Assessment | A play with a crude title reveals how language performs methods on us

The incident that escalates abnormal ticking-clock stress to existential calamity is a hot-mic gaffe by Webster’s editor in chief, caught on video at a Yale College convention referring to his long-serving deputy as “my bitch.”

Some 40 miles down Interstate 95, in Webster’s Stamford places of work — the sticky-noted, card-catalogued, page-proof-wallpapered set is by Matthew J. Keenan and Cindy Landrum Jacobs — the shock waves ripple up by way of the generations. It’s Extraordinarily On-line Gen Z-er Ellie (impish Irene Hamilton), making a nuisance of herself whereas ready for giant sister Gwen (Fabiolla Da Silva) to complete work and take her for drinks, who spots the video trending on Twitter. (The play is about in 2019, permitting Bircher to keep away from each the pandemic’s upheaval of white-collar tradition and Elon Musk’s erosion of that once-mighty social media platform.) Ellie shares the bombshell with Gwen and Nick (Andrés F. Roa), the workplace’s different millennial, each of whom panic over how Joyce, their superior and the topic of that careless comment, will reply.

Gwen, the extra aggrieved of the pair, is sharp sufficient to acknowledge that this scandal threatens not solely the superannuated profession of their boss’s boss — appropriately named Frank — but in addition the credibility of their whole enterprise. That’s as a result of Webster’s definition of the offending phrase, in contrast to these proffered by rivals just like the Oxford English Dictionary, elides the sense of mastery through which the loose-lipped Frank used it. When Joyce (a wry Sheri S. Herren) learns from the youngs about what went down, she places her duties forward of her emotions and orders Gwen and Nick to begin revising their definition of the b-word, pronto.

The flexibility of that contested epithet has all the time been a part of its attraction. It has the monosyllabic blunt-force impact of all the perfect curses, however so many contextual variations that — to quote one instance not referenced in Bircher’s script — the 1971 Rolling Stones music “Bitch” wouldn’t even make a listing of the band’s most unabashedly sexist recordings, whereas Meredith Brooks’s 1997 hit “Bitch” embraces and reclaims the phrase in its gendered-insult sense.

Bircher’s writing is at its most perceptive, and Da Silva’s and Roa’s performances at their most persuasive, when Gwen and Nick are competing over who can compile extra definitions and usages of the phrase the quickest, and cite 10 examples for every. Greater than as soon as, Gwen is compelled to level out that it was Nick, not her, who dealt with the contested phrase’s most up-to-date revision. After a one-on-one assembly with Joyce doesn’t go her method, Gwen launches right into a monologue elucidating how her competence and work ethic are taken as a right by her better-paid friends. It will be more practical nonetheless if Da Silva’s efficiency as Gwen didn’t appear to be foreshadowing that eruption from the moment we meet her.

Herren’s Joyce is a extra nuanced and dimensional character, however she’s additionally getting extra assist from Bircher’s script: Solely Joyce actually will get to shock us, revealing how a lady of a previous era discovered a method to survive the identical indignities to which she now topics Gwen. Abuse begets abuse, tragically.

Like poor Gwen, Bircher’s play is bold in a method that makes success extra elusive. What at first seems to be a easy office farce morphs into one thing extra curious and observant, significantly as soon as Frank (Timothy H. Lynch) makes his entrance a full hour into the present, lengthy after anybody who didn’t spot his identify in this system can have assumed he shall, like Godot, stay without end delayed. Lynch is nuanced sufficient to make Frank a memorably self-loathing villain as an alternative of a one-note stooge, which in the end makes the present extra rewarding as a drama than as comedy.

Paradoxically, it’s the best way Bircher dips a toe into a number of wealthy swimming pools of inquiry with out ever diving into any certainly one of them that left me satisfied that she has but to mine totally the potential of her personal premise. As a result of workplace politics generally are a bitch. Wage opacity? You guess. Managerial gaslighting? Essentially the most virulent and ruinous instance of all.

At one level, Gwen boasts concerning the document variety of usages/contexts she documented for a single phrase: Greater than 120 for “go.” Go, within the crucial utilization, continues to be my recommendation relating to “Webster’s Bitch,” although, as with Gwen’s and Nick’s spilling-over inboxes, Bircher might but uncover extra meanings by way of the alchemy of revision.

Webster’s Bitch, by way of Could 5 on the Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW, Washington. About 95 minutes with no intermission. keegantheatre.com.