Café Utopia
Written by Gwen Kingston
Directed by Ashley Olive Teague
441 W 26th St, Manhattan, NYC
November 2-23, 2024
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| Café Utopia featuring Julia Atwood, Al Piper, and Louis Reyes McWilliams. Photo by John Keon. |
Recently, there have been some high-profile strike actions by unions in the United States, from the Writers Guild of America and Boeing to, currently, tech workers at
The New York Times. Nevertheless, union membership has been greatly diminished in this nation since its peak in the 1950s, and unions and the labor movement will undoubtedly face increasing assaults under the incoming administration.
Café Utopia, from playwright Gwen Kingston, approaches union organizing in our contemporary climate of stark inequality and neoliberal exploitation by spending time with the staff of one NYC location of a chain of stores selling juice and snacks with sides of self-improvement and self-affirmation. Interspersing voices from the real-life labor movement as well as from the audience,
Café Utopia treats these characters' encounter with the possibility of unionization with an appealing blend of humor and humanity.
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| Café Utopia featuring Kathleen Mary Carthy and Julia Atwood Photo by John Keon. |
Perky graduate student Bex (Julia Atwood) is the newcomer at this Café Utopia, having worked at the store fewer than two weeks when the play begins (a public policy student, she is seen at one point reading a copy of Clifford Odets's 1935 play
Waiting for Lefty, about the lead-up to a cab drivers' strike). Ari (Al Piper) is the location's veteran, but they haven’t moved up the ranks yet and, meanwhile, keeps their personal and professional lives strictly separate. Rounding out the staff are irreverent musician Carlos (Louis Reyes McWilliams), who needs this job for reasons beyond insufficient income from gigs, and enigmatic Enzo (Sergio Mauritz Ang), whose most obvious on-the-job skill is disappearing into the back room. This quartet is overseen by manager Dee (Kathleen Mary Carthy), who wields control over the all-important hourly schedule at work and coaches children in martial arts in her off-hours. The location's employees are galvanized by the news that company founder Damien Lamb has scheduled a visit to their store, but as the big day approaches, the machine that produces the café's proprietary drink blends starts to act up, and–to Dee, worse–someone has been leaving unionization leaflets around.
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| Café Utopia featuring Sergio Mauritz Ang. Photo by John Keon. |
The names–and costs–of the food and drinks served (the "Decolonizer Muffin" is a particular favorite of ours) cleverly satirize not only the marketing of consumption via the language of self-improvement and progressive values but also how corporations have convinced us that buying or boycotting–and definitely not direct participation, including labor organizing–are the best ways to live our politics. Relatedly, both Damien Lamb and the store's products are mythologized, with the employees even delivering competing origin stories for the brand's secret ingredient. At the same time, these threads also highlight how, in our age of financialized, shareholder capitalism, businesses that begin with good ethics always jettison them as they grow, their ethical dimensions lost to capitalism's single imperative of ever-increasing accumulation (we might think here of Google, which officially abandoned its stated commitment to not being evil, and, more directly analogous here, Starbucks). As a manager within such a corporate structure, Dee does authentically care about her employees as human beings, yet she (and she is not alone) nevertheless still buys into ideas and attitudes rooted in the neoliberal emphasis on the individual, such as that only physically dangerous jobs require unionization or that if she had it hard, the younger generations should too (an attitude widely apparent in the discourse around student debt relief). Thus, when Dee says to Ari, whose marriage could be seen as a loose analogy for the worker's relationship with Corporate, "Everyone needs help sometimes," the irony is thick.
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| Café Utopia featuring Al Piper and Kathleen Mary Carthy. Photo by John Keon. |
The cast delivers funny, empathetic, and well-drawn performances, and the Calypso Michelet-designed set, with a hammock right out of an East Village 787 Coffee and a juice machine that resembles the center of a classic TARDIS console, feels like one could walk up and place an order. In an effective staging decision, we hear the workers' side of exchanges with the public but are left to imagine the customers, while brief dramatic monologues drawn from interviews conducted during the play's creation and audience contributions–audience members are invited to write down their own union-related stories, which are being collected in the foyer, near a timeline of important labor organizing moments in the United States, over the course of the run–are interwoven with both the fictional narrative and a pause for some community engagement and juice. Even more urgently timely than it would have been a week ago and boasting some genuinely surprising narrative turns,
Café Utopia offers an immensely enjoyable and engaging reason to come together.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
Members, PSC-CUNY
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