Unlike many stylized plays, Big Boss has an easily discernible story. An outsider, Guy, enters into the orbit of a family defined by its sharp disagreements. Pearl (Kate Wisniewski) looks after her two daughters and complains about a series of slight physical problems. She largely neglects dutiful Andra (Sarah Harlett), an actress who splits her time between working as an office drone and obsessing over the movie The Misfits. Pearl worries about sarcastic, unmotivated Alice (Elizabeth Kenny), who can be found either on the sofa or out meeting men. Guy works with Andra and later has a sexual encounter with Alice.
The play continues for a time as a standard dysfunctional family comedy, leavened only by absurdist bits between the actors and cast-off objects given the power of speech. Andra encounters discarded underwear, Pearl soothes a phone, Alice comforts a shoe, and oil is lovingly applied to a piano -- all in a more human and caring way than any character's relationship to another person.
Gottberg uses various comedy tropes to introduce issues of great thematic complexity. For example, Andra's amusing devotion to The Misfits reinforces the notion of actors-as-objects, willing to put their lives on display for the service of art. John Huston's film featured icon-challenging performances by Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, and watching it with some know- ledge of the actors' lives changes everything: Montgomery Clift's famous line about scars on his face seems terribly sad, as does Monroe's identification with the wild mustangs in captivity. Andra's obsession gives her a thematic depth that contrasts sharply with her shallowness in the narrative. Gottberg makes similar observations with other characters. Guy, the show's innocent, never quite stops being the all- knowing character from the opening scene. When Alice seduces Guy, she's covered her body with words, turning herself into a sex object and a billboard -- allowing Gottberg to hint at Alice's intelligence and complexity.
Late in the show, the distances between things and people disappear when each actor abruptly becomes one of the speaking objects introduced earlier. Gottberg flirts with overkill here, as she links the objects' evocations of a previous, Edenic state (the piano remembers being a tree) to being human. Fortunately, a narrative twist brings all of the relationships into relief: The niggling illnesses affecting Pearl turn out to be real. The move makes little sense in terms of story, but is a smart final exegesis of Gottberg's theme. As Pearl becomes increasingly aware that her body is slowly betraying her, she's able to separate her essential humanity from that vehicle. As she's dying, the daughters respond by sharing a memory of their mother's voice. In doing so, they break away from the mentality of the objects and become more human.
As Gottberg makes clear with her opening scene, an audience can interpret a play any way they want to. That essentially superior position can often be more important than the performers' intent. Big Boss or the Inner Life of Everything is a conceptually solid play that explores multiple thematic avenues. Every reaction -- including this reviewer's wish that Gottberg had reduced the stridency of some of her character's short monologues, and avoided altogether the unnecessary, literal conflation of character and object -- results from my thorough involvement with the show, an involvement almost guaranteed by its clever, blank canvas.
