LABOR RELATIONS
Where, he wonders in the play, did he go wrong? All he did was create a company town, itself called Pullman, out of a marsh eight miles south of Chicago. There he set out to save his workers the trouble of worrying about anything but working for him the rest of their lives–on whatever terms and for whatever wages he dictated. There wasn’t even the mockery of self-government found in South Africa. It was neo-feudalism at it s most blatant. (Trying to depict the human side of the robber baron, Beckett omits certain crucial facts about workers’ grievances: the vicious strike of 1894, for example, was the workers’ response when Pullman cut their wages after the Panic of 1893 but maintained or increased the price of housing, food, and utilities, all of which he controlled. Eventually Eugene Debs brought a nationwide railroad strike to protest Pullman’s medieval paternalism.)
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Dan LaMorte’s mannered, aimless staging of this world premiere doesn’t help a bit. Like Pullman’s tomb, Beckett’s dialogue is encased in its own concrete, in a stilted, unspontaneous delivery. The performances are as unfocused as the writing, and as abstract as set designer John Murbach’s bleak gray props and panels. Hilary Hammond’s Addams is earnest but not in the least interesting. Marc Vann’s Pullman is more vacuous than tragic, a Victorian Rodney Dangerfield–he just can’t get no respect. Sheryl Nieman plays Florence as if she were auditioning for the role of the lonely, dependent daughter in Washington Square–but then, faced with this half-role, she had to find some way to pass the time.
