June 03--Be they book publishers, journalists or academics, communication professionals of a certain age have much to fear from the ongoing digital revolution. It is not a fear expressed openly in offices like mine -- if there is one truth about change, it's that only a fool wants to be perceived as against it. The smart money always figures out where the corporate office thinks the puck is going and claims the same goal, gung-ho all the way.
But in whispered conversations, or alone in your darkened bedroom, worries nag. What is becoming of standards? Integrity? Permanence? What of tradition? Solidity? Accumulated wisdom? The importance of knowing where you came from and what your ancestors suffered to get you there?
And among those of us of that age -- including Regina Taylor, who wrote and directed the new work at the Goodman Theatre, "Stop. Reset." -- there is the additional worry about being eclipsed in the workplace by all the young punks who seem less resistant to technology and whose value system is, well, not to be trusted by anyone with an analog memory.
"Stop. Reset." is very much a meditation on these timely matters. Taylor is primarily concerned here with the capacity of technological change to drive a rift between generations -- or, in the ideal version of the nightmarish world she depicts here, bring them together in a great idealistic melding of experience and innovation. This new-to-Chicago play (it was seen at New York's Signature Theatre in 2013) is set in the offices of Alexander Ames (Eugene Lee), a venerable, Chicago-based publisher of books by, for and about African-Americans, still run by its founding patriarch.
But Mr. Ames is feeling digital pressures -- which have come upon him very suddenly, it seems. Thus in the course of a long act, he has to figure out which one of his loyal staffers to lay off at the behest of his new corporate partners, prior saviors when his business almost went under, but now extracting their price in the form of unlocking shareholder value, to use one of the more popular euphemisms for disruption.
Race is at the center of the discussion here -- on whether it is still viable for the company to focus on black literary works. And although they've worked together for years, the worker bees at the office still see one another very much in racial terms.
Should Alexander lay off Tim (Tim Decker), the mouthy white guy whose parents marched with Dr. Martin Luther King? Or should it be Chris (Eric Lynch), an African-American with a Harvard degree and a lot of new-world MBA thinking? Or Deb (Lisa Tejero), a Japanese-American who says she will do anything to keep her job? And then there's the kindly, vulnerable Jan (Jacqueline Williams), the only black woman on the staff and a woman who, like her colleagues, has plenty to lose.
Youth is represented by the janitor, J. Or the guy who seems to be the janitor. Maybe he's more like the trickster in the Br'er Rabbit stories. Played by Edgar Miguel Sanchez, this mysterious dude may be a malevolent impostor adept at 140 characters or less. Or he may be future salvation. Or both. But he gains the ear of the patriarch with his fancy talk of new digital technology that will someday allow the received wisdom of the ages to be implanted in young people.
I should note here that if you are looking for a play that makes sense in real-life terms or that has consistent, credible characters, you'll be vexed. Internal inconsistencies abound. At one point, it seems that Alexander owns his own building -- at another he's told he should move to get cheaper rent. Alexander seems to have never heard of the escape key on a computer keyboard, but a few moments later he knows about iCloud, which is ridiculous. More centrally yet, he gets very excited about J's plan to inject all his beloved books into the minds of youth. So then why has he shown so absurdly little interest in the Internet, which surely does much the same thing? The show, which has a splashy design by Riccardo Hernandez, is littered with that kind of stuff.
More serious is the way it treats workers being laid off. I've been around that particular circumstance a little, and, trust me, people do not react in the way that they do in this play -- offering up sexual favors, trashing their co-workers, making all kinds of claims. Change of that sort more often produces shock, and there is something about that unfortunately common circumstance in publishing that "Stop. Reset" just does not understand. Numbness is our most frequent response to change.
Part of Taylor's problem here, of course, is that change has arrived incrementally to book publishers like the one in this show, and yet drama requires an immediate crisis with high stakes. So the translation of one to the other is tricky. But I don't think that's an excuse for all the inconsistencies here, nor the lack of nuanced relationships, nor the feeling that no one here could really exist in the real world. If we're otherwise going so far down the road to reality to offer up a company with a street address on South Michigan Avenue, there are imperatives.
Having said that -- and you'll sense my ambivalence here -- I do think Taylor has taken on an important, ambitious and under-explored topic. Consider, for example, how the plays of August Wilson emphasized how true happiness only comes to those who know what was done on their behalf and who understand historical struggle. Whither that history on Facebook or Instagram?
Wilson died before that mattered so much, but it's an issue worth exploring now. This play is fearful of the future and it is a fear that I, for one, understand. Taylor is, I think, arguing that we can only move forward with moral rectitude if there is a stop and a reset and a change in our ways. True enough. What she does not do, though, is explore how that happens when the world is always moving, when every day is just a little different, which means you can't actually stop, for then revenue and influence stop. No doubt a place will be found on phones and watches for received ancestral wisdom -- you could argue it is already there, I suppose. But it's all more complex than hitting the reset button.
But there is one scene in "Stop. Reset." that strikes me as dead-on correct: It is the moment when an older leader falls into the thrall of youthful innovation. Those workers of an age in the middle of the two react by panicking, seeing the limitations of both and realizing that they're both dangerous to their economic health and well-bring. That is the real-life anguish of being a worker of the middle-age, and Taylor surely understands.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
REVIEW: "Stop. Reset." at the Goodman Theatre
2.5 STARS
When: Through June 21
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Tickets: $10-$40 at 312-443-3800 or http://www.goodmantheatre.org/stopreset
