries that change for him will be negative.
It’s all a bit simple for the time the play takes to get all that out.
DeYoung essentially plays himself, alternating between profanely ripping people down to graphically discussing his invention of a new sex position — yet another sex-related running gag that incorporates another sight gag.
The sliding brick bum-wall is a clever design, but there is not much in the play that sticks with you.
“Offices” is certainly entertaining, especially to those who like that humor, but don’t expect it to be as exceptional as Aux Dog’s first 2011 productions.
