There is a respectable art to being a great receptionist. A person who can patch people through, pass their messages along, all the while blessing callers with that seemingly endangered event of real human interaction. But does being a good worker hold any merit when the work itself is bad? What happens when compliancy is revealed to be complicity? These are the central questions the playwright Adam Bock poses with his sinister office satire, “The Receptionist,” which opened Thursday in a production presented by Second Stage Theater.
From the onset, the play establishes a taste for mystery. A middle-aged man named Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer) appears alone in a cramped box on an empty stage, nervously reciting a story about fly fishing. By the end of the monologue, however, his rumination begins to sound more like a confession: Mr. Raymond is involved in something darker. He hesitates to name the evil, but it’s something that makes his wife cry; something he has to keep convincing himself is the right thing to do.
From there, Bock’s play switches gears, opening up into a prototypical office environment where we finally meet the titular receptionist, Beverly (Katie Finneran). We learn that Mr. Raymond is her boss, and he has not come in yet for the day. There is a curious shroud of silence surrounding what any of the employees do. Whatever the work is, Beverly is fantastic at holding down headquarters. She remembers birthdays, fixes the copy machine that her co-worker Lorraine (a fluttery Mallori Johnson) keeps jamming and takes an obscene number of calls.
The director Sarah Benson has Finneran working that desk phone with the precision of an emergency dispatcher. The refrain “Northeast office” bursts from Beverly’s mouth with such immediacy every time the phone rings (and ring it does, over 20 times) that it feels borderline Pavlovian. Fortunately, there is some drollery in the myriad ways Finneran manages the repetition. And it’s impressive how grounded she keeps her performance considering that a hefty chunk of it relies on fragmented, one-sided conversations. Still, Bock’s play overrelies on these scenes to hold our interest, spending too much of its short, 80-minute run time poking fun at the humdrum of workplace life.
Stakes finally rev up when an authoritative-looking Mr. Dart (Will Pullen) from the “central office” shows up asking to speak with Mr. Raymond. At first, his arrival appears innocent enough — he brings Beverly well wishes from his office’s receptionist — but the costume designer Enver Chakartash’s cheeky choice to put Dart in a pair of blood red socks hints at a more dangerous revelation to come: The company is, in fact, involved in some form of interrogative torture, which makes Beverly and her colleagues knowing, administrative accomplices.
In retrospect, there are several sneaky instances, going back to that flying fish soliloquy, of Bock braiding violence into the world of the play. And his ability to layer clues about the office’s nefariousness like individual bricks until, boom, a wall of horror appears before us is a thrilling conceit. But the tedious amount of time “The Receptionist” spends building toward such a late-in-the-play twist, only for Bock to avoid taking aim at a specific industry or institution — political, military, corporate or other — renders his critique unsatisfying and even spineless.
The play could be about any system of brutality, but ultimately feels like it’s about none. Perhaps this was more forgivable in 2007 — when the play debuted and when, based on all elements of design, it seems to remain set — given the generalized anxiety around the American-led War on Terror. But now this vagueness feels frustrating, along with the lack of captivating performances outside of Finneran’s. “The Receptionist” is less a sharp foray into the banality of evil, more a story tangled in obscurity. And Bock’s fundamental inquiry into a person’s responsibility in an amoral organization is too loose to hit any target.
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