A tragedy about large-scale catastrophe wrapped in a comedy about tiny human interactions.

A tragedy about large-scale catastrophe wrapped in a comedy about tiny human interactions. JOHN ULMAN

In 1965, a new play by Vaclav Havel titled The Memorandum premiered at the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague. It was a bitter satire of Soviet bureaucracy and how it dehumanizes people with endemic cravenness, stupidity, surveillance, and general crushing of the human spirit for the sake of “progress.” But this sleek new production by Strawberry Theatre Workshop elegantly flips the critique, setting the play in an American office that is just as craven, stupid, and spirit-crushing—but, in this case, for the sake of profit.

The Memorandum opens with two office lackeys (Trick Danneker and Ian Fraser) scheming against their boss, Mr. Gross (Galen Joseph Osier). The lackeys tell Gross he’ll be in big trouble with “upstairs” if he doesn’t endorse their ridiculous and unnecessary new protocol—an invented language called Ptydepe (in this production, pronounced “puh-tee-a-deep”) for intra-agency communications…

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....