The Receptionist (CoHo Productions)

[October 22nd, 2008]

A good receptionist is more than just the gatekeeper of the phones. In our office, anyway, the receptionist is the conduit for all company gossip, the only person who knows where everyone is at any given time, the dispenser of lunch advice. Don’t mess with the receptionist, or the receptionist will mess with you.

Though her office is much smaller than ours, Beverly (Sharonlee McLean), the central character of Adam Bock’s workplace tragicomedy, is definitely the woman in charge. She’s the first in the door, she makes the coffee, she has all the pens. Her co-workers are not so on top of things. Lorraine (Laura Faye Smith) is an emotional wreck who misses buses and falls for narcissists. Her boss, Edward (Gary Norman), is a sad man who seems to be coasting toward retirement, which he will spend fly-fishing. Beverly holds their lives and schedules together, until one day something goes terribly wrong and a casually sinister man from the Central Office (Chris Murray) shows up to find out why. Then things get real dark, real quick.

Bock has a uncommon facility for capturing the way people really speak, in leaps and spurts and nonverbal noises. His realist dialogue and the ordinariness of his workplace settings—The Receptionist is a companion piece to The Thugs, a creepy play about temps who begin to disappear mysteriously, which Portland Center Stage produced in 2007—lead audiences to believe they’re watching a funny but unremarkable quotidian comedy. The gut punch of depravity, when it comes, is wholly unexpected. The modern office is an ideal place to address the banality of evil.

The Thugs was a great show—it won Drammy Awards for Rose Riordan’s direction and the ensemble’s performance—and The Receptionist, with the same director and three of the same actors, is even better. McLean has her role nailed, switching in and out of her telephone voice in midsentence and flipping her head mic up and down like a defensive visor. The costumes, designed by Riordan, are brilliant, down to the details of ill-fitting blouses and misadjusted collars. It’s all perfectly ordinary, and exceedingly menacing.