EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR

Five narrators pass off the story as it moves forward through time, in a style that has come to be associated with the New York–based devising duo 600 Highwaymen: crisp, abstract movement and straightforward storytelling. … The girls execute the movements with skill, but something always feels stumbling or reaching. This is not a negative critique: there is something quietly virtuosic about a big step forward executed by little legs or a performer constantly scratching her wrist when it is clear the stage picture should be static. Or perhaps the virtuosity exists in being able to see through the codified movements through and because of the young body performing.

The five girls in Employee of the Year remain vulnerable. We are never lulled into suspending our disbelief that we are not in a theater being told a story. Then, toward the end of the show, one girl steps forward and says, “My name is Candela. Candela Cubria.” I leaned forward in my seat. I flipped through my program. She is not playing J at this moment. like the four girls before her. She is playing herself. She tells us about the trip to and from Brooklyn she and her mom take for her to be in this evening’s performance. She begins to sing without any music: “Will I remember being in this play when I’m sixty? What are the things I’ll remember the most in my life?” This song, one of many written by David Cale for the show, highlights the doubleness that can make theater with young people so captivating to watch. The performer Candela wonders aloud what she will remember about her life at the same moment that the character J is at the end of her life. Through the simple melody, Candela looks backward and forward at the same time. A cynic could read this and several other moments in both productions as achieving some kind of sentimental shorthand through the use of children, but to another kind of attuned spectator the moment achieves a balance between sentimentality and simplicity. The moment is full of potential, curiosity, humor, and regret—just like life.

These girls grow and change a little each day. In the theater, however, time moves at an astronomical pace. A child becomes a teenager in a matter of minutes. Seventy years passes in about an hour. Something about this theatrical time signature captures what it is like to reconsider your youth from a long way off. As adults watching children onstage, our own childhoods seem to move just as quickly. One month you have baby smooth skin, and the next you are sprouting hairs on your chin. One month you are playing with your best friend, and the next month they are your sworn enemy. You are a child one month; the next, you’re an old woman.
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[This] devising process was tied to cooperation and collaboration between adult artist and child. Perhaps the reason that … Employee of the Year adeptly court[s] and coyly avoid[s] irony and overt sentimentality in equal measure is because [it was] created in a room where adults and children faced one another. The child has not yet bought into one proper ideology of “art” or art making, and maybe this unknowing allows for a certain manifestation of contradictions—the productions achieve and embody irony: they are well-executed and awkward; they are equally mature and childish. … Perhaps the child is also a better artist than you, too? Or at the very least, much more of a capable artist than you, too?

Ultimately these productions with children for adults use theatrical ideas of time at odds with young bodies in constant flux to prompt questions about the nature of theater and about life: What will I remember? What can I do know? What do I regret? What have I learned? Who’s in charge here? What am I doing? Does what I’m doing matter? What’s coming next?
We make one more play.

We get older.