ACT's 'Below the Belt' Goes Only For Laughs
Seattle's ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) presents Richard Dresser's take on corporate drudgery with "Below the Belt". Starring TV and stage comedy veteran Judd Hirsch, they are billing this as "The Office" meets Samuel Beckett. But it plays more like a cliché sitcom than a social commentary. The story (if it really has one) is about two worker bees in a fictitious factory that makes a nameless product and how they deal with their tyrannical boss. Sounds like a sitcom doesn't it? Well, that's pretty much what you can expect from the production.
The performances were fun enough (if not a little two dimensional). Hirsch as the long time disgruntled worker, R. Hamilton Wright as the fresh off the boat newbie full of hope and John Procaccino as their boss who has no qualifications to lead are funny and have excellent comic timing, but without any investment in their characters. I can only assume these great actors were directed to play them as the caricatures we saw. At times I noticed glimmers of them trying to break out of the mold but then they just got sucked back in by the staging.
While the show has the Beckett-esque qualities of rich dialogue and social deconstruction, the direction of the show and it's actors, by Pam Mackinnon, never really allows the play to evolve past the one liners. I could see qualities in the play where the author was trying to examine the power struggle between these stereotypical middle management workers but never quite got there. Instead all of the characters were one-note and the potential of the struggle was missed. With a more in depth portrayal, we could have seen a really interesting game of cat and mouse within these three actors with each of them taking their moment in the sun to get to be the cat. Even something as simple as the right the two workers coveted to sit in the one chair in the boss's office was glossed over by the desire to be quirky and cliché.
Now don't get me wrong, the show is enjoyable and entertaining, if you like sitcoms. The jokes and jabs the characters take at each other's expense, while a little old, provide good laughs. And the delivery of the actors make these bits all the better. But that's all the show has going for it, the bits. It is an endless series of comic vignettes that never seem to get anywhere and are a bit contrived at times. I just can't help but feel that with a more adept hand, the show could have still been funny but also have been a fascinating power play. Instead it was just a Beckett-lite sitcom starring Judd Hirsch.
"Below the Belt" plays at ACT through June 21st. For more information or tickets, contact the box office at 206-292-7676 or visit them online at www.acttheatre.org.
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