Playwright: Anupama Chandrasekhar. At: Victory Gardens, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets: 773-871-3000; www.victorygardens.org; $35-$50. Runs through: Feb. 24
Jean-Paul Sartre envisioned hell as a vast, enclosed, corporate-industrial residence so insular that employees, on their days off, go no farther than another floor for their recreation. The collections department for True Blue Helium credit cards is not dissimilar. One expects entry-level jobs to be boring, granted, but unlike group-activity tasks such as dishwashing or janitorial services, telecommunication-based operations require their staff to engage for long shifts in one-on-one foreign-language interaction with anonymous strangers. Oh, and when the call center is located in India11 time zones away from its clientsthe callers must carry out their duties in the nighttime.
Nowadays, we are familiar with the psychological isolation engendered by the virtual universe, so it comes as no surprise that when the new boss exhorts his inexperienced agents to cease their schoolroom slackerliness and adhere to company rules, their social needs soon become focused on the distant voices of their "marks" in the faraway realm of Chicago, U.S.A. Roshan (whose working name is"Ross") commits fraud for the love of a woman he will never meet. Vidya ("Vicki") scolds a guilty father, driving him to fatal extremes. Giri ("Gary") incurs personal debt in his hunger for luxury goods, like those bankrupting his customers. Supervisor Avinash strives to instill work-related values in his charges but soon he, too, is undone by the physical and emotional dissonance of the two worlds in which they are forced to dwell.
Anupama Chandrasekhar's compassion for these victims of global anomie is as prodigious as it is infectious but our empathy, ironically, also springs from the visual arrangement dominating this production: Our three youths sit facing us full-front at desks ranged on the forward edge of the stage, where they talk via headset with their carefully-rehearsed American pronunciations. Their superiors, who speak in accented English, are mostly placed far upstage or in profile. This would present no problem in a smaller auditorium, but the impaired audibility this imposes on the latterdid I mention that everybody talks very fast, often simultaneously?soon renders us as unaware of anything occurring outside the operations room as its occupants.
Chandrasekhar's play encompasses many provocative ideas, their urgency escalated by our immediate identification with these wayfarers in a swiftly changing culture and economy. As our own lifestyles collapse under unforeseen circumstances, we are justifiably humbled by this reminder of the difficulties faced by brave young pioneers taking the first clumsy steps on the road to prosperity.