Watch corporate culture get skewered from own cubicle
High concept of ‘Knowing’ is modus operandi of Santa Rosa troupe
When you walk inside the garage-like venue, you might not see the ensemble member in a black beret rattling a pair of dice behind you. As they clatter to the floor and she, in her makeup fusing clown and modern art, sees the result, she might bark, “Toots, take ’em to Hastings!”
In just such a flash have the Imaginists determined where you’ll sit for “A Kind of Knowing” — no low-stakes matter. In the show, which opened Friday, May 17, the company divides the audience into four groups, each with a view of just one of four office cubicles. Crane your neck as you might, you can only espy a hint of what the other cubicles might look like: Is that a preposterous white shag rug in the next corner over, or is it a blanket of shredded paper, perhaps from a printer (or human) gone haywire?
The target of the show’s humor — corporate bureaucracy and the way it dehumanizes its workers — is low-hanging fruit long plucked and punctured by other dramatists. Still, the inscrutable way Mr. Fink (David Roby) insists the team “leverage our synergies” makes you wonder if the company’s never-stated line of business isn’t bland and abstract but evil and bloody.
My cubicle belonged to Ms. Hastings (Yuxdi Farias), whose fondness for the shade of blue is evident even before she enters: blue rotary phone, blue flowers in a blue vase, blue waste paper in a blue trash can. After the show began, my seatmates and I could share a private laugh if, say, she silently made an obscene gesture to her officious coworkers Mr. Fink