Office life goes to hell in ‘Do You Feel Anger?’

The Moot Point Project’s absurdist comedy transforms empathy training into biting workplace satire.

The Sunday before Do You Feel Anger? opened, I ran into director Sarah Ausloos at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, where she serves as the retail manager. She was working in the newly renovated gift shop inside the Hellems Building, surrounded by Shakespeare T-shirts, playing cards and jackets, talking about a completely different type of play.

Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s Do You Feel Anger?, she told me, is the sort of comedy “where you’re laughing the entire time but then feel disgusting by the end.” After seeing The Moot Point Project’s production Friday, June 19, at The Three Leaches Theater in Lakewood, I can confirm: mission accomplished.

At first glance, everything appears normal: Sofia has been hired to teach basic emotional awareness to a debt collection agency that views empathy as just another box to check. However, the longer she remains, the more the play reveals the scope of what this seminar can and cannot fix. Under Ausloos’ brisk, uneasy direction, the show turns corporate self-improvement into a farce of managed harm, where the people causing the damage are coached just enough to sound better while everyone else is asked to keep adapting.

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Gisselle Gonzalez in Do You Feel Anger? | Photo courtesy of The Moot Point Project

Welcome to the empathy conference

The play begins in the lobby. Audience members are checked in as participants at an empathy conference for Cash Flow Accounts, a debt collection agency whose employees have been ordered into training after an unspecified workplace incident. You pick up a fake name badge, receive a manila folder with your “conference” materials and are gently shamed for being underdressed before being handed a tie to wear. By the time you walk into the black box, the office is already running.

True Smith’s scenic design turns the space into a bland corporate conference room, with enough funny details to make the room feel spiritually cursed. There is a flip chart with “What is empathy?” written on it, office clutter, a bookshelf stocked with absurd self-help and business-adjacent material and a conference table where several employees are already killing time. Ava McIlvain’s properties design does a lot of sly world-building here, while the show’s program, packaged as training material, extends the joke without overexplaining it.

Into this room walks Sofia, played by Gisselle Gonzalez, an empathy coach hired to teach the staff how to identify feelings and practice basic compassion. She enters in a pantsuit with the confidence of someone who still believes a workshop can fix a culture. That confidence does not last long.

Emma Grace Bradley and Gisselle Gonzalez in Do You Feel Anger? | Photo courtesy of The Moot Point Project

Sofia’s first warning comes from Eva, played with deadpan precision by Emma Grace Bradley. Eva casually explains that the office is not exactly safe for women. She advises Sofia to invent a boyfriend so the men will leave her alone. She also mentions, with the same alarming calm, that someone keeps mugging her at the office. Bradley underplays these revelations beautifully. Eva is not surprised by the dysfunction because she has already adjusted to it, making the character tragically funny.

The men of Cash Flow Accounts, meanwhile, are nightmares in different corporate fonts. Jacob David Smith plays Jon, the boss, as a smarmy nice guy who wants Sofia to move the training along, sign the paperwork and let everyone get back to business. Carson Coffey’s Howie is all macho swagger and belligerent entitlement, the kind of man who treats rules as a personal insult. Joshua Wilson’s Jordan fancies himself a poet but folds immediately whenever Howie enters the room. In private, he offers Sofia secret support. In public, he is useless.

Carson Coffey and Joshua Wilson in Do You Feel Anger? | Photo courtesy of The Moot Point Project

When care becomes compliance

Nelson-Greenberg’s satire is not subtle, but subtlety is not the point. The play takes the language of workplace wellness, HR mediation and corporate accountability and pushes it until it becomes grotesque. The employees cannot define empathy. Several of them think it might be a bird. They can barely name their own emotions, let alone care about anyone else’s. Yet the training is not really designed to change them. It is designed to give the company documentation that a problem has been addressed.

That is where the production finds its sharpest edge. Do You Feel Anger? understands the way institutions can weaponize the appearance of care. Empathy becomes another compliance module. Harm becomes a communication issue. Oppressors are handed just enough language to get closer to the line without technically crossing it.

Jacob David Smith and Gisselle Gonzalez in Do You Feel Anger? | Photo courtesy of The Moot Point Project

Ausloos directs the 90-minute, no-intermission production with a quick, nervy rhythm that lets the absurdity accelerate without losing the danger underneath. The early scenes are often very funny, especially as Sofia tries to lead the group through exercises that collapse into nonsense. But each laugh curdles a little. Eva is still being mugged. A missing employee named Janie hovers over the room through her empty chair, jacket and name badge. Sofia keeps receiving phone calls from her increasingly desperate mother, whose emotional needs she ignores while professionally preaching empathy to strangers.

Gonzalez gives Sofia a full-body unraveling. At first, she is composed, alert and certain of her own moral clarity. As the office begins to wear her down, she changes: her clothes, her posture, her tone and finally her tactics. By the later scenes, Sofia has begun indulging the men’s jokes and softening herself to make them more receptive.

Coffey is especially strong as Howie, whose volatility gives the room a charge of real threat. He is funny until he isn’t and then somehow funny again in a way that makes you feel bad for laughing. Bradley’s Eva makes an ideal foil. She is the person in the room most fluent in the consequences of everyone else’s behavior and the one least believed when she names them.

Jacob David Smith and Carson Coffey in Do You Feel Anger? | Photo courtesy of The Moot Point Project

The final stretch grows more surreal, including a liminal bathroom scene involving Janie, played by Nicole Caron, that is intentionally harder to pin down than the office satire that precedes it. Not every symbol lands cleanly, but the messiness feels appropriate for a play about systems that make emotional reality impossible to process. Cole Dille’s sound design and Dang Pham’s lighting help tilt the production from office comedy toward something stranger and more haunted.

The Moot Point Project is a new entrant in Denver’s theater scene, which could use more companies willing to be this unconventional, pointed and confrontational. There are other groups in town flirting with absurdism and experimental work, but not enough of them. Like its staging of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again from earlier this year, Do You Feel Anger? makes a compelling case for keeping this theatre company on your radar, especially if you have an appetite for the absurd.