He is just an ordinary Joe; an average guy like you and me. In the latest piece from Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, Joe appears before us at six different ages and is played by five different actors plus a robot - all decked out in red hoodies, jeans, socks and sneakers. (The robot only gets to wear the socks.) It is like looking at one of those diagrams of human evolutionary development from Australopithecus to Homo Sapiens. Except the really terrifying thing with Joe is just how little he changes. There is no evolution, just more of the same.
For Joe, life is a journey to nowhere: the elderly man trying to make sense of his senseless life in the late 21st century is the same person as the insecure 10-year-old who stands before us, exhorting us to "Look at my muscles" and despairing because Shannon, the girl next door, has stood him up.
Over the following decades, Joe's incessant wandering suggests an unconscious search for something that he cannot name, maybe something he doesn't even know is missing - but he remains the same. The muscles do not develop, and Shannon remains an illusion.
It is pretty grim stuff, particularly as Maxwell doesn't let us off the hook. His actors deliver the lines under full house lights in the Maxwell house style - deadpan with no inflection, no emotion - and they do it, for the most part, by fixing the audience with a penetrating stare. In between, the lights go down, and the Joes sing cheesy rock ballads full of romantic cliches under a canopy of twinkling stars.
Is this all that life has to hold: either the fake emotions of slushy songs, or a determinist scenario in which we go through life on automatic, like a robot, unable to change ourselves or the world around us?
This relentless pessimism is wearing, particularly when allied to journeyman writing and the Maxwell aesthetic that reduces the actors to machines. Several of the performers at the show I saw appeared to be staging tiny rebellions against this imposed monotony, and making a bid for artistic freedom - but this had the unfortunate effect of making them look like actors acting badly.
In the past I have admired Maxwell's work, but perhaps it is time he tried playing a different tune.
· Until March 12. Box office: 0845 120 7554.
