Late each spring at the Wild Project, on East Third Street in Manhattan, crowds bubbling with conversation spill out of the airy lobby onto the sidewalk, awaiting curtain time. For fans of appealingly eccentric downtown theater, this is a seasonal ritual: the return of Clubbed Thumb’s venerable Summerworks festival of new plays.
Opening this year’s series, Milo Cramer’s “Business Ideas” is recognizably Summerworks fare — a thoughtful, heightened comedy with a Grade-A cast, a trim running time and a set that instantly draws the eye. A curveball-throwing play about work, survival and the quest for a meaningful life, it takes place in the kind of cafe where a patron could comfortably spend hours, what with the creamy color scheme, the big windows and the potted greenery on the shelves. (The set is by Emmie Finckel.)
But for Patty (Brittany Bradford), a miserable and underpaid barista, working there is a shame-inducing, six-days-a-week form of torture: so many customers, so impossible to please. Her only curiosity about them is what they do for a living.
Each customer is played by Mary Wiseman, whose over-the-top transformations are a huge part of the fun of this production, directed by Laura Dupper. Wiseman becomes the Slowww Customer, who turns out to be a kindergarten teacher; the Anxious Customer, a therapist; and the Apologizing Customer, an administrative assistant. Also the Hurried Customer, who wears a comically loud dress that clashes wonderfully with what we learn is her vital job. (Costumes are by Avery Reed.)
Wiseman plays the cafe’s dreadful owner, too. Sounding like Madeline Kahn, she dryly reads out a series of online customer complaints about Patty, then demands: “Every single Yelp review has to be perfect from now on.”
“That’s impossible,” Patty says. “That’s like a fairy-tale task. Like weave straw into gold.”
Over in the corner, taking up two tables despite having bought nothing, the recently fired Georgina (Annie McNamara) and her constitutionally embarrassed teenage daughter, Lisa (Laura Scott Cary), are engaged in a challenge with similarly long odds: dreaming up a business idea so irresistible that it will instantly rescue their family finances. Desperation eventually removes any moral framework from schemes they’re willing to consider.
Written in dozens of brief scenes, the play alternates between Georgina and Lisa’s brainstorming session and the interactions in the rest of the cafe. At 65 minutes, it is a slender show that nonetheless goes slack in the middle, and comes to have something of a cudgel about it, with the script’s point-making taking precedence over its art-making.
Still, moments of loveliness add a delicate savor to this production, as with Wiseman’s understated morphing into a homeless customer, and Patty’s quiet bewilderment at not being able to get her life on track the way other people seem to do so easily.
Patty says: “I just feel very deeply that something is in some deep way wrong. With everything. And some people know the secret and I somehow have not been told the secret that everyone else has been told.”
Yet a smugness seeps in with the play’s sense of its own virtue. “Business Ideas” is not so much a contemplation as a parable, with a moral that is less about dignity and human connection than it is about gratitude. Patty is being taught a lesson, and the audience is, too.
Ultimately as mortified as the adolescent Lisa is by any form of privilege, the play becomes a rebuke to anyone craving work that has meaning, isn’t exploitative and pays enough to live on — because things could always be worse. So suck it up, it seems to say, and be thankful for what you have.
Business Ideas
Through May 27 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.
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