A mixture of "The Office" (without the humor) and No Exit, Survival Exercise depicts four white-collar workers toiling for an unnamed product design company which is launching a "talking-house" project. Although Mason (Mark Sande) has been dumped by the company for being too old, he is still on the scene when the play opens, trying to organize a sales meeting. Helping (or is it betraying?) him is Sharon (Cheryl Bricker), a blonde, mini-skirted exec who once was his lover. Andrew (Michael Sweeney) is young, ambitious and neurotic; his foil is Susan (Michelle Murphy), a perpetually hysterical girl at the bottom of the office food chain.
The product is absurd, ditto the language, actions and psychology of all four characters. Ponturo is good at satirizing the gobbledygook and chalk-talks employed by corporate hacks, but he stretches the play's thin and repetitive story line out too long. Also, his over-use of stylized, staccato-like dialogue becomes annoying; people are forever starting a conversation only to jump to an unrelated topic interrupted by yet another non sequitur.
As directed by Duane Daniels, the actors work (valiantly and skillfully) on a near-bare stage (four silver chairs) under an X-treme lighting scheme (lots of intense red) intended to convey that they aren't really in a corporate conference room but a cage in hell. Unfortunately, I began to have the same feeling an hour into the play.
