True, the employees of Berry’s (which is likely to have you thinking of discount retailers with Mart in their names) may wear festive sweatshirts with their regulation lanyards and uniforms. And canned carols are piped, relentlessly, throughout the store.
Review: In 'Paris,' Shrinking Lives at a Big Box Store
NEW YORK — Christmas in Paris is a cheerless occasion. Or at least that’s how the Yuletide season is experienced by those working at a big-box store in the mid-1990s in the Vermont town of Paris, which gives Eboni Booth’s coolly observant new play its title.
But this aural wallpaper only underscores the bleakness of the lives unraveling in the staff rooms and loading docks of the non-unionized Berry’s, where a typical salary is $5 an hour. In the world of “Paris,” which opened Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, there’s no expectation of comfort and joy.
Like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Greater Clements,” which recently ended its run at Lincoln Center, “Paris” is a solid addition to the expanding genre of sociologically detailed working-class American dramas. Booth, a playwriting fellow at the Juilliard School who is best known in New York as an actress in adventurous plays (“Dance Nation,” “Fulfillment Center”), shares with Hunter a rigorous economic fatalism.
But while “Greater Clements” deploys the grinding gears of melodrama to wear down its doomed characters, “Paris” takes an almost flatline approach to the unhappy existences it portrays. Yes, these people explode in fits of temper on a regular basis; they taunt and insult and scrap with one another; and at least one of them is involved in dangerously illegal activities.
Yet suspense rarely makes an appearance in this realistically acted, astutely written play, which is directed with a very even hand by Knud Adams. An ever-corrosive anxiety — the kind that comes from never knowing if this week’s paycheck will cover this week’s living expenses — is in the oxygen of Berry’s. And it leaves those working in its airless confines (evoked mercilessly by David Zinn’s gloomy set) in a state of depleted resignation.
This includes the store’s newest staff member, Emmie. As embodied by the appealing newcomer Jules Latimer, in a bravely affectless performance, Emmie (birth name: Emaani) has the self-effacing mien of someone who aspires to invisibility. As it turns out, this is a not a state she has to work hard to achieve.
Emmie is black. And though she has lived most of her life in Paris, a small and insular town, and also works at a popular local bar (called Blonde Jovi), none of her fellow employees can remember having seen her before.
Racism is seldom openly acknowledged in “Paris”; it is instead a stealthy, insistent part of its general climate. Gar (Eddie K. Robinson), the store manager who hires Emmie in the play’s first scene, is also black. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s her ally.
He treats everyone badly, especially when he’s in a bad mood. And as a boss, he has a secret weapon he holds over his employees. He knows how much — and why — they need their jobs. “You want to quit?” he typically says to one of them with the confidence of a fully briefed henchman. “No, you can’t quit. You have your grandmother to think about.”
There is little rousing esprit de corps among Emmie’s fellow workers, though they can usually be relied upon to inventively cover up one another’s mistakes. Logan (Christopher Dylan White) performs — pathetically, one presumes — in a local rap group. Wendy (a spot-on Ann McDonough), a former nurse and a not-so-secret on-site drinker, is married to Dev (James Murtaugh), who fruitlessly peddles the gospel of success books.
The most outspoken of the lot is the misanthropic Maxine (Danielle Skraastad), who lives with her four children in a motel room behind the local Costco and snarls at pretty much everyone. Wendy winningly offers an explanation for such behavior: “Her children are very bad people.”
Lines like that — simple yet startling — come along with welcome frequency in “Paris.” Yet while the play holds the attention, it seldom clutches it.
Ultimately, the wage slaves of Berry’s register as the sums of their financial problems, fitted out with eccentricities that might show up in anecdotes of someone who had worked there for a summer. It is part of Booth’s point, I think, that when money is as elusive as it is for these people, character is indeed primarily defined by privation.
Only Emmie — who has spent an aborted year in college and is working to earn money to return — would seem to have any chance of escaping this flattening destiny. Her status as a newcomer and an outsider makes her an effective, and increasingly dispirited, proxy for the audience’s initiation into the Berry’s universe.
She has also reached a nadir in her own life when she starts work there. Her mother has recently died, and her face is badly bruised — her mouth intermittently bleeds without warning — from a recent, drunken fall. Berry’s seems like the next and natural circle of hell for her to enter.
In the show’s most unsettling scene, Emmie encounters a visitor to the store named Carlisle, who’s looking for her boss, and a whole other, deeper vista of darkness opens up behind him. Played with creepy, compelling understatement by Bruce McKenzie, Carlisle — a soft-spoken man who runs his own mysterious and illicit business — might have been teleported from a David Lynch movie.
“You want to be my little elf?” he asks Emmie, proffering an unspecified alternative form of employment. He later adds, “Your people are good workers.” He asks her to open her injured mouth, so he can inspect it.
The cold wind of primal evil has entered the room. And for just a moment, a low-pay, tenuous job at Berry’s seems, in contrast, like a pretty good way to make a living.
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‘Paris’
Through Feb. 16 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
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