Windowmen-wide-copyOMG. I just saw what has to be one of the most exciting new plays, productions, and ensembles of the year–by the excellent actor Steven Barkhimer called WINDOWMEN at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. The whole thing takes place in one dingy room of the wholesale lower Manhattan fish market known to the world as the Fulton Fish Market. It begins with the words “How the Fuck Are you?” and ends with a philosophical gloss on Socrates “unexamined life.” Yeah, this play covers the waterfront, and I was hooked from the first moment.

The action begins when a rough and tumble guy named Vic (Brandon Whitehead) walks in at 4am to begin his workday at the window of said fishery working the register, and booms out the expletive-laced greeting to his dispatcher. Soon, a new hire named Kenny (Alex Pollock (!)) walks in to begin his first day on the job backing up Vic at the window. Vic is a working class family man who proudly declares he was born, lives, and will die never having left Brooklyn. Kenny looks like a schlub, but his more sophisticated intellectual leanings are betrayed by his vocabulary and facile turn of mind. He’s actually a college grad–philosophy major/math minor–and is immediately sized up by the owner AL (Will Lyman) who charges in tall and tough, narrow of eye and sharp of tongue.

Nothing escapes Al’s notice and we quickly learn as he peels back the tentative tropes of Kenny’s rhetoric, that Kenny is smart but unsure. Al reveals that he,too, has had “the old liberal arts education,” didn’t always fraternize with “troglodytes,” and has examined enough life to know a flounder from a faker. We sense a paternal interest in the young man as he puts Kenny on the spot to buck up, figure out what he wants, and go for it. Alas, Kenny is broke and hangin’ with the bottom feeders for the time being.

Lyman is a towering talent– bestriding the two worlds with uncanny grace; as Al, he’s street smart and book smart, an all-in-one earthy/elegant package. There is nothing this actor cannot do. Alex Pollock as Kenny is his perfect foil, his initial hesitancy giving way to a deeper restlessness, sadness, and simmering anger, which point to the kind of man he really is.

What transpires is a tale of ordinary corruption and universal greed. But there are distinctions to be made amongst men, sorting the shallow and the merely weak, “the lies and half truths,” the good men and the pond scum– and that’s what makes this play explode with power and humanity.  These are really pungent, believable characters–take Nael Nacer as Rocco–a slimeball and unknowing scapegoat for the “fishy” goings-on, the conscience-less but cagey Lester (Daniel Berger-Jones), Brandon Whitehead as the flawed but likable and hardworking Vic. Minor quibbles: the riff on Goldie Hawn and a taco was jarring–even in this vulgar landscape, and if there’s a clock onstage– it has to work.

Director Brett Marks keeps the tempo taut. That this production is staged in a small space, adds to the tension, until it feels positively explosive when the pace picks up in Act II. I found myself aghast that I was THAT worked up about these guys in a fish market. By the way, the actual milieu in the back office with orders flying, shifty customers eyeing the cashbox, phones ringing with ominous sounding guys named “Sal” on the line, all in the pre-computer 1980’s, blew my mind. (Playwright Barkhimer comes by this info honestly, having worked at the actual Fulton’s for three years just out of college!) We sense the world of the play Barkhimer give us is firmly anchored in the authentic; thus the script ricocheting from the ridiculous to the sublime, has the ring of truth. At one point after Kenny’s incredibly hectic first day, Vic– in a moment of unwitting brilliance- says, “You know what the surreal thing about it is? It’s REAL!”

If you see one show in the next few weeks– make it this one: WINDOWMEN At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 24!