Theatre in Review: Trade Practices (HERE/Pershing Hall, Governors Island)

	Daphne Gaines, Mary Rasmussen, Peter McCabe. Photo: Carl Skutsch.

We are standing in the foyer of Pershing Hall, a Federal-style building that is part of the former Coast Guard post on Governors Island. The walls are covered with murals depicting scenes of wartime -- among them Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill and George Washington shaking hands with General Lafayette. We are greeted by Darlene, a self-described intern, dressed rather like a private school student in a blue blouse and a plaid skirt, who takes us into a room where we see a video detailing the glorious history of Tender, Inc., the company that allegedly makes the paper on which US money is printed.

After the video is finished, Darlene takes over, framing the company's identity in less august terms: "We make paper. And we also make money. Dudes! Money is crazy, right? It's like this thing that is standing in for this other thing. At first it was silver. Then gold. And now, well, nothing. Now just an idea of worth and not even a metal to back it up. It's a trip! Right?"

Welcome to Trade Practices, the latest entry in the burgeoning genre of immersive, interactive theatre pieces. A talented and enthusiastic troupe, led by creators Kristin Marting and David Evans Morris, has lured us to this verdant island off the coast of Manhattan to give us a lesson in modern economics. Soon we are invited into a large central room where, using play money, we are given the opportunity to buy into one of the production's four narrative lines, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the fictional Tender, Inc.: ownership, communications, middle management, and the worker class. A stock certificate in hand, one is dispatched to one of four smaller rooms for a comic vignette that provides an insight into the troubled workings of Tender, Inc. Then it's back to the main room, where you can wheel and deal, selling one narrative for another or simply holding firm with what you have. (If you don't have enough cash, loans are provided.) One young man at my performance managed to get his hands on two stocks, giving him the ability to hop from one storyline to another without having to make a deal; now that's capitalism.

A cross between Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and a Monopoly board, Trade Practices turns the audience into Tender, Inc.'s investors, offering them glimpses of the company's dysfunction. By sticking with the communications track, I learned, among other things, that Patricia, the communications director, tends to beat up on Jim Tender; that Jim is locked in a power struggle with his niece, Polly, a Wharton MBA with a piratical eye patch; that Tender, Inc. has struggled with scandal centering on the use of low-grade paper; and that Patricia's disdain for her intern (and, later, her associate) Darlene, masks a closetful of suppressed passions. Between these scenes, the main room becomes a trading floor, with the worth of each narrative fluctuating as the spectators buy and sell.

In terms of implementation, Trade Practices, which is directed by Marting, is an impressive piece of stage management. Each room has an operator who calls sound, light, and video cues. The latter, designed by Gil Sperling and Jared Mezzocchi, includes the Tender, Inc. promotional video, a tonally perfect piece of self-adoring corporate hogwash; a series of smarmy, faux-60 Minutes interviews with Tender, Inc. principals; and a wickedly exact replica of one of those split-screen verbal brawls that can be seen daily on CNBC. The actors manage their challenging tasks with ease, ushering the audience around and handling all sorts of interactions, especially in the trading floor sequences. Except for one moment, when we were made to stand in the hall for a few minutes, killing time, the entire enterprise unfolded with remarkable confidence.

But, as so often happens with this sort of production, all of the energy seems to have gone into setting up and coordinating its various elements. Given all the imagination that has been expended on it, Trade Practices has surprisingly little to say about the labyrinthine nature of 21st-century finance. The individual storylines, written by a half-dozen playwrights (Erin Courtney, Eisa Davis, Robert Lyons, Qui Nguyen, KJ Sanchez, and Chris Wells) are ham-handed in their satire and tend to harp on a single point, that the American economy is a house of cards, its currency pegged to nothing of real value. Surprisingly, for a production that is about as far Off Broadway as one can get and still remain in the five boroughs, Trade Practices reminded me of Enron, the 2010 Broadway flop, which also used a battery of theatrical devices to satirize one corporation's chimerical fiscal dealings. Like Enron, Trade Practices is hostage to its own storytelling method; its real point gets lost somewhere along the way.

Still, it's easy to enjoy spending time with Jenniffer Diaz, as Patricia, the Argentine firecracker, who turns any press conference into a full-fledged melodrama with her Evita-like gestures; Brooke Ishibashi, as Darlene, whose perky façade crumbles as she declares her desire for Patricia; Peter McCabe, as the telegenic and fatheaded Jim Tender; and Mary Rasmussen, as the sly, power-grabbing Polly. (If you choose other storylines, you will spend more time with other members of the cast, all of whom seemed more than up to their roles.) Even though their material is substandard, Daphne Gaines and Mike Iveson, Jr. make a solid impression as Lauren and Alex, warring investment advisors whose spiky relationship is really a form of romantic sparring.

Morris' set design makes good use of Pershing Hall, transforming at least a couple of rooms into accurate reproductions of corporate offices. Elizabeth Bourgeois' costumes display a solid grasp of how people dress at all levels of company life. Natalie Robin's lighting design is compromised a bit by trying to blend theatrical cues into rooms with bright overhead illumination; in at least one instance, the theatrical rig in the room wasn't too well focused. Jane Shaw's sound design makes good use of pop classics like "We are Family" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want," along with lesser songs composed by her and Xander Duell. The latter, with their drab melodies and flat lyrics, are actively painful. The action is occasionally punctuated by movement sequences which do little more than add to the running time.

Ironically, for a show that accuses the American economy of being all form and no function, Trade Practices suffers from a similar dilemma, spending its capital on creating its environment, leaving it with little intelligence to spend on critical thinking. These artists have my sympathy. It's not easy to grasp such facts of life as subprime mortgages, hedge funds, and the 2008 crash, let alone say something amusing and/or trenchant about them. But if Trade Practices was an IPO, I'd probably advise investing in something with better long-term prospects.--David Barbour