DO YOU FEEL ANGER? to Open Actors' Theatre Grand Rapids 44th Season

Actors' Theatre Grand Rapids will open its 44th season with Nelson-Greenberg's razor-sharp satire, directed by Dr. Bridgett Vanderhoof. Performances run September 10-13 and 17-19 at Spectrum Theater on the campus of Grand Rapids Community College.

An empathy coach walks into a debt-collection agency. It sounds like the setup for a joke. In Mara Nelson-Greenberg's dark workplace comedy Do You Feel Anger?, it is, but the joke keeps curdling.

Sofia has been hired to teach empathy to the employees of a debt-collection agency plagued by lawsuits. Her new clients can barely identify an emotion, much less practice compassion. Their workplace is governed by its own warped logic: hostility is ordinary, harassment is shrugged away, and even the most basic attempts at emotional understanding become nearly impossible exercises.

As Sofia leads the employees through lessons in listening, vulnerability, and basic human decency, the office's dysfunction becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss. What first appears merely ridiculous begins to reveal something more sinister beneath the surface.

Nelson-Greenberg uses the heightened language of absurdist comedy to examine a world in which empathy can become another corporate initiative-something to discuss, rehearse, and display without requiring anyone to change. The play asks what happens when the language of care is adopted by an institution while accountability remains optional. It also explores who is permitted to express anger, who is expected to accommodate it, and who ultimately bears the consequences when harm becomes part of the workplace culture.

The result is both uproariously funny and deeply unsettling. Do You Feel Anger? turns the contemporary workplace into a funhouse mirror: distorted enough to provoke laughter, but recognizable enough that the laughter may catch in your throat.

The production launches a season built around the question 'What makes us human?' Across four Michigan premieres, Actors' Theatre's 2026-27 season enters the strange, funny, brutal, and tender places where humanity is tested.

For Los, Do You Feel Anger? provides an especially fitting opening to that conversation. Its characters know-or are learning-the correct words for empathy, but words alone cannot make an environment safe. Beneath its outrageous behavior and escalating absurdity, the play confronts the distance between recognizing harm and accepting responsibility for it.

Vanderhoof leads a cast featuring Emily J. Haan as Sofia, Jordan Moriah as Eva, Will Gearring as Jon, Carter Spetoskey as Howie, Jason J. Flannery as Jordan, Justine Olson as Sofia's Mother and Janie, and Joe Carmolli as the Old Man.

The production team includes stage manager Ivy Frantti, lighting designer David Miller, Costume Designer Dr. Bridgett Vanderhoof, properties designer Maureen O'Brien, scenic and sound designer Kyle Los, and intimacy director Bob Troszok.