The script for Colorado playwright Matt Wexler’s dark comedy Reptile Logic: A Corporate Dismemberment has racked up a number of awards over the past few years, but it wasn’t until it opened as a special engagement at Aurora’s Vintage Theatre this weekend that audiences got a first look at it.
With its focus on the politics of unionization, it’s a timely topic to be sure, and Wexler zeroes in on it with just three characters: Mike, a spineless warehouse manager (Colin Martin); his office assistant Iris (Corinne Landy) who holds his balls in her grasping little hands; and a fired-up floor worker named Jackie (Gin Walker), who’s been tasked with representing the workers following a machinery accident that chewed up someone’s hand.
Walker, whose Henry-nominated performance in BETC’s The Children was a standout last fall, here plays a tough, blue-collar worker bee and ex-con who covers up her lack of negotiating skills with a pugnacious, foul-mouthed frontal assault on Mike who withers under her repeated tongue lashings.
Fortunately, he has Iris (also his lover) to stand between himself and the workers represented by Jackie, and it’s not long before he’s almost a spectator as the two women square off. Mike and Iris consider “union” to be an unmentionable word, so when Jackie starts touting the idea of the warehouse workers organizing to
Corinne Landy and Colin Martin in ‘Reptile Logic’ | Photo: Lindsey Alexander
demand better pay, benefits and working conditions, Mike’s only negotiating tactic is to try to buy her off with a generous salary bump and her own parking spot.
Jackie is having none of it, although she’s still uncertain what her approach should be as she realizes Mike has little power to make the changes she demands. Walker does a nice job carrying these conflicts in her performance, and while she seems to relish battling Iris, she knows the whole time she’s carrying a trump card that will bring the whole thing to a head.
Landy as Iris is a petite fireball in an unfortunate blonde wig who doesn’t give a shit if Jackie thinks she’s a bitch, nor is she affected by the insults flung at her by the strident woman who towers over her. In fact, she’s quick to call out any occasions where Jackie’s verbal assaults are repetitive or lame.
Reptile Logic isn’t a long play, but it needs an intermission because the ground shifts tremendously between scenes and requires a re-set. To avoid spoilers, I’ll only say that the idea of a snake eating its own tail or biting the hand that feeds it is the “reptile logic” in question, and what happens in the pressure-cooker environment of the office in Act One leads to the corporate dismemberment of the title in ways none of the three characters could imagine.
The play thoughtfully explores the dark side of the soulless megacorporation, where workers are little different than a forklift or a drill press — simply tools that can be replaced if malfunctioning. As we’ve seen in real life, big companies are quite willing to deploy draconian tactics to cut the head off any union snakes — even if it means shutting down entire operations to do so.
Director Mike Langworthy succeeds in helping guide three strong performances and making the most of the tiny rectangular stage of Vintage’s smaller theatre. And while the script does have a fair amount of humor in it, the funniest part of it all is Martin’s performance as the consummate corporate weasel whose only interest is in saving his own ass; his only weapon the company checkbook. He even at one point brazenly offers up Iris for sacrifice if it’ll get Jackie to shut the fuck up and go away.
Reptile Logic spends a lot of time in the red zone of human emotion, and as such it could probably use a few more laugh lines to modulate the two women braying at one another at volume 11. Overall, it’s an interesting, sometimes hard-to-watch study of what happens when three people being manipulated by an unseen corporation and driven by money lose their common humanity in the process.
By the time the play’s shocking conclusion comes around, it’s fair to contemplate whether capitalism itself can survive if its only outcome other than profit is to have people turning on each other like hyenas.
Leave A Comment